The Rec’s guide to online poker security

It's true that you will see more bad beats and unlikely runouts when playing online - much more often, in fact - but it's not because online sites are rigged. It's rather because the pace of play is so much faster, you play way more hands online than live.

So this is an easy fear to allay: serious, major poker sites are not actively conspiring to make you lose pots. It just doesn't make sense for the major sites to upset the apple cart over chump change.

The human problem

The bad news is that, even if the poker sites are acting in good faith, there are many poker players out there who are not: players that will collude with their friends, use real-time assistance (RTA), or create software programs that can play automatically 24-hours-a-day (bots).

Listen, there are bad humans out there from every demographic, it's not just poker players. But poker players are humans too and some of them are bad apples and will try to cheat the system.

Brick and mortar casinos have to deal with this as well: there are many rules about how dealers and floor staff have to act, the mechanics they use to move cards and chips around, the order in which they take certain steps. These rules exist to stop players potentially cheating in some way, even if many casual players don't understand the reasons why.

If you've played in underground games or casual home games, you've likely noticed that they take these rules and security protocols less seriously - and are therefore less secure against cheating.

Online poker rooms are the same way. They have rules and protocols in place to prevent players from gaming the system and cheating. And while the major poker sites (like the major brick and mortar casinos) take this very seriously, the less-regulated sites are under less pressure to invest in these measures.

So, just like the shady backroom underground live games, these grey-market or unregulated sites are less likely to comply with the robust security protocols that are required to keep modern cheaters at bay.

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The bot problem

But their incentives are also not as clear in every case. For instance, take the example of bots.

Bots can play 24/7 with no need for breaks or sleep, they can multi-table an absurd number of tables without losing an edge. For a poker site, this means that those bots are out there playing lots of hands and generating rake for the site. In one simple view, poker sites are incentivized to have as many hands played as possible, generating the most amount of rake (and therefore revenue) as possible for the site.

But there is a tradeoff when it comes to reputation; if players feel like many of their opponents are bots, they might leave to play on different sites, lowering volume in the short term and probably spelling the end of the site in the long term. Sites need players, after all! And players will only put their money where they think it is safe.

Financial security

Speaking of money, if things go badly poker sites can go bankrupt or decide to close up shop, and if you have a lot of your bankroll loaded onto the site this could spell trouble. There's not much you can do to avoid spots like this, other than only leaving a portion of your bankroll on any given site at a time, and choosing wisely when it comes to which sites to deposit on and play on in the first place. Depending on where you live, local regulation may also protect your funds.

Most major sites will pay out your winnings in a reasonable timeframe. If you are having trouble cashing out, or if the support team is giving you any kind of runaround when it comes to removing your money from the site, that is a big red flag that usually means the company is having trouble making ends meet; it's probably a good time to move your money if you can.

And be very careful about playing on sites with 'agents' that act as an intermediary between you and the platform. There are even more opportunities for 'bad apple humans' to scam you or act in bad faith in scenarios like that.

Collusion and RTA

When it comes to players colluding with each other in real time, like playing at the same table and sharing info, there's not much that can be done about that online or in real brick and mortar casinos, other than the sites paying attention and tracking whether the same players are often playing together or from the same IP address, and winning more than usual when they do.

Similarly, the recent onslaught of RTA tools like real-time solvers make it very difficult for players and sites to know when cheaters are using these tools without going deep into the meta-data of their play.

Some companies like Range Trainer Pro have introduced a real-time fair-use delay into their program, which actively prevents players from using their solver in real time as they play to cheat. We should all commend Range Trainer Pro and its creator K.L. Cleeton for sticking with this fair-use delay. Many other solvers out there allow for instant solves, making it easier for bad apples to use them to cheat in real time.

Will the future of online poker look more like a home game?

As technology improves it will become harder and harder to catch the cheaters. This does not bode well for the future of online poker, unless we as a community can find a way to keep it transparent and secure and demonstrably fair to all.

I worry that in the next several years NLHE players will have to play against people they know personally, in private games, if they want to be sure that no-one in the player pool is cheating in some way. So finding or building a community of players you trust will become even more important in the future as it is now.

In the meantime, take some solace in the fact that the current cheaters are more likely to be spending their resources on the bigger-buy-in games, so recreational players like us are at less risk in the lower-stakes games we play. For now.

But whether you are playing live or online, remember: humans are gonna human. Protect yourself accordingly.