article by M.J. Morgan

Our 4-part article series will offer you an extensive guide to detecting the different ways cheaters may invade and clean up your home poker nights, even if they are friends or acquaintances you have trusted over the years. If you read our first article, you will now be more wary of dealing irregularities; now read on to find out other methods used at home games.

Collusion:

Requiring minimal skill and preparation, collusion is definitely the most used and the easiest way to cheat. It consists of an agreement between two or more players to signal each other at different times of the game how their hands are standing and when winning, they split the pot between them.

Maneuvers: Each player agrees on discreetly giving each other signals about the strength of their hands, and when one of them is dealing, the other distracts the other players. Some of the signals to share hand information involves turning the cards faced down after dealing outwards, thus showing their numbers in a split second, but if paying attention, the colluding players can see the cards. In addition, the colluding players may agree to speak using a code that is imperceptible to the other players.

Angling:

Although allowed in some casinos, angling consists of acting when it is not the player’s turn, thus influencing the other players’ actions, and when it is finally the player’s turn, taking back the anticipated action, thus affecting the others’ fate in the hand. Players who use angling are called “angle shooters” and some say it is more unethical than plain cheating.

Marked Cards:

Cards can be marked obviously, noticeably up close, or imperceptibly. In order to mark the cards, the cheating player has to own the deck or have at least plenty of private time with it before playing.

For vigilant players, card markings can be classified in 4 types:

Shading. Manipulation of the card design with very fine ink applied with extreme precision, making it almost imperceptible.
Daubing. Available in magic stores, a special ink only visible with special sunglasses is applied to the marked cards, and the cheater plays the poker game wearing the glasses.
Corner Crimp. The cheating player peeks at the wanted card (top or bottom) and discreetly pushes it a small distance away from the rest of the cards, subtly bends the corner closest to the thumb or index finger. The cheat can do this with all aces or kings.
Thumbnailing. This technique consists of inserting the thumb nail inside one of the edges of the card, barely splitting the card but leaving a mark that is visible to the trained eye.

Misrepresentation of a Hand:

Also called bad calling, a cheat misrepresents a hand by reveling it at showdown but calling it something better than what it is. If unnoticed by the rest of the players, the cheat gets the money; if caught, he/she will innocently pretend to have made a mistake and laugh it off. If not careful, too many of these mistakes can reveal the true agenda of the cheat.

Pot interaction:

Cheating can very easily occur when putting money into the pot or “making change” off of it, which can allow the cheat to take small but frequent amounts of money that favor his/her bankroll.

To avoid inappropriate handling of the pot, players should keep track of the expected pot amount. If the amount is less than expected, each player’s bankroll must be counted.

Prepared Deck:

A cheat can prepare a deck by putting the wanted cards in strategic places before shuffling, and the cheat would usually say the deck has already been shuffled. This trick is frequently used in angling. The most basic deck-preparing includes cards whose back designs are not symmetric, and if the position of the design of some cards differs from the others that will help the cheater figure out which cards those are during the game. However, if he players move the cards or the deck is shuffled again before the next hand, the cheating would lose its course.

Phony Chips:

After a player purchased phony $100 chips from the Rio souvenir shop during the 2005 WSOP, the chips were used by that player for the tournaments, and since then, it has been a cheating trend. The red engraving that identifies a chip as an official WSOP chip is not easily visible in all chips, especially when stacked up, which confuses them with fake ones.

Players may bring phony chips or steal them from previous games and introduce them to the game. In order to avoid this, the host must be very protective of his/her chips and when possible try to purchase unique-looking chips, different from standard color denominations, and keep them locked at all times. The game should be played with the house chips and no one should be allowed to bring their own; unique-looking chips prevent phony chips from being secretly introduced in the game.

Learning about all the ways you can expect a cheat player to boycott your home game creates awareness about how deceitful some of your acquaintances can be. However, detecting cheating and demanding justice in a home game can be difficult and challenging. In our next article, we will show you the ways you can protect your home from poker cheats.

