Cheating in online poker. The real percentage..

..of online cheating is most likely higher than most online players would like to admit. The recent exposure of the "Absolute Poker" exposed cards incidence is just a small tip of the iceberg to serious on-line cheating. In a real world game things such as tipping your co-conspirators to your hand strengths are done with signals which give info and directions to your "partners". In online poker playing with allies is so prevalent that chat rooms and text messaging between players is so common that simply monitoring a shared poker chat room for 1 hour and your are almost gauranteed to see some forms of grifting. Also, how many times have you played in a MTT and seen 5 to 10 players with almost identical names. Only the niave and unsophisticated would see the "AP" incident as an isolated crime spree. With current hacking techniques and a willingness or desire to break into these online poker companies systems it wouldn't surprise me if one day we find out that a small percentage similiar to a rake has systematically been taken form every online player. It comes to mind the master thief who stoled pennies from everyones bank account over several years to rack up millions. Anyway, the real percentage of online cheating i would estimate to be at above 10% or above in every type of game.

Cheating is a problem anytime gambling is involved. It isn't a reserved condition for poker. My own concern for poker is more along the lines you mention with collusion, not the poker sites themselves. I do agree that chat rooms, IM, cell phones and the like will make the problem even worse over time as more and more people lose their money online and need ways to 'recover' since they cannot win by their skills and luck alone. It's just too tempting, and too easy for them.

My only suggestion to avoid it is to watch where you play and observe carefully the play of others on a table. Signs of possible collusion don't take long to surface in many cases. If your luck and cards are running bad and your stack is disappearing, get off the table.

GL on the flat screen felt.

Never. And if they were colluding they would be idiots to make their names so similar.

Current hacking techniques? I'm guessing you know nothing about how computers work if you're talking in those terms. Unless there is an inside job, even if the system were vulnerable to that problem (and I'm guessing it's secure enough), at least for Pokerstars, the cards are continuously shuffled so seeing the board is literally impossible, and pulling off another absolute would, as I mentioned, require an inside job. If you think you're losing the rake PLUS more, you'd better not play online. Or are you just losing and using this as justification?

Actually, he stole fractions of pennies, any time there was any rounding, he kept the extra fraction. So the bank still paid out what they were supposed to, they just paid for example 5.3% on a 5.3% account when without the stealing it would be 5.29999% because of the rounding. But two flaws in your logic.
1. It was an inside job. I maintain that's the only possibility for a breach in the security of a MAJOR poker site
2. He got caught and is now in jail

And pokerstars I know has some really good detection. Any time a hand is played differently, it picks up on it. When it sees someone folding TPTK when he hasn't laid down a pair on the flop most of his hands and it just happens to always be when a certain player has a better hand and he seems to always be playing with that player, hmm, maybe collusion? Unless they can prove something I doubt they can take the money or give it back to players who were cheated out of it, but they can easily ban the person from playing at the site again. I think that's how it works with pokerstars, but haven't heard of any specific cases of action.

Completely wrong here.

i've seen it my self. i have a few sinister friends.
they have wire-less broad-band cards for their lap-tops. 4 or 5 of them get together . enter a sit-n-go trny, and do what they do.
i imagine it would be pretty easy to win if you were at a table with 3 or 4 of your pals and could see their cards.

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quads if any is there any type of protection for collusion??? i think thats would be pretty hard to manage considering the number of tables and hands going on at any particular moment in time...

are you kidding me?????
how the heck did you get over 4 billion posts jdig84?

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my first post got deleted bc it was "spam" its an error in the system thats all...

This is from the pokerstars site.

Not saying they couldn't do this but at for example the pokerstars 10-person sngs you would need to take first place AND another spot (2nd and 3rd would NOT be eough) for this to be profitable with 5 people. With 4 people simply taking first or 2nd+3rd would be enough to make this profitable. I think that's not gonna be tough to do if you know what you're doing, but you have to not only avoid detection but also place multiple people.

No, not really. Except for a player making a complaint to the site that they might feel collusion is taking place at their table. The site would then join the table and review it. Professional collusion teams talking in real time via their own server, are good at what they do at cash tables. They replace members at the table with fresh ones constantly.

Most people think they won't run into a team, or not enough of times to make a big % difference. But collusion is the biggest threat to online poker, other then inside help.

Much more about collusion will hit the forums in the near future.