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The BBC this past weekend featured an in depth investigation into the world of online poker cheating and collusion. This past summer, the world’s largest online poker room, PokerStars.com, found itself at the center of a firestorm involving “Chinese collusion”, resulting in some 25,000 of its customers being compensated to the tune of $2.1 million.
By being less aggressive when other members of their ring were at risk of being expelled from the game, they were able to collectively stay in tournaments longer and win more cash from rival players who were oblivious to the fact they were being cheated, the BBC reported.
Collusion is virtually impossible to prevent, the BBC points out, since players can share information about their hands via phone or Internet messenger.
Such online poker cheating is often only discovered by security professionals and those who study patterns of behavior involving a particular player.
A former employee of PokerStars, speaking anonymously to the BBC, told of how his company’s rapid growth has contributed to the increase in cheating.
"We had a hard job keeping up, just because of the volume of complaints from players [about suspected cheating]," he said.
"Not that all of the complaints were legitimate – 95 percent were just bitter [customers] because they lost, and there was no collusion. But Pokerstars still pledged to investigate them all."
The employee relayed that at one point PokerStars shut off the flagging system used to detect possible collusion due to high volume.
Ace King, Gambling911.com
