Poker Collusion Signals
Signs and signals let the other players know what’s on hand but the online poker room has means to detect this unlawful behavior. Anti collusion software Most players will agree that hustling and collusion is repulsive and it makes sense that poker software has elements to prevent this kind of cheating. 18+ New Customers only. £10 Poker Collusion Signals deposit. 100% up to Poker Collusion Signals £300 Bonus + 30 bonus spins. Bonus spins Poker Collusion Signals on Starburst or Berryburst Max are subject to change & must be used within 3 days from activation. Bonus spins are activated after wagering a min. Collusion is the easiest and most dangerous form of cheating at poker. Collusion involves two or more players silently working together at a poker table. When working together players can use signals to identify the strength of their hand or betting strategies. They can also create a distraction during sleight of hand.
Online Poker Tournaments ♥ Sit n Go Tournament Tips ♥ Poker Freerolls. Collusion - A cheating conspiracy between two or more players. When two or more people engage in coordinated cheating in a poker game, it is called collusion. Collusion takes many forms, and it runs the gamut from relatively benign to malignant.
The growing prevalence of staking agreements in tournament poker brings up a possible issue — the increased potential for collusion among players. However, if the poker community acknowledges and openly talks about the proverbial Elephant in the Room, awareness improves and solutions can emerge.
There's life-changing money at the top of the biggest tournaments, but bankroll help is often needed to get there. Severely top-heavy payout structures put variance on steroids, motivating many serious players to seek out financial backers.
Crowd-funding platforms like YouStake and Stake Kings have brought poker staking arrangements into the mainstream, while privately negotiated deals continue to flourish. But what happens when these arrangements tempt players to cheat at key points during a tournament? What should happen?
The Ubiquity of Staking Agreements
To start a new business, some entrepreneurs borrow money from family, friends, or banks. Others form a corporation and sell shares of stock.
Poker Collusion Rules
Many poker players combat variance by mimicking the tactics of entrepreneurs. Through staking arrangements, players raise money for tournament entry fees in exchange for a share of their profits (if any). Staking is the capitalist solution to variance.
Staking agreements take many forms. Backers might provide all of the funding over an extended time period in exchange for a share of the cumulative profits, or a portion of the buy-in for a single tournament for a share of that tournament's winnings with no makeup or ongoing funding obligations.
Alternatively, a player might raise a pool of money from multiple backers for a series of tournaments or stated time period, to be used at the player's discretion with accounting and settlement at the end. And multiple players may swap action with each other, creating a team approach with each agreeing to pay the others a percentage of their payouts.
Staking agreements provide working capital and risk mitigation for the player, and an investment opportunity for the backer.
Perverse Incentives
When one player has a financial interest in another player in the same tournament, perverse incentives can potentially arise when they are assigned seats at the same table.
What happens when staking agreements change a player's tactics or lead to outright cheating? Are players entitled to know when their opponents have backers?
I once heard a story about four players who appeared to be friends, all late registering for a tournament at the same time and being seated together at a newly created table. On the first hand, each of them went all-in blind. The winner of that hand quickly had four times the starting chip stack and a clear advantage over the remaining players. Does this look suspicious?
As most experienced players well know, there are many ways to collude or cheat in a tournament, such as:
- Signaling - flashing hole cards or using a signal to reveal one's hand strength or betting intentions
- Whipsawing - partners raising and reraising each other to trap players in between
- Soft play - not raising a strong hand to avoid damaging the stack of another player
- Chip dumping - transferring chips to a partner's stack by folding a potential winner when heads-up in a hand; this is the most prevalent form of collusion because it is the simplest, and least detectable
It's naive to expect human beings to resist every temptation when so much money is at stake. From information asymmetries to angle shooting, the problem is as old as Tantalus, the Greek God of Temptation.
It starts when we park at the outer reaches of the garage while wishing we could afford valet. Temptation makes us obsess over the top-heaviness of the payout schedule. Temptation perches like invisible fairies on our shoulders, whispering that the ends justify the means. And besides, everybody else is colluding (or so we might be tempted to suspect).
