Cheating in poker

Such methods include shorting the pot, avoiding house fees, and peeking at other players' cards.

Another minimal-skill method is going south (also known as "ratholing"), where a player covertly removes a portion of their chips from play while remaining in the game, normally in order to preserve the winnings as profit, or prevent a major loss in "big bet" games.

The latter method may require collusion or a pass if the style of play or house rules call for a cut.

Shading a card by putting it in the sun or scratching the surface with a razor are ways to mark an already printed deck.

Juice and "daub" are two kinds of substances that can be used to mark cards in a subtle way so as to avoid detection, when done properly.

Decks can be marked while playing using fingernails, poker chips or by bending or crimping the cards in a position that the cheat can read from across the table.

Though their accuracy and their ability to win are disputed, their use normally violates the rules of online cardrooms, so using them is, by definition, cheating.

Users who frequently sit at the same tables will be flagged by poker rooms and their play will be closely monitored.

Another online method of cheating is "multiaccounting", where a player will register several accounts to their name (or, perhaps more commonly, to non-poker-playing friends and family members).

Another common motive for multi-accounting is to facilitate chip dumping and other methods of equity maximization in online tournaments.

Because tournaments tend to pay prize money only to the top ten percent of entrants on average and tend to pay the majority of prize money to a very small number of top finishers, in tournament play even the best players are prone to relatively long streaks of overall net losses (or even no winnings at all) between sizable wins.

In addition, some sites now offer multi-table tournaments where the same player can enter multiple times under their own name, so as to reduce the incentive to multi-account.

This is the systematic collection of hand histories, enough of which can be used to profile opponents using specially designed software.

[5] The user agreement of the two online poker sites owned by Tokwiro Enterprises, Absolute Poker and UltimateBet, state they reserve the right to cancel an account if a player plays "in a professional sense" (and not for personal entertainment only).

For example, it is not in the end-user agreements of the three largest online cardrooms: PokerStars, PartyPoker, and Full Tilt Poker.

Angle shooting is engaging in actions that may technically be within the scope of the rules of the game, but that are considered unethical or unfair to exploit or take advantage of another player.

One form of angle shooting which is exclusive to online poker is to abuse the disconnect protection (DP) rules most sites have in place.

[9] How this is used by angle shooters is if a player is in a hand that they are unsure if they have the best cards and don't want to invest any more money to find out.

[citation needed] Another example is when a player says nothing when betting, pushes in a raise, then says he made an error (a/k/a "misclick") & meant to just call.