Playing poker for a living is very much like running a business. There are basically two ways to increase profit. You can increase revenue or cut expenses.Now we all love to win bigger pots and to increase our revenue but I’ll get to that in another post. Today I want to write about one simple way to cut expenses and thus increase our profit.

article by M.J. Morgan

Direct access to poker games through television and the effective marketing strategy of today’s poker industry has greatly increased the popularity of poker, and more people are now hosting poker nights at home. What most of the poker amateurs don’t know is that not only are they risking their and everybody’s money to savvy cheating players, but also risking police raids, and in worst-case-yet-real-scenarios, losing their lives.

If you enjoy playing and hosting poker nights, there are some basic things you need to know for the safety of everybody involved.One of my previous series of articles dealing with poker tragedies featured 4 home game tragedies out of 9 that happened during the last century and the beginning of this one, and not every player that ended up killing their poker mates was an experienced criminal. Some of them were average people who wanted to have some fun but found themselves in a situation and reacted impulsively and regrettably. Therefore, home poker games can certainly be dangerous and prone to the unthinkable if people are not cautious.

According to Richard Marcus, a now retired professional casino cheater, talks about the alarming increase of home-game cheating that can lead up to dangerous incidents.

“If cheating is blowing up sky-high on the Internet, it’s gone nuclear in home games. How do I know? You’d only have to read my e-mails. Eighty-five percent of them querying me about cheating in poker ask about incidents occurring in the senders’ home games.”

Thus, what signs or traits would a poker host look for when suspecting of the honesty of some player? Whether a poker host would like to get rid of their cheating buddy or learn everything about cheating before hosting his/her first poker party, there are 4 important facts to consider about poker cheats, according to poker player and author Marc Wortman.

Cheats will do anything rather than admit they cheated. If you think that confronting a poker cheat about their shady practices is going to embarrass them and make them admit and repent of their actions, then, you definitely don’t know much about poker cheats.

Even if you or others at the table catch a cheater red-handed, they will deny it with all their might. The only thing you can get out of confronting a cheater is a nasty argument, which may escalate into something more unpleasant, depending on the circumstances and the feelings of the other players.

Low stakes won’t discourage cheaters. Some cheaters are more driven by the challenge of tricking others than by profit. They can’t play without the thrill of changing the game’s course to their advantage and winning. Most home cheaters look for home games in which there is a balance between the profit stakes and the ability for the other players to catch the cheater. Therefore, keep in mind that even when playing for pennies, you might be hosting a cheater who just likes fooling everybody.

Cheaters will try to continue playing after being caught. Even after an embarrassing moment at your poker night, the cheater will continue trying to get invited to future games, especially because they will always deny their involvement, and expressing any kind of shame by not coming back would be like admitting the suspicion was accurate.

Cheaters won’t get scared when warned by a knowledgeable host. If you ever thought that warning a cheater that you know what they are up to could deter him/her, you will only be daring the cheater to improve. Therefore, don’t make the mistake of waking the cheating beast!

According to Richard Marcus, the cheating technique that wins the #1 prize in home games is marking cards.

Marcus claims that nowadays, the marking trend for home cheaters involves a Mission Impossible style move: buying several new decks, taking the cards out without damaging the plastic packages or the sealing blue sticker on the box openings, marking the cards, putting everything back, and ironing the plastic cellophane wrappings to seal the decks back. Then, the cheats take the decks to a store near the game’s location, especially a store that stays open until late, and when the vendor is distracted, the cheaters replace the new decks with the marked ones. Then, at the game, the cheater goes on “tilt” and tears the cards in their bad hands out of apparent frustration. When all the decks available at the host’s house are ruined, someone will try to go and buy a deck at the nearest store, the one that is open until late and is now selling the marked decks. And to everybody’s surprise, there is no more deck tearing by the cheater for the rest of the game, only the tearing through everybody’s stacks.

Therefore, it is important for game hosts to know how far cheating players are willing to expend time and energy for the thrill of fooling everyone, even close friends. Hopefully your own cheater’s secrets have been exposed in this article, and you will be able to expel them from your home poker fun.

Next: Home-Game Cheating Awareness, Part IV: 8 Home-Protection Rules

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 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.