When you think of poker cheating, you think of hiding cards up your sleeve or bribing the dealer. But online poker cheating is completely different in nature for obvious reasons. The dealer is a computer automated programme and the cards are virtual so online poker cheating takes a completely different form. There are two types of online poker cheating, hacking or collusion. We will discuss each of these in detail so that you can ensure that you don’t become a victim of the crime of online poker cheating.

Hacking is not a very common form of cheating at online poker as most top legal online poker sites have a good security system in place. However, this form of cheating has happened in a few online poker rooms and it is not good for the online poker game when it does.

A far more common form of online poker cheating is collusion. Here, a group of poker players will get together and give each other information about their hole cards so that they can coordinate their betting to suck the maximum amount of chips out of the non-colluding poker players at the poker table. This substantially increases the winnings of the group as a whole and this is then all divided up so that everyone in the group profits from their online poker cheating.

It is very hard for the online poker room providers to track this form of online poker cheating because to the untrained eye it just looks like a normal game of online poker! Gone are the days when players were setting up lots of computers in the same room and each playing as individuals. The internet poker rooms often see if players are using the same IP address. However, modern forms of communication mean that even if they are logging onto the internet from different IP addresses, collusion can still easily happen. Modern internet poker rooms are also looking at certain groups who play regularly together at the same poker tables. However, online poker cheating is still rife, even though all these methods are being used. It is very rare for poker players to be banned from the online sites although a few investigations are being undertaken into certain poker players and groups.

If you look at the Google listings for online poker, you will see that a lot of the sites openly advertise the phrase ‘online poker cheating’. Please steer clear of sites such as these as they often offer guides or books on how to cheat at online poker. If the guides don’t work then they are a waste of time and if they do, cheating at online poker is a crime and there will eventually be an enforcement mechanism to make sure that such perpetrators are stopped.