Internet Poker / Editor / 04 February 2008 / Leave a Comment

WOULD you cheat at poker?

ScurvyDog writes: "Would I rig the game if Donald Trump sat down and I knew, with 100% likelihood, that I could clean him out for, oh, say $5 million large, with 0% risk whatsoever? Well, umm, of course I would. You wouldn't? Really? What if you were sitting with Osama Bin Laden instead? Tom Cruise?"

He writes in response to the alleged cheating at Absolute Poker.

He concludes: "If you can grab an edge, grab it. Then justify it later, if it needs justifying."

Ftrain is less certain.

He recalls starting out playing poker as a teenager:

The cheating started out just with all of us picking on one guy that we nicknamed Stanley (because he was a tool, you see). With the blessing of the other guys at the table, I'd set the deck against him, or deal a bad one off the bottom of the deck to him in mofo -- those sorts of shenanigans.

Nowadays, older and more cautious, he would not cheat. But he maintains that others would. It's human nature:

The thing is, whenever money is involved, for at least a certain segment of the population, the rules either become much more flexible or go out the window entirely. You can put regulations in place to try to safeguard against that as much as possible, and I'm certainly in favour [sic] of that in an effort to make games as fair as possible, but you'll never be able to change basic human nature. Where there's money, there's a will. Where there's a will, there's a way.

But cheats never prosper. At least, they get found out.

As Steven Levitt notes in the New York Times, the Absolute Poker matter came to light via player power and what might be a whistleblower.

Some opponents became suspicious of how a certain player was playing. He seemed to know what the opponents' hole cards were. The suspicious players provided examples of these hands, which were so outrageous that virtually all serious poker players were convinced that cheating had occurred. One of the players who'd been cheated requested that Absolute Poker provide hand histories from the tournament (which is standard practice for online sites). In this case, Absolute Poker "accidentally" did not send the usual hand histories, but instead sent a file that contained all sorts of private information that the poker site would never release. The file contained every player's hole cards, observations of the tables, and even the IP addresses of every person playing.

Detective work was done. The allegation is that an observer was watching hands played by the alleged cheater.

The suspect player folded the first two hands in a tournament before the observer arrived. They did not then fold a single hand before the flop for the next 20 minutes. They did, though, fold pre-flop when another player was holding a pair of kings. And so it went.

After some digging it turned out that the observer's IP address and account name were held on the same set of servers that host Absolute Poker.

Absolute Poker may be entirely innocent. But damage to its name has been done.

Given the chance to play with them or another outfit - such as Betfair - the poker player's choice seems obvious.

Cheats may well prosper, but they will struggle to get a game...

Play online and keep safe

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