Poker Articles

By Fox | Published Mar 30 2006, 10:04 AM
Yet another serious tournament player has been busted for using multiple accounts on Party and Stars. Another player people thought was solid turns out to have cheated his way to reputation. And unfortunately I think cheaters in online tournament play are like roaches, for each one you see there are 100 you don't know about. Anyone who is good with computers and can keep a secret to themselves could easily avoid the pitfalls that have caught the big name cheaters so far, and it has to make you wonder how many of those opponents you face in a Party Super or a Stars 1M guarantee are using multiple accounts.

If something isn't done, and done quickly, this will ruin the reputation of online poker for a long time after it is fixed. In a few years when fingerprint readers or some other security device are required for the major sites things may be very safe again, but if all the fish have been chased away by a fear of being cheated it won't really matter.

As with anything in business, money will be the only thing that brings about change. Over the next few weeks I will be trying to find out which sites are doing a good job of preventing cheats and which sites have a big problem. I'll try to interview some cheaters as well as the security people from the sites themselves, and if anyone has any useful information please contact me. Once we find the sites that are safe and people start to migrate to them the other sites will change things quickly to improve safety. Until they start to lose players the sites have no reason to care.

Anyone with ideas is more than welcome to contact me at pokerfox@hotmail.com, and help is welcome.