Where are you LEAST likely to be cheated in poker?
Like many people, I started playing poker with the goal of playing big MTTs. The drama and prize money of the World Series. I wanted to come from nowhere and make a deep run in the big-money tournaments, a la Moneymaker, Raymer and McManus. (Here’s a long post from my previous blog about my captivation with Jim McManus’ experience – I’m sure AmarilloSB can relate to that…)
However, after a year of playing poker, I’ve switched almost exclusively to cash game play. I may play a Sit and Go now and then but it’s just for fun, I don’t consider them a part of my bankroll building strategy at all.
Online MTTs seem to be the most ethically compromised element of poker these days. If you don’t know about the myriad scandals in online poker, look up the names PotRipper, JJProdigy and TheV0id to get a summary. At the very least, people enter multiple accounts into tournaments; on the worst end, it’s been confimed that unethical site owners have played tournaments where they can see everyone else’s cards. Players sell their entries to better players mid-way through the tournament, which amounts to a good player having multiple entries and repeated shots at the final table.
Well, at least live tournament poker is clean, right? There certainly can’t be multi-accounting, ghosting or any of the security compromises that plague online poker… right? I thought so, and then I was looking around for a new poker podcast and found “Big Poker Sundays” from PokerRoad. They recently played a clip of Gavin Smith saying everyone knows that some players squirrel away chips from World Series prelim events and carry them over to the next event. This was certainly news to me; not that I’ve ever played a big buy-in live tournament, but I just wasn’t aware that these security compromises were out there. Obviously chip-dumping is a possibility in any tournament and can’t realistically be stopped; but actually taking chips from one tournament to another shocked me. (It’s possible because Harrah’s apparently uses the exact same chips for all world series prelim events.)
I read our humble Pokersift site pretty regularly, and there were a few threads of poker thinking that seemed related. The first was SteelWheel’s series on why cash games are better than tournaments, most of which I agreed with (Part I) (Part II). The second was Lifesagrind’s series on cheating and grey areas in poker ethics (Part I) (Part II) (Part III).
My summary:
- You are probably most likely to be cheated or subjected to unethical collaboration in online multi-table tournaments.
- Tournaments in general offer greater risk of unethical poker. This is largely because it’s impossible to fully supervise/confine players during a tournament; this problem is just particularly acute during online tournaments when players are not even sharing the same physical space in a casino.
- Since “ghosting” can still occur in online games, live cash games offer the smallest possibility of cheating. However, the obvious corrolary is “angle shooting” in live games; players may try to trick you into mucking winning hands or declaring a hand they don’t have.
- However, my preference remains for online cash games. They are convenient, offer small-stakes players like myself an entree into big-bet poker without needing to play for casinos stakes, and rarely have any ethical questions surrounding them. Although the player base is larger, they offer repeated interactions with donkey, which SteelWheel points out was the main advantage of cash games: if a guy puts a beat on your in a tournament, it’s probably over; in a cash game, it’s just a piece of information to use next time.
Curious to hear what the tournament players think about this… don’t you worry about the integrity of tournaments no matter where you are?
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I disagree – I think you are likely to get cheated in online cash ring games as well, it’s just harder to catch so it goes unreported at a higher frequency. I know a handful of online poker cheaters, and they all cheat in cash ring by talking over the phone and exchanging hole card information. It is way more beneficial, since you can get multiple people in the same ring game and share cards/raise people out of hands, but the only utility of cheating in a MTT is decreasing variance via multiple entries, or perhaps ghosting, which is only really feasible for a handful of accounts since hardly anyone is in direct personal contact with the highly skilled MTTers.
In contrast, I know no online MTT cheaters – the only people who would even consider cheating are the top 1% of these players anyway, who could potentially gain benefit from collaborating with each other.
I think by far the least cheating occurs in live cash. Are online MTTs and cash games still beatable? Of course, but you would be naive to think that there is not some form of cheating going on in these spots.