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Online Poker Strategy

Signing Up	Online Poker Tells
Building An Online Bankroll	Player Notes, Hand Histories, Netstats & All In
The Lobby	How To Deal With Support
Playing Two Games	Paranoia & Cheating Tips
Monitor Stack Sizes & Prompt Play	The Rake & The Conclusions
Careful In Using Turn Buttons

Paranoia Strikes Deep

Online poker has one truly fundamental thing in common with casino poker: most players lose. But the way players lose online inevitably leads to some delusional paranoia. For instance, in casino poker, most players can effectively fool themselves about how they are doing. The money they buy-in or cash out mixes in their pockets. They win some days and lose others. It's easy to say: "I break even, or win a little." Online the bookkeeping is in black and white. Your losses are documented; your wins are sent to you in a very deliberate way. You know if you are winning or losing.

Rather than admit the legitimacy of their losses, some of those players who delude themselves about their poker ability in a casino end up charging the online cardrooms with some truly amazing practices. Most of these charges are hopelessly illogical paranoia. The fact of the matter is, the amount of money a semi-successful online cardroom can make is staggering. The idea that a hugely profitable multi-million dollar enterprise with relatively small overhead would jeopardize its goose that laid the golden egg for a few more dollars by punishing people for cashing out... ideas like this are just ludicrous. (At least one rogue online cardroom used bots and did not declare that fact, but this was easy to discover and they are out of business as of this writing.

Online players should install firewalls on their computers. (If you have DSL or cable, you should have one anyway.) If you are the type of person who worries about the grassy knoll a lot, a firewall should ease some concerns.

But firewalls end up causing some paranoia too. Sometimes your computer briefly loses its connection to the cardroom, even if your Internet connection stays up. When this happens, the cardroom's software tries to reconnect to your computer, which alerts your firewall (unless you configure a rule to always allow a connection from that particular site.) This is not evidence of your computer being hacked by somebody who wants to see your cards! Configure your firewall sensibly and you can play without hacking worries.

Cheating

Some people cheat while playing online. Some cheating goes on in casino poker too. When money is put up for grabs, some people will behave criminally to get a piece. While the "Paranoia" category mostly dismisses the idea of the established cardrooms robbing their customers, individual and small groups of players will inevitably cheat.

In all walks of life, cheaters are drawn disproportionately from the pool of losers -- people unable to win legitimately, and too lazy to do the work to become winners. To oversimplify it, most cheats aren't very bright. Most poker cheats, online or casino, are hopelessly inept. They cheat and they still can't win. From a purely mercenary standpoint, we should welcome most cheaters because they lose!

Joking aside, I don't mean to diminish the dangers of cheating, but just because something is morally bad doesn't mean it is financially bad. Besides the issue that most cheats probably lose, it's important to consider how "bad" the most common form of cheating is -- two pals talking on the phone while playing, telling each other what they folded. This is an edge, but not a particularly big one. These two pals, who are not playing together on a common bankroll, are not in the league of colluding cheats -- players playing from the same bankroll. Even here, this sort of effective collusion is rare. It requires trust, and cheaters are by definition not trustable. Such arrangements have trouble lasting.

And that brings us to the cheater to really fear... a single individual playing in one game using two computers and two identities. These people only have to trust themselves.

We have two principal defenses against effective cheating -- our own vigilance, and the might of the cardroom, which sees cheats as a mortal enemy. You suspect cheating, tell Support immediately. But don’t be the boy who cried "wolf." If you accuse endless numbers of innocent people of cheating, you will be ignored, which may lead to letting a real cheat get away with it for awhile longer.

Once alerted to suspicious behavior, the cardrooms have an excellent ability to monitor potential cheaters. They can see the cards after all. So, the most sensible way to combat cheating is: if you suspect it, stop playing, and tell support exactly why you stopped playing. When you stop playing, you stop contributing to the rake. The rake is the primary motivation of a cardroom. It’s the thing they take most seriously.

Effective cheating should seldom be a problem below the $10/20 level, so the majority of players needn't give it too much thought. Still, report anything suspicious.