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Poker Website Scandals

Poker websites scandals seem to be happening more and more often, which isn’t a surprise. One would expect that as the popularity of online poker grows, the number of players would grow too. And with more players, there’s more opportunity for cheating and controversy, but correspondingly more opportunities to catch cheating and cheaters too. Some of these poker scandals are more interesting than others.

For example, in 2004, there was some controversy about a poker website called PokerSpot.com. I only became interested in Internet poker in 2003, and PokerSport is a site I’d never even heard of. But it looks like a lot of poker players had some serious problems related to cashouts there.  This thread at Two Plus Two goes into a great amount of detail about that particular poker site scandal.

The biggest poker scandal on the Internet that I can recall personally is the Ultimate Bet/Absolute Poker scandals, which are still relatively recent. The good folks at Two Plus Two were again on the case, and their summary of what happened is thorough and detailed. If you’re interested in this sort of thing, I recommend reading that thread, especially the first post, which summarizes the case very well.

Here’s my much briefer and less detailed summary of what happened. Someone using PokerTracker noticed that NioNio, a player at Ultimate Bet, was winning at a rate of 155 big blinds per 100 hands played. Since the average win rate of a player at those levels is 1.52 big blinds per 100 hands played, it seems like NioNio was either some kind of poker savant with psychic powers or he was cheating in some way. The odds of winning that much more often than the average is similar to winning the Powerball lottery–three days in a row! Can you guess which scenario was more likely, the cheating, or the psychic theory? (The psychic theory is mine, but it’s not really meant to be taken seriously.)

In a similar time frame, a player with the screenname of POTRIPPER won a big tournament at Absolute Poker, but the numbers there looked funny too. According to the Two Plus Two thread I cited earlier, this player played an abnormally high percentage of hands, and somehow made the correct decision on almost every flop. He finally won the tournament with an unusual hand–a ten high.

Later that same year, other players at the $150/$300 level were winning a strange amount of hands with a mathematically losing strategy. Outside investigators were convinced that these players could see the other people’s hole cards.

I really can’t go into as much detail about what happened in these poker website scandals, because it would be unfair to the original posters and investigators over at Two Plus Two. But here’s my thinking about the situation. (And these are just my opinions. Take them at face value.)

• Cheating at online poker has happened in at least some of the online poker sites.
• Cheating will likely happen in higher stakes games rather than in lower stakes games, because that’s where the most potential profit is.
• Some poker sites have better security and integrity than others.
• Online poker is fun.
• You should use a certain amount of caution when playing Internet poker as it relates to stakes. You’re a lot less likely to get cheated out of your money in a $3/$6 game than in a $150/$300 game.

Play Internet poker, and enjoy it. But play with your “fun money,” not your rent money. Play for the bigger money in the live poker games.