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As long as poker has existed, there have been players trying to cheat the game. And in today’s age of internet poker, players have more opportunity to attempt different methods of cheating, especially collusion. With the ability to communicate on the phone, via instant message, or Skype, players can easily communicate their hole cards to one another and discuss cheating strategies.

This is a discussion on The Bot Scandal and Collusion within the online poker forums, in the Online Poker section; I'm going to post a comment I made on a news article on here that sums up my. NOTE: As of, Australia has joined the USA in restricting online poker. Any Australian residents will now need to use an off-shore site similar to the USA currently does if they wish to play online poker. They are no longer allowed to play on official sites such as PokerStars or FullTilt.

While it is easier to collude online than it is to do it live, most cheaters are not skilled enough to get away with it. Plus, the poker rooms have all the hand histories with which to track the colluders down, and the increasingly sophisticated hand analysis software makes shady play easily evident.

You should still always be on the lookout for the bad guys, though, and to detect them, you need to know what they are doing. So, here are the three most common ways players collude.

I’m under a massive belief that there is widespread cheating through botting, through collusion, through potential super-using, and through players playing more than one account at the same time at the highest stakes games for cash games on the Winning Poker Network / America’s Cardroom. Welcome to Collusion, a new fashion brand offering bold, experimental, inclusive styles for the coming age. Browse the collection and upcoming drops online.

Softplaying

In cash games, softplaying could arguably considered the least problematic form of collusion, but it is still cheating and still hurts the game. Softplaying is just what it sounds like – two (or more, but usually two) players do not play aggressively against each other, for whatever reason. Chances are, they are friends, but they could also be two strong players familiar with each other, choosing to pick on the weaker players at the table instead of each other. If you play enough hands with softplayers and remain observant, it’s not the most difficult thing in the world to spot. Softplayers will rarely raise each other when in a heads-up pot and will very frequently just check it down through the river, even if they both have premium hands. It is tough to softplay with any frequency without getting noticed, as it looks fishy when there’s barely any betting in the hand and one player shows Aces and one shows Kings. Like I said, while still bad, it’s not as damaging in cash games as it is in tournaments, although I know I wouldn’t be thrilled if I stacked a player only to realize later that he could have had more chips for me to take had he not softplayed his friend on a prior hand. In tourneys, softplaying is particularly offensive because it potentially delays the elimination of one of the cheaters, making it harder for the honest players to make the money.

Squeezing

This one is wrong no matter which way you slice it. Two players (again, it could be more, but two is the most common number) will cheat by teaming up on an innocent player in an effort not to beat him with the best hand at showdown, but by forcing him to fold and surrender his chips. A typical collusion hand using the squeeze method goes like this:

Colluder A raises pre-flop, Victim three-bets, Colluder B four-bets, Colluder A five-bets, Victim folds, Colluder B calls. At some point after the flop, one of the cheaters will eventually fold, with the other winning the pot, which includes the pre-flop victim’s chips, as well as any blinds or antes. Alternatively, Victim may be the original raiser, with Colluder A and Colluder B both re-raising after him. The latter method guarantees that the cheaters will find a patsy. The former tactic is riskier, but offers the opportunity to bilk the innocent opponent out of more money.

The reason that the colluders won’t often take the hand all the way to showdown is that at least one of them will almost certainly have a junk hand. After all, if they waited to both have great hands, it wouldn’t really be cheating, as it would make sense to raise and re-raise with premium holdings. Remember, the whole point of the squeeze is not to have the best hand, it is to get the victim to raise and then fold. It is an intimidation play.

The squeeze cheat is especially troubling when it is done on the bubble of a single table tournament. With blinds very high relative to the chip stacks, every hand is important. Squeezing an opponent out of a hand after he raises just once can swing the tournament strongly in the cheaters’ favor.

Aside from simply keeping an eye on your opponents and noting if the same two players demonstrate this betting pattern on a somewhat regular basis, there is one way to really sniff them out. Call their raises. If you can get one or both of them to showdown and see that their hands are crap, you will have a nice piece of evidence of their cheating.

Chip Dumping

In cash games, chip dumping is generally a means for two players to transfer funds to one another, and is relatively harmless to the other players. In tournaments, though, it is a means to give one of the colluders the upper hand on the rest of the table. When chip dumping, one cheater will purposely lose his stack to his partner. While the first cheater is eliminated from the tournament, the other has now doubled-up and has a significant advantage the rest of the way. It’s not as easy to detect chip dumping as it might seem, as it is usually just a one-time thing in any given tournament (the dumping could occur in stages, but that’s less likely). The dumper does it, gets eliminated, and that’s it. It could appear to just be a silly donk blowing off steam. Aside from noting the players’ screen names and trying to track them down in other tournaments, my best advice would be to e-mail the poker room if you suspect chip dumping. The poker room will be able to find any other instances of those players sitting at the same table and will be able to determine if this was a one-time deal or a pattern of cheating.

While I just described three methods of collusion so that you have the knowledge necessary to spot this type of cheating, keep in mind that not all strange play is collusion. A single instance of what might seem to be softplay, squeezing, or chip dumping is not necessarily collusion (especially squeezing, since the squeeze play is a legitimate strategic move). But if you see repeated instances of any of these by the same players, it may be worth shooting off a message to the online poker room.

Online Poker Collusion Reddit Games

Poker is a highly competitive game where the winners stand to win large amounts of cash for beating their opponents. Online poker is no different. As such, player cheating is an issue. Some players will do anything they can to gain an edge and increase their chances of winning, even if it means resorting to cheating. The relative anonymity of internet poker facilitates this.

