Online poker players need to not only worry about collusion, hackers, and other player-on-player crime, but there is also the online sites themselves that they need to worry about. If after everything that has happened, from Super-Users to the lengths online sites went to continue to serve the US market, you still have the 2005 mindset of “Why would the sites cheat, they make money hand over fist from the rake!” you are insane!
If I owned an online poker site, and was an unethical individual, I think it would be a very simple matter to cheat my players and never get caught, and I think this could be done in a variety of different ways! In an older blog post discussing the potential for online poker sites to “rig the deck” so to speak, I wrote the following:
“For instance, suppose in every all-in situation on the Turn the site was to remove just two harmless cards from the deck, by doing so they would prolong the number of hands the player with the worst of it will play in the long-run, while not drastically changing the individual outcomes, and since even winning players get it in bad sometimes it would basically go completely unnoticed.
“Here’s a real world example of what I mean: Suppose a player gets it all-in with one card to come, and has 2 outs. Normally they have about a 4.5% chance of winning, but removing two cards boosts their winning potential to around 4.75%. See how it would work?
“Now suppose you get it in good 75% of the time, you would only be losing roughly .18% equity per hand when you get it all-in on the turn. Do you think you would be able to spot this lost equity? So in our example above instead of winning 95.5% of the time you would only win 95.25% of the time. So over the course of 100,000 hands your opponent would win 1,049 times instead of 1,047 times!”
That’s just one way a site could easily rig their games. The key point is that the best way to cheat your players, from the site’s perspective, would be to make every player as close in skill level as possible, since this means they would play more hands, and therefore generate more rake –the perfect scenario for an online poker site is to have every player be the exact same skill level, neither winning or losing, because inevitably they would juts bed ground down entirely by the rake.
Now add to this low-limit poker bots, which not only can be programmed to play a very conservative, break-even, style, but also can keep more tables running. How hard would it be for a site to just scrap all of these bots every week (so players do not build-up databases and fishy play is not detected) or simply allow for screen-name changes for this group? How would players –especially low-limit poker players—be able to confirm they were playing against bots?
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