What are you basing this on? Common sense and logic disagree with you.

Anonymous people thousands of miles away with access to undetected software and an ability to play several tables at once with no real punishment if caught is primed for cheating and exploiting.

Much more likely than running into someone you know who is ballsy enough to run the risk of being caught cheating right to your face, at a table of only 8-9 people, with the knowledge and know how to get away with it.

Does it happen? Sure, from time to time. But you are a bajillion times more likely to encounter a cheat or someone exploiting online than live.

It’s not even close.

If people using RTA, colluding, ghosting etc counts as cheating then no, not even close. If you only count the really egregious stuff like superusing, marked decks, rigged games etc then yea, the really bad stuff would happen more often in live games. Theres probably a large amount of cheaters in any online poker game. Live, not so much, but once theres cheating going on its going to be worse than online.

I'm way more wary of playing a private game than online.

Basing it on personal experience and from all the players I've talked to. My friend who is a live pro and has played in a lot of private games across Europe and Asia, he has ways to detect rigged games like an RFID scanner and other ways I don't know all the details of and he's found a crazy amount of games is been cheated in, maybe 50% of games

As an online pro myself and knowing others, it's clearly possible to have a good winrate honestly and have never had anyone suggest for example to card share which would be one of the easiest ways to cheat. And while playing almost never suspect a reg is cheating either, which I think you would often get a sense if they were

what a bunch of sore losers around here...is twoplustwo wtf
cheating using rta/colluding is ocurring far less than you guys think...live home games are a heaven for cheaters.
and even these shity rta guys or the ones colluding 25/50cents on obscure sites,they are probably idiots that are trying to make a buck by being shity people because they are not capable/good enough to do it on their own,but they dont have astronomical gains from it like you guys imagine. This is not why you are losing OP.

And if/when rta or others cheating methods becomes to big of a problem,any platform could easily and should imo ask the profitable regs that are getting money out of the ecosystem to have an webcam when they are grinding or a desktop that is shared somehow with the platform. That should be only for winning players so that recs isnt bothered.

Stop being so pesimistics guys wtf,poker is the only game in this world that is a skilled based/luck/strategy/flow/dynamic/reads/intuition AND PLAYED FOR ***** MONEY.

Ive tried finding games that you could play for money like poker there none,and lets face it its an awsome aspect of it,the thrill of losing/winning money based on ur decisions/luck.

One movie like Queens Gambit or series but for poker would create so much hype around it

Care to elaborate? Aside from the cheating comments which obviously no one wants what’s so different from a professional who wants to play in weaker games and a recreational who wants to play in even weaker games? That’s the whole gist of the post how playing with ‘fun’ players is more enjoyable. Fun = weak it’s an interchangeable word that’s been created in the last 5 or so years

You don’t think the players he’s better than don’t shake their heads and go ‘he shouldn’t play, he’s too good compared to us’?

I’m going to start a separate thread with a poll related to the prevalence, or perceived prevalence, of cheating online.

And that's why so many people get away with cheating online.

You misread his comment completely. You projectile vomited your proception of what you said so you could have a little heehee moment.
By fun game, maybe he just ment fun?

Oh that’s rich that a ‘fun game’ doesn’t imply a myriad of weak players

I agree about cheating being more of the issue in live private games (I was cheated like that at least once), but the main difference is not in frequency, but the severity of cheating. Cheaters online who use something like RTA will gain themselves a few bb/100 advantage over competent regs and may even cost themselves money vs whales if they are unable to adjust on the spot. Meanwhile, a rigged live game will likely be literally impossible to win in for anyone who's not in on a scam.

And yeah, we did recently have a superuser online, but hopefully that was an isolated incident, it also happened on the least trustworthy of all poker sites

I agree the severity live is probably higher but the prevalence online is much higher.

However, GG has been outed as a bot city recently. There has been far more scandal than one super user.

Yes, the term "fun table" has become pretty synonymous with "a table that I can win money at" unfortunately. What's even more is people seem to not want to get better, which by default would make the table more fun! Strange indeed.

Not true for most.

While my primary objective is to win money when I play I've stayed at tough tables that were actually fun socially bc I was enjoying myself. Granted this is a rare combination but it exists.

Losing players are going to lose. Sure some that are small losers maybe convince themselves theyre winners running bad but a ton of losing players know they lose and play bc it's fun to bullshit and gamble on cards. The more social the game the longer they play.

People on this site really need to stop looking through poker through the lens of a winning player and understand why losing players play.

I mean personally I think losing in pit games day after day is pretty stupid but I understand people do it and often have fun doing it. It would be silly for me to deny it's a thing even though it's dumb to me. If I was running a casino it would be extremely important for me to understand what makes things fun for these people so they keep Coming back. Winning poker players should do the same with regards to losing players.

Me getting better at poker isn't going to make a boring table of mis regs more fun. It will make me slightly more profitable at that table which is a different issue entirely.

