It’s official. Books are for idiots:

When was the last time you heard a WSOP winner attribute his success to a book?

Not my words, the words of abcdcamp, ebayer, and vendor of a quality product known as CHEAT IN POKER AND WIN POKER SECRETS SALE!, and clearly a smart guy who knows a market when he sees one. I’d quote more, but frankly I’ve read enough, and I’m not reading on. What’s clear is that this ebay sale is nothing more than a plug for the full price nonsense and guff available at a website so shocking in its depravity and falseness that I can’t quite bring myself to link to it.

Luckily, however, even with such stunning products available to anyone willing to pay (frankly if you have the $60 asking price, only a fool would spend it on an empty promise when Poker Tracker is available for the same price), the sane majority need not fear.

Cheating is a legitimate worry in the online poker world. With the industry revelling in boom times, it’s inevitable that some will stoop to underhand tactics, but so far it looks like the sites are on the ball, at least in the major areas of concern.

Magic cheating software

Call off the search right now. There simply isn’t a piece of software that allows you to see what cards your opponents have been dealt. This is not Counter-strike, people. You can’t make walls invisible in this game, and there are no exclusive under-table cameras in the online world.

Collusion

I’ve no doubt that collusion goes on, but I’ve seen nothing to suggest that its anything like as effective as the doomsayers would have me believe, and if Roy Cooke is right, sites are capable of sniffing out and are actively taking steps to prevent online collusion. Of course, you could always collude over the phone, but there are ways beyond just detecting software that allow sites to flag colluders. You sit at the same tables and in the same SnGs with the same people for long enough, and someone somewhere is going to become suspicious.

I’m not entirely at peace with the idea of poker client software detecting and feeding back what other software I’m also running, but I’ll let that slide for now.

Datamining

Personally speaking, I don’t have a problem with datamining, and in general it’s not something I’d consider cheating. I run Poker Tracker fairly constantly, watching up to 12 tables at a time, and collating stats on as many opponents as I can. Even when I’m not playing, at least this way I’m watching who is playing, and taking notes of a sort. Where I do start to feel uncomfortable is when players sign up for services like those offered by Poker Edge, or Poker Sherlock. To me, there’s just something not quite right about being able to pay subscription fees for a service that gives you databases of information on your opponents. I don’t have a problem, as my PT use shows, in anyone collecting data themselves, using any means they can, but it seems to me that in order to use this wealth of information, you should have to demonstrate some personal effort in getting hold of it. Partly that’s just some warped sense of justice (and not entirely coherent either - exactly how much personal effort is involved beyond buying PT and running some Party skins?) but partly I worry that the logical extension of something like Poker Sherlock is a situation where you have every hand ever played by every player tracked somewhere and accessible to all. Whether you agree or disagree with the principle of dataming on that scale is one issue, but what would that do for online poker? Lots of things, and none of them good is my guess.

Crooked sites

Of course, it’s not just the players who could cheat, but until I see hard evidence that any of the major sites are rigging any of their games, or ever have done, and if you sign up for a small or unknown site without doing proper research, you take your chances with your money as far as I’m concerned.

The simple truth of the matter is that poker players have a peculiarly warped ability to selectively remember situations, while forgetting others. Poker players love bad beat stories. So much so, in fact, that once they’ve compiled enough of them, they realise that there must be something more sinister than a bit of bad luck going on. Strangely, it’s usually the losing players who finally resort to crying foul, but then the winning players wouldn’t say anything anyway, would they? After all, they’re the ‘favoured’ ones, so why rock the boat?

Co-incidentally, winning online players often attribute their success to books. Whereas losers whine, or cheat, or both.

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