Have you ever played poker against someone a little too good? Someone who always seemed to have the perfect card in the most pressured situations and pulled off an improbable win when he should have lost? For those of you who have been playing poker for some time, then you’ve met such a player and you believe there is something fishy. Cheating is common in card games, and the popular tricks used are marked cards or swapping cards to mention a few. Suppose you’re convinced that a particular player is cheating: how can you tell he’s cheating? In this post, we will tackle the common signs that someone, or something, is indeed cheating!
Long Hours of Playing
This first clue only applies to online poker play, but one of the signs of cheating is if you’ve been playing online for a long time. By “long,” it means an amount of time you wouldn’t expect a human to be able to play for and still be able to make coherent plays. If you know someone has managed to play for a long period, it’s likely to be a bot, which is a program specifically designed to play poker.
Weekends and vacations can affect the amount of time a person can play, so make sure they have other attributes of the bot. You would probably feel very bad accusing a person of being a bot and ruining their weekend when they have a poker marathon scheduled.
Patterns Don’t Change
This is another online clue that the player at the table is a bot. If you notice that they always use the same plan, there is a possibility that it is a bot and not a human. Analyze the routines of the game and see if they are the same in different scenarios: being on the button, with status, without status, etc. This is even more important if the player in question makes the same idiotic mistake in the same situations. If the same error is detected over and over again, the probability that it is a bot is much higher. But I can’t give you this advice without more caveats because some designs are fine. For example, don’t start denouncing players who follow basic blackjack strategies. That would be silly. Patterns should be consistent (since they occur every second, not just most of the time) and specific to a particular location.
Players Always at the Same Table
In real life, sitting in a poker room with one or two friends and talking at the table is a common occurrence, so it’s not a sign of cheating at poker. It’s an opportunity to find out if they make similar hand gestures, eye protocols, or use the same words differently. On the other hand, in online poker, there can be tens of thousands of registered accounts on some of the biggest sites.
Therefore, if two players are often at the same table, it is most likely intentional. Considering that you don’t know what these two players are winning with the game, it’s not a good idea to assume that they are cheating and moving to another table. Unfortunately, you can’t prove anything, but it is possible to stay safe.
Unusual Head-to-Head Playing
In cases like this, if there is a known pattern of strange behavior once the same two specific players are face-to-face, they are cheating. Weird could mean that a participant always folds, always likes their bets, or always makes the same mistake. In poker, this could mean that both players are cooperating and believe they share the yolk. Again, it’s hard to judge whether a particular pattern is an odd behavior, and it’s almost impossible to prove. So, if you feel uncomfortable that someone is behaving strangely, approach the tables in online poker or quietly approach the pit boss in poker to talk about it.