Next: Home-Game Cheating Awareness, Part III: Important Facts about Poker Cheats

About the Author

This article was published courtesy of TightPoker.com.
Tight Poker (www.tightpoker.com) is the top site for Party Poker information and promos, as well as a popular resource center for Poker news, promotions, reviews of online poker sites, strategy articles and also home to an active forum for discussing poker news and strategy.

article written by M.J. Morgan

According to general poker wisdom, there are eight types of poker cheating: Sleight of hand, collusion, angling, marked cards, misrepresentation of a hand, pot interaction, prepared decks and phony chips. In this article we will go over the main techniques used in sleights of hand.

1. The Mechanic’s Grip: Cheating players in charge of dealing hold the deck in a way that facilitates several types of cheating like peeking, second dealing and bottom dealing (to be explained later in this article).

Grip A: Cheating dealers have the deck on their palms, with the index and middle fingers by the short side of the deck away from themselves.

Grip B: Cheating dealers hold the deck with their thumbs on top of the deck, the index finger holding it around the front edge, the two middle fingers underneath the deck and the little finger around the rear edge. In this case, most of the deck is covered by the dealer’s hand.

2. The Peek: The dealers peek at the top card of the deck before dealing, which allows them to know who gets that card during the dealing or to deal it to themselves if wanted.

Maneuver: using the mechanic’s grip, the dealers make sure their thumb is blocking the top card from being pushed to the right; the cheats then push the card to the right slowly with their pinky finger and the ring finger if necessary, making the bottom right corner of the card curl, and the number of the card visible. This maneuver is hard to master but possible with enough practice.

3. The Second Deal: After peeking at the top card of the deck, the cheating dealer keeps the top card in place and starts dealing from the second card on.

Maneuver: using the mechanic’s grip, the cheating dealer softly pushes the top card inward from the rest of cards, leaving an inch of the second card exposed beneath it, easy to push forward with the thumb as if it was the first card. This maneuver is difficult to master, and it only works if the dealers have chosen the top card for themselves after peeking at it.

4. The Bottom Deal: After choosing a card, the dealers place it on the very bottom of the deck and deal it to themselves.

Maneuver: using the mechanic’s grip to hide the action, the dealers wait until everybody has their cards to deal themselves the known bottom card.

5. Extra Cards: As long as nobody is focusing too much on the dealing, cheat dealers deal themselves an extra card or more. These cards give dealers the advantage to choose the best card among them and get rid of the bad extra ones at some point of the game.

Maneuver: Cheating dealers push two cards with the thumb holding the deck and grab both cards with the thumb and index fingers of the other hand; if done by the end of the deal, the extra cards will fall on top of the cards already dealt, which makes it almost unnoticeable. After choosing which cards to keep, cheating dealers have to either put back the extra cards into the deck, which is difficult, or dump them on the floor.

Vigilant players should check under the table for fallen cards after each hand, which could indicate extra-card cheating.

6. False Shuffling: The following are four ways of false shuffling,

a) Keeping the bottom card at the bottom: The cheating dealers divide the deck in two halves shuffled together by interlocking them. By ensuring that the half with the chosen bottom card is brought down first, the card will remain on the bottom. This maneuver is useful for bottom-dealing.

b) Shuffling the bottom card to the top of the deck. After peeking at the bottom card, cheating dealers undercut the deck by taking portions of the deck held in one hand with the other, and piling them on the table, and leaving the last card by itself in the left hand, to be naturally placed at the top of the shuffled deck. This maneuver is used for second or extra-card dealing.

c) Keeping one or more cards at the top of the deck. This can be done with the previous way of shuffling or by interlocking the cards, making sure the half with the wanted cards is brought down last. This maneuver is used for second or extra-card dealing.

d) Stacking the deck: It involves manipulating the deck in a way that allows cheating dealers to position the card(s) at the top, separated by a number of cards corresponding to the number of players before them, thus dealing themselves the wanted cards with nobody noticing. This requires the time to choose all the wanted cards before the dealers are seen at the table dealing, which is not always possible.