There are regs I absolutely hate playing with that I know I'm better than. Me having an edge on them doesn't make playing with them fun. There are also some regs I actually enjoy playing with though I know they're better than me.

Cheating is just another piece of hidden information, and it's far easier to uncover it online than in a live game, because you can track hands. And at least there's a chance of getting your money back. You get cheated live, it's gone and you probably don't even realize it happened.

Poker ended when the poker Boom ended in 2006 with UIGEA and the final ending was in 2011 when Feds closed Full Tilt, UltimateBet, Absolute Poker. The few sites left cannot be trusted and the tables are boring without the American players. And with GTO Wizard there is no point in playing online at all

Agree w/Borg that it wouldn't be a "gold rush", but I do think that it would be significant.

Tilted sports bettors were a lot of what made Bovada so good for so long, but Draft Kings, and all the other legal betting apps, offer a much easier, free, and legal process to move money than Bovada and the gray market sites.

I think it would be better than something like wsop bc youd have sports betting drunks. But far from a gold rush


Old bodog was amazing.
But another reason games on bodog were so good was the 3 table max.

For the OP- imo I think online these days is filled with collusion RTA etc. Nothing to me is fun about it. I've consistently won in live 5/5 to 10/25 plo games at a very good rate.

Online in public games I'm a small winner the last couple of years and basically play to get reps if I haven't played live in a week or two and stay sharp. I have zero desire to put the work in needed to beat online games solidly. I maybe played 300 hours online in the last 2 years or so.

In 2020- 2021 the games were way better on wsop.com.etc. I won at a pretty good rate and was still bored the entire time and didn't enjoy it at all. So it's not like winning more money these days would make me enjoy it more.

So if you're not going to enjoy playing,and are going to lose then don't play. It's pretty simple.

Figure out what it is you like about poker- and if online poker doesn't offer those things you have no reason to play online.

The bolded is awesome. Yeah, once Full Tilt, Ultimate Bet, and Absolute poker closed down, who was left to trust?? LOL.

Unquestionably that was a big blow to online poker, but definitely not to the level of untrustworthiness. About the only good thing about that day was it finally stopped people from playing on sites (AP & UB) they shouldn't have been supporting in the first place, but just couldn't help themselves.

You made me think pretty hard but I don’t think that’s very correct.

I take way too many hands to the turn to be considered a serious player . Plenty of guys in my game are like me and took poker seriously/had some success in the 2006-2012 era, so they are not mugs .
I get clobbered plenty enough to be just a small winner .

Perhaps I’m naive but not amongst friends/friends of friends. Nearly All of whom are fairly financially secure

Shady raked invite home games . I guess you are right there. I know of a few that blew up amongst allegations

Years ago, there was a guest on PokerRoad Radio talking about how close we were to heads-up LHE being solved (or maybe that it already was). Furthermore, heads-up NLHE would be next, then six-max LHE, or whatever order the dominos would fall.

A bunch of us were in the chat, taking this all in. For every one gloom and doomer who said something like "well, that will be the end of poker," there were probably three of us going, "No, poker will just pivot to a different variant becoming the most popular." After all, PLO was starting to really take off at that point, and was already seemingly more popular in Europe than NLHE. Plenty of people – myself included – were getting into 2-7 lowball games or the various badugi variants. The popularity of a given game shifts frequently, even in recent years, lest we forget that there's more stud than hold 'em played in Rounders, which was the tick-tick prior to the poker boom. So the game can and will adapt before it ever dies.

Of course, the OP is referring to cheating specifically, which could pose a problem whether we're talking about HE or PLO or TDL or Crazy Pineapple. As for its effect on the random Joe, I guess that depends on how likely a person succumbs to availability heuristics. Will the reports of another cheating scandal scare some people away? Sure, just as the report of a plane crash does scare some people from flying. In reality, the instances of either are very much the exceptions, often by whopping magnitudes.

It does seem like poker players should be less prone to such bias, since as a group, we're much better at understanding precise probabilities and likelihoods and less likely to fall for a "it feels like ___" gut feelings.

I genuinely believe most regs that play don't actually like poker. Or they don't like what poker really is. They like the idea of making easy money, or freedom, but they can't stand the variance, can't stand losing pots to bad players, can't stand the grind, can't stand difficult runouts, can't stand it. They sit there at the table with sullen looks on their faces and throw their cards in the muck in anger and leave in a huff and are generally just shitty people to be around. Maybe they continue to do it because they've devoted so much time to it (sunk cost fallacy), or maybe they think they're just running bad and eventually they'll run super hot and make enough windfall that it'll finally be worth it. Or maybe they think all the variance is because they're playing cheaters and colluders and RTAers and such like. If that sounds like you, you should quit. Because you aren't actually playing poker. You're playing some game that doesn't exist that you've made up in your head, and it's never going to get better.

What do you suggest they do after they quit?

Whatever they like