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Common sense would dictate that where there is a hefty amount of money involve, there is also a goodish practice of cheating in order to ascertain greater winnings. Infamous cheating instances from AbsolutePoker.com and UltimateBet.com have sparked several concerns regarding the integrity of online poker and questions on the widespread cheating activity of poker players. As a matter of fact, these incidents are not that widespread unless, of course, a player invest and play on an online poker room that has not been subject to any government oversight and hasn't earned the approval of third-party inspectors.
As technology continuously evolves, cheating strategies evolve as well. Several years ago, when online poker crashed into the scene and became a big hit, one of the first complaints from forums and chat rooms was that the games were rigged. Cries of foul play were lobbied at poker sites themselves especially when someone's aces cracked.
The claim that online poker operators need to cheat at their own game to get a profit is ludicrous. If common sense will dictate, a company, already raking in tremendous profits, would not risk its reputation and possibly forever maculate its commercial image. Some poker rooms were earning more than $1 million per day by the time rumors of internal cheating started circulating. No online poker operators, on his right mind, would throw all that away.
Every once in a while scares of dishonesty still surface, but no one really takes it seriously. When these scares died down, a new scam spanned through the online gambling industry, and this time, it is collusion. Now collusion was always a distinct possibility since, with online poker, big brother won't be watching. Collusion happens when two or more players in the same table exchange vital information with each other. However, many online poker rooms have employed sophisticated software that identifies irregular betting patterns for the express purpose of purging the community of these nefarious nuisances, and the number of players attempting to collude has decreased steadily since its introduction.
Another common online poker dread is playing against a "bot". These are computers trained to play and win to outsmart humans based solely on their ability to make sophisticated computations. This fear was materialized on some fringe sites; however, those sites have long closed down. Most online poker rooms promised to never employ such methods, and all the major third-party auditors have done a good job closing down sites that didn't keep their promise. Occasionally there are knave operators who show up and offer magical returns (through the use of bots), but none of these sites survive the marketplace.
CyberArts, one of the major online poker software developers, advise online poker players to play only at trusted online poker rooms to lessen the risk. Online poker is in fact safe and even quite safer than its land-based counterpart when you try to think about it.
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