The good news is that online poker rooms are well aware of player cheating and the tricky schemes that people invent. Here’s a rundown of some of the common methods employed by online poker cheats, and how the online poker rooms have responded to them.

All-in Abuse

This is a method of cheating by abusing a featured called “all-in protection” or “disconnect protection”, which was designed to help online poker players. Basically, it works as such – when a poker player times out or disconnects from an online poker room (a rather common occurrence, given the fickle nature of many internet connections), any money that the player has invested in the pot will be protected. When the player logs back in, they’ll be entitled to receive the money they invested, since it apparently wasn’t their own fault that they were disconnected. If the disconnected poker player wins, he wins the part of the pot that he bet on, and the player with the next best hand wins any side pots that happened after the disconnect.

Some poker players try to exploit this feature. They intentionally disconnect their internet connection when they’re afraid to make a poker decision, in order to hold onto their invested money instead of folding and losing it. This is a clear-cut example of cheating and online poker rooms are well aware of this exploit and have responded. This type of cheating is nowhere near as much of a problem as it was in the past.

There was a time when virtually all online poker sites had a feature called “disconnect protection”. Many online poker rooms have completely stopped offering disconnect protection. Full Tilt and Poker Stars will give players adequate time to reconnect, should there be a legitimate disconnection problem. But if they fail to get back to the action within the allocated time, their hand is folded if further betting actions occur. This completely eliminates the all-in abuse cheats from these online poker rooms.

Other online poker sites that still offer disconnect protection nearly always have more tables that don’t offer it. These are listed as “no all-in” or “no DP (disconnect protection)” tables, which turn off the disconnect protection feature for players who are concerned about the exploit. If you ever notice what you deem to be all-in abuse at your online card room, contact support staff immediately.

In addition, all poker rooms prevent this type of cheating by monitoring disconnects. Online poker players that are suspected of this type of abuse will have their account banned and players victim to this type of cheating are often eligible for monetary compensation.

Collusion

Collusion is basically defined as two players covertly working together in order to increase one player’s chances of winning. To get an idea of how this works, imagine two or more friends logged into the same online poker room, playing at the same table. They share information about their cards in order to get an idea of what cards aren’t remaining in the deck. Worse still, they work together to increase the pot size or to squeeze other players out of a hand. Presumably, they’ll share their profits when the game is over.

Collusion is often difficult to spot because it’s often hard to tell if players are working together or simply making decisions on their own based on their individual poker strategies. A player folding AQ before the flop might be doing it because his friend has AK, or he might simply be a very tight player who is only willing to pursue absolute premium hands.

Player cheating of this nature, however, is actually easier to detect than you might think. Online poker sites have a complete hand history database for all of their poker players. They know if certain players have a history of playing on the same tables. Their databases are automatically scanned with complex algorithms that search for any signs of collusion. When something fishy is spotted the staff will manually review the action.

Online poker rooms take multiple steps against collusion and, accept on the rarest of occasion, it is not an issue when playing online poker. Having said that, online poker rooms take reports of suspected collusion very seriously. Poker Stars is widely considered one of the best sites when it comes to reviewing these situations thoroughly. Regardless of which online poker room you play at, be sure to contact customer service immediately if you suspect player cheating, including collusion, at your table.

Multi-Accounting

It is against the terms of most online poker rooms to sign up under more than one player account. However, this doesn’t stop people doing so – and in many ways the online poker rooms only have themselves to blame for this. Most of the cases where players have create additional accounts are usually because the player wasn’t receiving rakeback on their existing account, and therefore paying more than other players. But there’s a big difference between creating a new player account and the true definition of multi-accounting, which can be a form of collusion.

Multi-accounting is when an online poker player who plays under more than one account at the same time on the same site. A player might enter an online poker tournament under several different accounts in order to increase their chances of cashing. In some rare cases they could even end up on the same table, which would obviously be a huge advantage (see collusion, above) and unfair on the other players. The good news is that this form of cheating is fairly easy for the online poker rooms to spot, and players who attempt to cheat in this way will face serious consequences.

Online Poker Bots

Poker bots are software programs that have been designed to analyze a poker game, particularly starting hands and community cards, and make decisions for the player. A poker bot can be set up to play poker for real money while the actual player sleeps, goes to work, or just generally doesn’t pay any attention to the game himself. The simple fact is that online poker sites disapprove of bots, and that you should consider them to be a form of player cheating.

Poker bots are not really as big of a problem as some angry poker forum posters (that may have simply been beaten fairly) would like people to believe, and get far more attention that they deserve. In the rare event that a poker bot has been identified in the past, it has been shown to be a quite unsuccessful technique. Bot algorithms are no match for even the amateur poker player and sites found guilty of using poker bots (however ineffective they may be) have always failed or been forced out of the online poker market.

Conclusion

There’s no denying that cheating occurs. It happens in live poker games, and it happens in online poker games. There will always be cheaters trying to scam people when there’s money involved. But it isn’t nearly as bad as you might think. Online poker rooms know that dishonest players will try and cheat given the opportunity, and they put a lot of time and resources into making the games fair. If you truly suspect foul play at an online card room, simply cash out and take your money elsewhere.

Online Poker Collusion Reddit Against

By Tim Ryerson

Tim is from London, England and has been playing poker since the late 1990’s. He is the ‘Editor-in-Chief’ at Pokerology.com and is responsible for all the content on the website.

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