In Search of Transparency
The antidote for information asymmetry is transparency. We may never get full disclosure, but that's not an excuse not to try. Tournament organizers could ask — or require — players to disclose their backing and swapping arrangements when they register. Collecting this information would be a daunting task, but as a thought experiment let's consider it, anyway.
Table and seat assignment algorithms could assign players with shared financial interests to different tables.
Players could research the entangled relationships to understand who might have an incentive to collude.
For broadcast or streamed tournaments, commentators and analysts could share the backing details with viewers, explaining the intensity of a player's rail supporters or revealing secondary considerations that affect major decisions. In other sports, announcers often discuss athletes' and coaches' contract incentives. Why not in poker?
Poker Collusion
Penalties could be imposed for non-disclosure.
Tournament organizers should acknowledge that the growing use of staking agreements can lead to information asymmetry and perverse incentives. They should also show the courage and determination to do something about it.
David Bass mostly plays in live no-limit hold’em cash games and has been writing about poker since 2012. You can follow him on Twitter @KKingDavidPoker or enjoy his blog, They Always Have It, at https://kkingdavid.com/.
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tournament strategystakingvariancebankroll managementrulesetiquettecollusionRelated Players
Variance
All right, we certainly don’t condone cheating here at RealOnlineGambling, but we all know it can happen. The best way to guard against being cheated is to learn how people go about cheating at poker. This course is presented to give you a basic background on how people cheat at poker so you know what to watch for.
Common Cheating Tactics
Most of the common methods of cheating at poker are due to slight of hand techniques. To facilitate sleight of hand, a special manner of holding the cards is often used called the Mechanic’s Grip. The best way to understand the Mechanic’s Grip is to hold a deck as though you were preparing to deal. Most likely the deck is in the palm of your hand with your four fingers along the long side of the deck and your thumb on the top. When you deal, you use your thumb to push a single card onto the tips of your fingers. Move you index and middle finger to the short side of the deck away from yourself. This is basically the Mechanic’s Grip. Remember just because someone is holding the deck in this fashion doesn’t mean they’re cheating. There are also other grips that can be used to conceal sleight of hand.
The Peek is a manor of cheating where the dealer sees the top card before it is dealt. This gives the dealer the advantage of knowing what cards people are holding or the ability to alter who gets a particular card. The Peek is performed by blocking the top card from moving with the thumb and pushing against the opposite side with the pinky finger.
The Second Deal allows the dealer to deal the second top card of the deck instead of the top card. The dealer uses his thumb to push the top card away from the rest of the deck, leaving about a half inch of the second card exposed. The second card is then eased out with the thumb and grabbed by the dealer’s other hand.
The Bottom Deal is much easier to perform. Instead of grabbing off the top card the dealer simply grabs the bottom card from the deck. The action is hidden by the Mechanic’s Grip.
Another technique is for the dealer to give himself extra cards. The advantage is obvious and the action is easy to hide if no one is paying close attention. The difficulty in this method is in getting rid of the extra card or cards before the showdown and re-introducing them to the deck.
There are a number of false shuffling methods of cheating. The bottom card can be kept on the bottom and then bottom dealt. The bottom card can also be shuffled to the top of the deck and kept there by second dealing. The shuffle can also keep a number of cards undisturbed at the top of the deck. A player skilled at sleight of hand can also stack the deck in his favor.
Collusion is the easiest and most dangerous form of cheating at poker. Collusion involves two or more players silently working together at a poker table. When working together players can use signals to identify the strength of their hand or betting strategies. They can also create a distraction during sleight of hand.
The use of marked cards is another potential area of cheating. The best way to avoid a marked deck is to use a newly opened deck at the start of play. Cards can also be marked during play but not as effectively. The most common way to mark during play is by scraping the card with the thumbnail.
One of the simplest forms of cheating is by hand misrepresentation. At the showdown a player claims to have hand that he does not. This may seem easy to catch but cards can be displayed or hidden to make a hand appear to be something it is not.
Poker Collusion Signals Games
The best way to guard against the different forms of cheating at poker is to pay attention. Know the signs and keep an eye out for them. Are players acting oddly? Does the dealing look different than usual? Have strong hands been beaten abnormally? Cutting can also help insulate against cheating during the shuffle. Do not allow the dealer to reshuffle after the cut.