7. Palming: The dealers hide individual cards in their hands and hide them into their pockets, under their legs or by dropping them on the floor and covering them with a foot. Then, at the right moment, the dealers bring the card back when their hand requires it.

8. Shifting the Cut: The cheating dealers arrange the deck in a way that benefits their hand, yet let another player cut the deck in smaller piles along the table. The dealers identify the positions of each pile and allow the other player to stack the bottom pile into the middle of the deck. To restore the original order of the deck, the dealer picks up the original top pile (now in another part of the deck) and places it back on top, then moves the original bottom pile back to the bottom, and so on with the other piles. Extensive practice is needed for a cheating dealer to master this technique.

Next: Home-Game Cheating Awareness, Part II: Other Cheating Methods

About the Author

This article was published courtesy of TightPoker.com.
Tight Poker (www.tightpoker.com) is the top site for Party Poker information and promos, as well as a popular resource center for Poker news, promotions, reviews of online poker sites, strategy articles and also home to an active forum for discussing poker news and strategy.

Tells are one of the most important aspects of poker. They are a big part of the game and very important to get clues and hints about the cards that your opponents hold.
A good poker player knows that the amount of money that his opponent bets on has nothing to do with his cards and that in order to evaluate his opponents situation he must spot tells.

A good experienced player can gather lots of information from tells. Tells are signs that reveal information in many different ways, good players know how to spot them and how to use the information that they revealed for their own benefit.

Another important advantage of knowing how to pick up tells is the ability to avoid giving away your own tells. If you know how common players reveal information by tells you can try to look at yourself while playing and to notice what kind of tells you give and by that to learn how to monitor and avoid it.

There are many tells that experienced poker players can read. Tells are very idiosyncratic so in order to know exactly how to read a player’s tell you have to play with the specific player for a long time. In the long run you’ll realize that you’re familiar with your friend’s tells and that you can read them like an open book, but if you’re playing against new opponents in all sorts of poker rooms, here are some of the things that you should look for.

The first thing that you have to look at is the eyes. If you’ll watch professional poker tournaments you’ll notice that many poker pros are playing with sunglasses or visors. This is because the eyes can reveal lots of information about one’s cards.

Take a good look at your opponent’s eyes, learn how he reacts to different situations and you’ll now how to read his tells.

You can also learn a lot from the facial expression on your opponents’ face. You can tell if a player is nervous or eager if he has specific facial expressions or ‘tics’ and you can look for specific smiles or concern if the hands are good or bad.

Look for certain body gestures that can hint on a specific hand. Look for signs of anxiety or distress. There are stimulus responses that even the most experienced players cannot hide, so try to look for those physical changes and to study how the other players respond to different situations.

Try to look for eye pupil dilations, signs of dry throat, sweat, trembling hands and flexing of muscles and changes in the body gestures.

Other things that you have to look for are a repetitive glance at the player’s chips which might indicate a subconscious reaction to different situations at the poker table. Another thing is that you have to look for is the way the players stack their chips. If you notice a different pattern of stacking it might indicate that the player is under pressure or eager to make his move and win the hand.

There are many different tells that can indicate different reactions to situations at the poker table, but you must remember that you cannot count only on tells and you should use other poker strategies if you want to be a better player. Tells can provide valuable information, but serious players know that this is not enough for the game.

About Author

Jack Reider is writing his PHD on Caesar and Augustus, but also frequents the race track. He runs an online gambling guide to betting and online casinos.

In last month’s Poker Player magazine an article was written on how a player should compare what rake a casino charges to play in their tournament. They quoted a few casinos that charged a 7% to 10% rake.

As usual, here in California, everything is MUCH MORE expensive. The Commerce Casino has a $40 buy-in tournament plus an extra  charge of $15 for the house. You pay $55 yet only $40 goes into the prize pool. This calculates to a 27% rake. Nearby at the Bicycle Casino, they have them all beat. They have a $10 buy-in with a $10 premium to the house. Here we have $20 to play, yet only $10 goes into the prize pool for a 50% rake.

Does anyone have a nearby casino that rakes more than these? I welcome your replies.