While I was on my unscheduled break from on-line poker I received an e-mail from Peter S in London, UK who’s interested in getting started playing on-line poker for real money. Like most players entering the world of real money on-line poker he’s a little worried about the integrity of the on-line game. Hi concernt are not about the integrity of on-line poker rooms themselves, but more about the other players playing at these rooms. Some experienced friends of his claim they see a lot of collusion in high stakes games on-line and he was interested to hear whether I’d seen any of this happening myself.

Although I know about the possibility of other players colluding in on-line games, I’ve never really been that overly concerned with it. I have never had any reason to suspect that it has been occurring on the tables that I’ve played and have always believed that if I ever saw anything suspicious that I could just report it to my poker room, get up and move tables as one of the major advantages of playing on-line is the sheer number of different sites and tables to choose from.

My advice to Peter was just to be vigilant, not to play if things didn’t feel right and that it’s probably not that big a problem at the micro limits anyhow. I left it at that and didn’t really give it another thought until today when I listened to episode 64 of Card Club where the guys were talking about a player “ZeeJustin” who was allegedly caught entering multiple accounts into tournaments on Party Poker. These were high stakes games and his accounts would, according the the 2+2 thread here, often end up playing at the same table. The story is a long one and I recommend if you’re interested you go read it yourself, but to cut it short his accounts have been suspended and his funds (rumoured to be in the 6 figure mark) have been seized as per Party Poker terms and conditions).

In my opinion the thing that is so scary about this case is that the alleged cheater was a respected member of the on-line poker community and widely regarded as being a skilled player. Prior to this case I’d always thought of potential cheaters as players who just couldn’t master the game, losing players trying to win anyway they could. I was of the opinion that even when cheating, these players would still have trouble turning a profit against anyone with any experience. In this case we have an experienced, profitable player getting greedy and trying to cheat honest players out of their hard earned bank rolls.

So where does this leave the average player trying to learn the game? It’s hard enough learning how to become a profitable poker player without the risk of greedy, immoral, cheats trying to eat into our profits with these kinds of scams.

Well, the positive thing here is that Party Poker has detected and taken action against the cheating player. This is a good thing, but how many poker sites out there aren’t as proactive in detecting the cheats? Also, how many cheaters are out there avoiding detection? Unfortunately it’s unlikely anyone can come up with an accurate answer to these questions which is why as a poker community we need to be aware that these people are out there and educate ourselves in the methods they are using and how we can detect them.

I recommend all on-line poker players, whether new to the game or more experienced set aside sometime in their poker studies to look into ways players attempt to cheat at on-line poker. The best way to avoid the cheats is to be smarter than them, so educate yourself! Here’s some links to get you started:

Top 10 Ways to Avoid Poker Cheats - This is an excellent resource, I’ll be spending a bit of time trawling through all this information myself.

Player Cheating on www.onlinepokerfaq.com - Contains links to responses from some popular on-line poker rooms.

Also, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the state of cheating on-line. Have you had any experience with it directly? What do you look out for when playing? Leave a comment or drop me an e-mail!