Poker Cheating

As long as poker games have been going on, poker cheating has been going on. In the good old days poker cheating consisted of manipulating the deck when dealing, marked cards, shorting another player’s pot, and all kinds of other stuff you may have seen Worm doing in Rounders. These days poker cheating is less likely to display over the top moves like the ones mentioned above, and poker cheating is less likely to be going on in casinos where unlike the days of old, dealers are now a normal part of the game. Although poker cheating is less obvious in live games now, subtle poker cheating is still around.

The most common form of poker cheating is collusion. Something you may be guilty of if you’ve ever soft played a friend in a pot, maybe checking it down to the river when you flopped the nuts, just to be a nice guy. This is poker cheating and probably the most common type, and while no one will probably make too much of it at a friendly nickel and dime home game, it can get much more serious as more money is on the line. Take professional poker player Men “The Master” Nguyen. Professional poker player Daniel Negreanu has been an outspoken critic of Men, saying Men and his team, that is his personal friends who he bankrolls for the same tournaments that he plays, have taken poker cheating to a whole new level in live tournament play. Accusations of poker cheating have followed Men “The Master” for years. He is accused of having his team soft play him, dump chips when in hands with him, and even have them physically take chips from the table to hand to him during breaks. To show how far Men takes poker cheating, he and his team were once kicked out of a tournament when a small fire was started in their room, and when staff came to see what was going on, they allegedly found an absurd amount of tournament chips lying about Men’s room. But that’s just the most visible type of poker cheating in today’s poker world.

Instances of online poker cheating are even more rampant, and have grabbed the poker community’s attention recently. One form of online poker cheating, and probably the most common, is using a different account or letting someone use your account. Again, while this makes little to no difference at the micro and lower level games, this form of poker cheating can get more serious the higher the stakes. Before account sharing, and using multiple accounts to play was really looked into, the rules were blurry and not quite clear. Neverwinpoker’s Dustin Woolf was actually banned from pokerstars for life when they saw that he was playing from multiple accounts. Because they never quite took a definite stance on the subject, their ruling was eventually overturned and Dustin Woolf was allowed to play there once again. The main reason this is considered poker cheating is because if a world class player were to sit down under a different name, with players who would normally never even think they could beat him online, he gains an unfair advantage that the other players following the rules of having only one account could hardly combat. Former Full Tilt red pro Jonathon Little took the poker cheating practice of sharing an online account name to extremes when he let several people play on his account, racking up impossible numbers of sngs, and essentially making hundreds of thousands because of his 100% rakeback deal, and also gaining unfair prestige in the leaderboards. When Full Tilt found out about Little’s poker cheating, he was immediately let go. These were cases of poker cheating where people were using multiple accounts to hide their identity or sharing an account to make more money. Our next example involves a guy whose poker cheating would be legendary online.

Justin Bonomo also had multiple accounts, but his poker cheating wasn’t so much to hide his identity in cash games, but to provide extra tickets in the lottery we call online tournaments. Justin was a highly successful mtt player online, but his dirty little secret was that he would enter the same tournament multiple times with different accounts that he had made, giving himself that many more chances at a big win or cash. When word got out, the poker community was outraged and Bonomo was instantly kicked off multiple sites. The Justin Bonomo case was probably the biggest story as far as online poker cheating since online poker has been around. This event caused online sites to start taking multiple accounts more serious, and eventually come up with new rules to stop poker cheating at this level. While the Justin Bonomo story was the biggest story of online poker cheating at the time, things would get even bigger and more absurd.

In late 2007 perhaps the biggest poker cheating scandal ever was starting to unfold on Absolute Poker. There seemed to be a superuser account who could actually see his opponent’s hole cards. This allowed the superuser to punish his opponents when they were weak, and also make impossible laydowns when he could see he was beat. Several things were disturbing with this case of poker cheating. First of all the poker site itself seemed to stall the poker community who wanted answers immediately. Also people feared if someone could hack into that site, why not others? Was poker cheating with superusers rampant among online sites? Eventually the poker community, led by Neverwinpoker’s Todd “Dan Druff” Witteles came to the conclusion that it must be an inside job. Eventually the ip was placed to Tom Scott, an apparent part owner of Absolutepoker itself! This was the biggest case of poker cheating to have ever taken place. A part owner (current or form depending on who you ask) of a poker site had the gall to take poker cheating to an absurd level. When the dust cleared Absolute Poker refunded members more than one million dollars, and after audited was itself fined half a million dollars. No legal action was taken against Tom Scott or his accomplices.

So is poker cheating common? In casinos, not so much. Online? Maybe a little more when considering collusion or account sharing, but again probably not enough to make a winning player avoid the sites. With the recent huge poker cheating scandals, the poker community has been very good about calling out suspected cheaters and keeping others informed, sites and fellow players alike. As long as poker is bing played somewhere in the world, poker cheating is probably going on somewhere in the world. But odds are, it’s probably not happening to you.