Online Poker Safety - Part I of II: Types of Cheating to Watch Out For
When talking about being cheated playing online poker, the concern is not about inappropriate action taken by the poker sites, as this is so rare as to be virtually negligible. It is about malicious activity being perpetrated by a handful of your fellow players, those in particular who believe that their poker abilities are inadequate enough at winning them the big bucks that they feel they have to resort to cheating in order to win.
Poker may be 70% luck, but the element of skill involved, comprising that other 30%, should not be skill in using devious and unethical means to get one over on your fellow players. Bluffing is one thing; cheating is altogether another.
There are many forms of cheating at online poker, the most predominant ones being:
- Multi-accounting - where a single player signs up for multiple accounts with the same site
- Seat-selling - where a player sells their online poker account to a professional player for a share of the gains
- Multi-tabling - while many sites permit multi-tabling at ring game tables (and we see no real devilishness here), the cheating version of this occurs mostly during tournaments wherein each player should only be getting one seat, but somehow manages to land him or herself multiple seats in the same tournament, thereby giving them an unfair advantage
- Ghosting - less an actionable form of cheating than a practice of questionable ethics, this is when a player of less skill accepts advice during a hand from a more experienced player secretly standing by and observing the game.
How then to protect yourself for this type of behavior? How can you sit in at an online table with the peace of mind that you’ll be enjoying some good, clean, fun and with the trust that, should anyone try to take advantage of you by breaking the rules, you’ll catch on soon enough to avoid losing your chips and be able to take appropriate action against the perpetrator(s)?
That will be the subject of part II of this post: How to Protect Yourself from Being Cheated by Other Players