Posted 7/20/2022 by admin

How To Collude In Poker

How To Collude In Poker 4,1/5 7579 votes

How To Collude In Poker 3

David Bass

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.

Put the deck of cards in the palm of your hand with the short end of the cards up on edge against your palm. This leaves the other short end sticking up. While watching the backs of the cards use the thumb on your other hand to run across the cards from the front of the deck to the back so you see the backs of each of the cards quickly go. 888 Poker has a very popular 5 table (45 player) $3.50 buy in Sit and Go that stars with 300 chips pays 6 places (winner takes $60). The nature of low limit and high ratio of callers will work to effectively collude against the bluffer. Knowing when to fold is an intuition that is sharpened with experience. Slick Graphics Chat and Play.

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.

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?

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 managementrulesetiquettecollusion
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Immediately after the first Internet-poker website went online, people began to wonder if there might be a way to beat the system through cheating. It didn’t take long for players to realize this fact: While they were playing online poker, they could be speaking on the telephone to another player at the same table, and no one else would be the wiser.
This idea of working with another player was not new to the world of poker. At brick-and-mortar poker establishments, players have been teaming up for as long as there has been gambling. Two players go to a cardroom and sit at the same poker table. They have a predetermined system of signals to communicate with each other about their hands. The theory is that, together, they can better manipulate the betting and, eventually, win a lot of money. This form of cheating is called collusion.
In practice, making collusion profitable is an iffy proposition. It is far more difficult to execute properly than most people realize. Nonetheless, done skillfully over a long period of time, two colluding players can gain an advantage over the rest of the table. For that reason, cardrooms and casinos have policies in place to watch for collusion. Should they spot evidence of two players working together in this manner, they will promptly ban those players from their establishment.
Online poker is a different story altogether, and you can see why. With online poker, there is no physical poker table where players actually see each other with their own eyeballs. When you play poker online, you could be doing anything. Players can (and do) post probability charts next to their computers, sit at their computers naked, loudly swear and curse and give tells like crazy. Anything and everything is okay, since players cannot see what other players are doing. There are activities that no player would dream of doing while seated at a game in person, but those same activities can be done easily when playing poker online.
Included in this list of possible activities is talking to other players. At an in-person game, it is not possible to carry on a secret conversation with one of the other players at the table. You cannot discuss your hand and devise joint strategies to defeat your opponents while you are involved in the game. Obviously, if you tried to do this, other players would know what you are doing. But that is not the case online. Online poker seems perfect for such strategies of collusion.
Players collude in online poker games all the time. Often, those players think they are the first people ever to devise such a brilliant scheme. They congratulate themselves on their cleverness. In truth, they are late to the party. It is estimated that as many as one out of every five online poker tables contains at least some players working in collusion in some way.
Is this collusion effective? Not really. Most players who try it, do so only for a while, and then give up after they notice they are not generating any more profit than they normally do. Often, the colluding players actually end up earning less than normal. Such players eventually conclude that working in cahoots with another player is more bother than it is worth, at least for them.
So, what are they doing wrong? Why do their efforts at collusion fail to produce a profit? There are four basic reasons why simple collusion does not work for most players:
1) The players do not communicate effectively. In most cases, players do not have a clear system of communication worked out before they get on the phone with each other and start blabbing about their hands. As a result, mistakes and misunderstandings are common.
2) They do not play well. For most players, the added complication of constantly dealing with another person, analyzing his hands and figuring out strategy with him, is too much added mental baggage. These players do not concentrate as well on the things they should be concentrating on during the game. The most common result is that they play too many poor and marginal hands. These players are eager to get in there and start using their new perceived advantage, and as a result, they play too many hands and play them badly.
3) They are only two players strong. Rarely do colluders get more than two people to go in on their scheme at one time, and that is not enough. And three or more players on a multi-way phone conversation is bedlam, and highly ineffective; it can never work to produce results. Two players are not enough to influence a game and its probabilities a sufficient amount to make much difference, especially if there are another four to eight players seated at the same table. Two guys sitting at a table of ten are not likely to accomplish much, no matter how good they are at their plan.
4) They don’t know what to do. This is the biggest reason why online collusion fails for most players. They sit there on the phone with their buddy, and they just know they have some kind of an advantage over the rest of the table. However, they simply do not know what to do with their newfound power. They do not know how to use it.
If you are one of the millions of online poker players who suddenly get the bright idea to collude with a friend while you play, I offer you this advice: don’t bother. If you persist in putting your little brainstorm to the test, go right ahead, but you will soon find your dreams of poker riches dashed upon the rocks of reality.
True, there are ways to cheat at online poker. Many players do so every day. But colluding with a friend is not one of those ways. Talking on the phone with your buddy while playing is a sure path to failure. Just in case you are open to hearing my message, I thought I’d save you the trouble and disappointment of trying this shortsighted scheme.

Timmor L. White is the founder and president of Online Poker Systems and the OPS Group. With a background in Internet technology, he is active in the study and reporting of online-poker playing strategies. If you wish to explore a specific way to cheat when playing online, click here: Online Poker Cheat.
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