Poker Cheats

online
With regards to online poker, there is only really one way to cheat: collusion. What this means is that there will be a group of bullies that sit on the same table and discuss their hands through an other chat client whilst playing. They will likely gang up on people not in their group.

They are very hard to identify and there is little that can be done to prove the collusion. It is best to move table and if possible, leave a player note on that player for future times. One way to avoid collusion is to play in tournaments, as in online tournaments, you are moved from table to table frequently by the server, and as there is no way of controlling the table you are moved to, you are safe from collusion.

Offline
When playing at home, a skilled cheat can play with you every week and always win. A person like that has a few tricks up his sleeve that if you pay close attention, can be spotted.

When a dealer shuffles, there are several ways in which he or she can perform fake shuffles. To counter this, always insist on cutting the pack yourself, as there are many fake cuts too. Or, you can shuffle the pack yourself.

Another way somebody may try and cheat is to bring his/her own chips. This method is affective only in tournaments, as if it is a cash game where every chip is worth a certain amount; at the end of the game, somebody will have more chips that the amount of money available. Whilst this will not identify the cheater, it will reveal the cheater and make him nervous.

The best way around this is to make sure that you do not leave your spare chips available. Treat them like cash, you are not likely to leave $100 lying on the kitchen table when you have a group of people in your house. Or you can make sure that you buy chips that have clear markings on them. In the 2005 WSOP, phoney $100 chips were introduced that had been bought at a Rio souvenir shop, whist hey did not bare the WSOP hologram, they were impossible to identify when in a middle of a stack of official chips.

Marking cards is when a cheat uses one of several methods to identify certain relevant cards in the pack. There are three mains ways to do this:

daubing. The cheat has bought special ink and special sunglasses, and has marked cards. This ink is cannot be seen without the special sunglasses. He may mark all the aces, or he may mark the 2’s, in order to ‘declare deuces wild’ if he is dealing.
corner crimp. The dealer (in this case the cheat), will peak at either the top or bottom card and will pinch the corner ever so slightly. This will leave the card recognisable to him for the rest of the game, but not to anybody else.
thumb dent. When the cheat depresses the centre of the card so it remains in a slightly concave shape. This will mean that it will not sit flat when left on a table. So when a player puts his cards down, the cheat will know what card it is.

For all of these cheats, the best solution is to swap the pack. This will foil cheats 1 & 2, but not three.