Is Online Poker Safe Or Rigged?

This is one of the most common questions that people ask at the beginning of there online poker career - is online poker safe or rigged? Its a very smart question as well! It is imperative that you trust the place where you deposit your money and are 100% confident that nothing shady is going on.

Safety can be defined in a few different ways but the most crucial questions you must be asking before you play on any online poker site are, are my funds safe? And, Is the software safe? (Not rigged).

Are my funds safe?

For the most part your funds will be safe. Especially if you deposit on one of the more well known poker sites. In fact, your funds are more likely to be more safe on most poker sites than in a bank, since in the recent economic past, a number of banking institutes in first world countries have gone into administration and had to be bailed out by there respective governments to protect peoples savings. All regulated poker sites are forced to keep all the players funds in safe accounts and don’t invest them in any way (Unlike the banks). Your funds are very safe and secure!

The only time you could get into some kind of trouble from this is if you deposit your money onto a less known poker site. All of the bigger sites (And all sites advertised on this site) are safe and secure places to play. The reason you don’t want to deposit your money onto these smaller sites is they don’t have the same level of profitability as the most popular sites and like any business they have a risk of going bust. Recently a few “skins” (Small sites that operate on the same network) of the MicroGaming network went into administration because they were not operating profitably. At the current moment, over a year later, the players on these sites are trying to get there money back.

So if you really want to make sure your funds are 100% safe, you need to deposit on a poker room that a) Has a large number of players b) Has been in business for a long period of time c) Is highly profitable and generates large profits every year for multiple years. According to those criteria Pokerstars and Party Poker is considered to be the safest place to have your poker funds stored. Consequently, these sites are the largest and actually the most enjoyable places to play in our opinion. Of course, some of the smaller sites have a weaker level of competition so there is definitely a risk vs reward question here to whether you want to play there. What we suggest is that you keep the majority of your bankroll on the largest trusted sites and then if you want to play on a smaller site, transfer a small portion of your bankroll onto it and cash out regularly, only keeping a small amount of money on the less known site.

Is the software rigged?

As a professional poker player for the best part of 5 years I can honestly say that I don’t think that any online poker software is inherently rigged. And if it is rigged, its obviously rigged in my favour since I have been able to earn a good income over this time. I am very confident that the cards pulled out the deck are random and can not be seen beforehand by any other player.

What I can say is that sick and disgusting bad runs happen, so its very important to have a strong and large bankroll so you can withstand the inevitable swings.

In the past there has been one instance of a “super user” account which happened when someone employed by Absolute Poker created a back door that allowed a certain account to see all the whole cards. As far as I know, in online pokers history this is the only serious cheating scandal that has ever occurred. What I can say about this is that, the account was figured out because it was playing in an unusual way and was winning such a large amount. After it was found out the software was patched up so that it could never happen again and all the players who were a victim of the scandal were refunded the money they lost. I can not guarantee that something like this has not happened again or will ever happen again in the future. But what I can guarantee you, the percentage chance of something like this happening to you is minimal because of all the tracking software that is out there now, something like this happening would be very transparent and easily found out. It is also likely that anyone who had these kind of abilities wouldn’t waste there time playing the low stakes games because it is inevitable they will get discovered at some point, so they would want to make as much money as possible and cash out.

Once again, if this is something that concerns you a lot or you are overly conscious about something like this happening, then you should base your play on one of the larger online poker sites. The reason for this is that these larger sites are massive organisations where they have people watching everybody and various fail safe measures to make sure nothing shady occurs. So you will have a team who does the software programming, a team watching the software programmers and a bunch of people who watch over them. Basically, what I am saying is something like this is much less likely to happen due to all the procedures that are in place to stop something like this from happening. The biggest online poker sites generate billions in profits every year from all of the rake, it is 100% in there interest that some kind of cheating never happens on there site, so it is a huge priority for them.