In my personal opinion, cheating is going to happen in online poker, but from the actual poker provider itself is pretty hard to believe. Alamo Poker may have some problems, but I'm sure even they know that rigging the deck would be the absolute worst thing they could do to shoot themselves in the foot.

There already exists out there a number of poker tracking software that generally keep track of your individual poker play. I'm sure some sophisticated players who have the capability have written their own for that matter.

These can be aggregated into a database format that can be summarily used to analyze deck shuffles and hand probabilities. Although most players would never play enough to make a case for statistical deviance, professional players would definitely notice an errant deviation in deck shuffles with their trackers.

For instance, to hit a flush draw with there are two to your suit showing, the probability is around 35%. In essence, the chance of the board having three to a suit fall is around 35%.

Through tracking software, one can easily notice over 10,000 hands (what a professional probably plays in a month) any deviations in flushes. If flushes are falling 36% of the time, that's probably just a random blip. 37% and that's a big blip.

If we get near 40% then there's definitely something to be looked into. Seeing how a pro player would have a database easily reaching into the hundreds of thousands of hands, they would definitely be able to judge the randomness of the deck (if they were technially able to run reports against their own data).


Active Cheating

Active cheating works just like it does in real life, where players work in teams to raise other players out of the pot or juice the pot for each other. This play manages to maximize value bets because both players are as far as money goes, playing as one.

Fortunately, this style of play can usually be detected by the trained eye, although reporting this action usually will not result in anything. The poker sites usually have automated software that tries to interpret if you are engaged in this type of betting.

I would imagine it tries to find if you are raising weak hands when you normally don't or if you constantly do better when playing with a certain player, etc. People are caught using these methods, just so you know.


Passive Cheating

Passive cheating is generally harder to catch and is also known as collusion. This is when players share their cards with one another to help them make better choices when it comes to odds. For the most part, this cheating is normally not very beneficial to the cheaters to begin with except in few situations where the information may actually help.

With more than 2 players in on it however, it may become a problem with 4 players are all sharing information. This is difficult to catch because in this scenario, cheaters will fold their hand when they realize another one of theirs has a stronger hand. Since you can't see mucked cards online, it's impossible to know if people are folding monsters.

However, the poker site may or may not be able to detect this type of play. For instance, if a flop showed A/K/2 and cheater #1 held KK while cheater #2 held AK, if cheater #2 folded to a bet from cheater #1, there should (one would hope) be some warning bells raised from the server end.


Cheating Software

Lastly, there have been inquiries about the possibility of cheat software or ways to view your opponent's cards. Obviously these inquiries are usually made by players who want to cheat instead of the worried players. Coming from a computer background, I have a good knowledge of how most software applications are written and how server software operates.

My assumption would be that an online poker site only sends to your computer data about the board and your hand. Only at showdown does it actually send data about other players to your computer. Sending the data for each player would be a completely insane approach in terms of security- and any good programmer would know not to write a server in this fashion.

You can say your computer is on a "need to know basis" when it comes to poker data. Because of this, there is no feasible way to cheat because you are only limited to the amount of data you have on your computer.

There is also close to a zero perecent chance of being able to send data to online poker servers that would have you magically win a hand or get cards of your choosing. It would take deliberate coding on the part of the online sites to have this happen- and again, it would not be in their best interests (or so we hope).

Any poker site worth playing on will have some very sophisticated tools to discover online cheating and collusion. It is in the interest of the legitimate site to eradicate this problem to help sustain the image of the site as a safe and worthwhile place to play.

No real life casino would do well if it had a reputation for cheating. So although online cheating is something you should be aware of and report if you suspect it, just consider that often you may just be outplayed. But that is fine, there are hundreds of games with suckers just dying to give their money to you.

The best advice is to be vigilant in where you play and with whom you play, but for the most part if the game is not going your way, move on and seek out the suckers who want to give you their money.

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