Spotting the Cheaters: How Do Players Cheat In Online Poker

“It’s dangerous out there.” You’ve probably heard the saying before. Well, I believe who ever coined that statement was referring to the poker world. And in all honesty, it’s actually dangerous out there. For all the ease, simplicity, and comfortability that come with playing online poker, the one straw that breaks the camel’s back is the presence of cheaters at online poker tables.

While some play with no intention to con anyone, there are others whose sole aim is to cheat other players and win the pot for themselves in devious ways. Although most poker sites try their best to fish out these sorts of players, some are quite resourceful and boast lots of tools that allow them to cheat without the poker room ever noticing them.
To beat these types of players, the best thing you can do is to understand how they operate. To that end, we’ve compiled a list of their tricks for you. Read on to know about them!

Multi-accounting

I know you probably don’t do it or know it’s even possible, but some players do create multiple accounts on poker sites. Although all poker sites frown at this act, it hasn’t stopped these con guys from perpetrating their evil.

Now, while you may think a player creating multiple accounts should only be a cause for concern for the poker site, it’s actually a source of headache for players too. Imagine someone playing at a cash game table with two or more poker accounts; instead of seeing only two hole cards like everyone else, he would be seeing four hole cards. In addition to this, if such a player was playing in live tournaments like SNGs, he would be having “two lives” instead of one like everyone else.

This creates an unfair advantage!

Use of poker bots

Although some players are still not convinced about the existence of bots in poker rooms, there are lots of proofs to affirm that players can actually play with bots. For instance, at the University of Alberta in Canada, a poker bot called Polaris defeated several poker professionals at heads-up fixed limit Texas Hold’em cash games.

The issue with cheaters playing with bots is that they have the advantage of beating you even without moving a finger themselves. The bot is programmed to play every hand, make every decision and if need be, the cheater supplies additional information to the bot – depending on how the play is unfolding – to better its chances of winning.

Unlike you, a bot has no emotion, which means it never gets tired, doesn’t tilt or seek revenge, and never show tells.

In order to eradicate the use of bots on their sites, many online poker platforms like poker online Spbo use a set of mechanisms to detect the presence of bot players on their site.

Ghosting

This is a situation whereby a cheater seeks the help of a coach or a pro player while playing at a poker table. Thanks to the advent of tech tools like Teamviewer and Skype, many online poker cheaters screen record their poker screen and send to their “ghost” coach so that he can help them make the tough decisions.

For an opponent of this type of player, it becomes almost impossible to win any money because you’re not just playing against someone who’s at your level but against professionals.

Colluding

While ghosting cheaters seek help from aside, colluding cheaters seek it from within. In this cheating method, two or more players combine their efforts, without the rest knowing so that they can earn a large financial benefit and share the reward between them.

When online poker players collude, they share their hole cards with one another, as well as their intended playing strategies via telephone, Skype, o other instant messaging tool.

Hole Card Cheats

Hole card cheaters are one of the worst types of poker cheat although, thankfully, one of the rarest. A hole card cheat is someone who can play perfectly against us since they have access to our hole cards. There are perhaps three main ways this might happen:

• A backdoor in the poker client itself. Especially in the case of a corrupt or disgruntled employee being able to access insider info.
• An exploit placed on the player’s computer by a hacker. A trojan horse which submits hole-card information.
• A social engineering attack involving screen-sharing software. A poker “friend” asks us to share our screen using software saying that he just wants to “watch us play”. His intends to join our tables and take money from us using our hole card information.

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