A word about online poker. Whether or not the sites intentionally rig their software or

not will always be open for debate. Any experienced poker player who has played online

for a week or two will observe that there are a large occurence of suspicious hands and

most will stop playing.

1. There is a high motivation for onine poker sites to rig the software and the

arguement of “why would they, they make tons of money anyway” is not really legitmate.

They stand to multiply their profits tenfold by rigging the game for action and bad

beats. It keeps bad players playing and neutralizes good players. However, this

arguement can be beaten to death and the only way to prove the game is rigged is to

obtain an active copy of the source code they are running. No site will ever offer this

up and it is very easy to mask and hide the actual source code during audits, etc. The

only way, in my book, a poker site could legitimate its software is by undergoing a full

Sarbanes Oxley audit, which they won’t. They don’t need to, they operate outside of US

law. If you feel that the Kahnawake Gaming Commission is a strong enough authority to

audit your favorite poker site, be my guest. There is really no point in arguing this,

if you believe it is rigged, don’t play.

2. Beyond the ‘rigging’ arguement there are plenty of motivators to keep honest poker

players out of online poker rooms. Collusion is real and active in all poker rooms all

of the time. I personally know a husband and wife team that have made hundreds of

thousands using collusion in online poker rooms. In fact, they have quit their daytime

jobs as active traders on the stock market. Their routine is fairly simple, they each

operate 4 to 8 poker IDs at the same time and run the software from different locations

using Remote Desktop to login to machines at the homes of friends and families. They

constantly close and open accounts and use fake names and IDs, all transactions going

through Neteller. While their accounts do get cancelled on occasion, none of the online

poker rooms seems to care if another account signs up and transfers money from the same

Neteller account 10 minutes later. Their favorite targets are mid range tourneys (27 to

63) players with buy-ins around 20 dollars. Mind you, they are both very good poker

players to begin with, and they play very tight poker until the tables are reduced and

they own multiple seats at one table. Then the collusion kicks in and they generally

take 4 of the 8 or so paying spots at the table. They are not milllionaires but do make

about $200,000 a year doing this. Keep in mind there is only two of them, a team of 10

can rake in millions.

3. RNGs can be cracked, software can be hacked and the 8 Billion dollars in profits

generated by online casinos in 2005 is enough to draw the best hackers in the world.

Basically, when online poker (and casinos) popped up, all the hackers stopped going

after banks and fortune 500 companies and set their sites on you, the online poker

player. Why would they waste their time attempting to hack the best gaurded sites in

the world when they have second rate programmers writing archaic software running out of

unregulated and unprotected sites in every third world country south of Mexico? For

example, most of you have probably seen advertisements for Poker RNG 4.0. This software

claims that it builds a database and after about 2000 hands will give you a 90% accurate

read on other players whole cards and what the flop, turn, and river will bring. This

is complete crap. The software fails b/c they expect you to manually enter at least

2000 of your hands that you follow to the river, never going to happen. In reality, it

takes more like 100,000 hands to accurately predict the outcome of an RNG. A plant of

100 BOTS feeding a common database can log 100,000 hands in less than a day. The RNG

can be cracked within 95% accuracy within a matter of hours and then bang…you get

pulled out to the river, all-in, holding A K by someone with pocket 7 2 and lose your

stack, sound familiar? This is real. I work for a software company and had an hour

long conversation with a couple of our developlers about the prospect of building such

software. One is a PHD in mathmatics from India, the other is a premier Java programmer

from Israel. They assured me that what I am describing can be written in a matter of

days (poker is very simple). Here is a quote from my Isreali friend: “what you are

talking about, not exactly, but very similar, my friends are doing at home”. Thats

about as far as I am going to go with this example.

Bottom line: Online Poker is a haven for criminals, scams, cheats, and bad beats. If

you are a legitimate poker player, stay away. If you want to put together a cheating

system to rob from others, this is the best place to do it right now. Have fun, I will

not be participating. See you back in the brick and mortar, good luck, and godspeed.

- Teddy J.