Briscoe

Short article on people cheating at online Casinos:

http://www.pokerlistings.com/casino-cheat-warns-of-widescale-corruption-in-internet-poker-1427

I know Palimax at least plays online. Any thoughts? My wife wants to play online since we can't go to the Casino with the new baby. I'd hate to just be throwing money away though.

Palimax Sceleris

The article there pretty much defines "playing honestly" as not being a bot or otherwise computer enhanced.

Some truths about online poker.

• (a) Many of your opponents employ a log-watching or screen-scraping program to count their pot-ods, make-percentages and track opponents.
• (b) Further still, some of your opponents are either a fully automated version of this, playing with simple fold-call-raise rules against those odds, or are some sort of man-machine hybrid doing what the machine suggests.
• (c) The most sophisticated of these automations can play together. If my machine knows I folded J7c, your machine can remove J7c from its unknowns and further increase its odds. [There is a much greater advantage to "gang" play in Omaha and Stud, where more cards are revealed.]
• (d) Some people, independant of computer assistance, collude by playing in one physical location that *appears* to be two logical locations when the IPs are sorted. Many people even play from the SAME IP, as large corporations, colleges, and some smaller ISPs all show the same outgoing internet address.

I play at one of two limits for my cash games. Either $.50/$1 or $10/$20. I play the former to relax. I play the later for the cheddar on my steak. There's no obvious "I'm a robot" flashing light on any players in my games -- and, honestly, I think the majority of robots would be playing Hold'em [or at least the robots that I've looked at play hold'em -- they're out there, for sure] -- and I play stud and Omaha; but you have to ask yourself. Can you beat a simple robot who's programmed to play tight and agressive. Can you beat the first three chapters of the Phil Helmuth book? If so, you can beat robots. If so, you can make small regular sums of cash playing online.

If you're serious about playing online, I'd do the usual, stick to limits that you feel safe at, stick to games you know or play at smaller limits on games you want to learn, keep great records of your play and make notes on people you play against - most online software lets you do this, and I'd invest in one of a dozen programs that helps you calculate pot odds so you can be part of the class-A people above. Imagine them as the sort of people with Pinochle Buddy up when they're playing cards on Yahoo -- automatically watching all of the cards that ended up in tricks so you can have a better idea if your queen is going to float. Cheating? You tell me.

If you decide to play somewhere, feel free to let me refer you. You'll get the same deal as you'd get signing up anywhere, and, well, I get some scratch too.

Let me know if I can answer any more questions.

Palimax Sceleris

Oh, sorry, what I didn't include was that PartyPoker, among others, employs some anti-cheating mechanics; and for the most part, I rarely, if ever, suspect players at my table are robots. ...but if I played only hold'em, the percentage would probably go from "nearly nothing" to maybe a couple of percent -- every couple of tables maybe someone's a class (b),(c),(d) player.

Lots of (a)'s out there though - but I hardly consider good note-taking and automatic calculator "cheating." It's like playing EverQuest with a web browser on a second computer looking up spawn points and loot drops.