Poker Articles

As poker players, we are all concerned with the EV of our plays. At any given time, in any given forum, there may be a half dozen separate discussions about plays that might, over the course of a year, make a difference amounting to half a buyin in $EV – and those are just the ones with lots of replies and multiple sides. Poker players very frequently spend days arguing about very marginal decisions; the best arguments I’ve been a part of have all been about plays that, realistically, don’t make much difference to your bottom line.

Oddly enough, though, the same people that will spend days talking about whether it’s better to call or fold in a spot that’s probably worth about 3 BB of a 40 BB stack sometimes miss elementary spots that could potentially cost them their entire bankrolls. These spots are rare, but they do happen – I’ve seen or heard of at least a few dozen over the several years I’ve been active online – and they tend to strike professional and recreational players alike.

As you might’ve guessed from the title, I am talking about protecting yourself from hackers and other computer-based criminals. If you’re reading this, you probably have a substantial percentage of your net worth on the Internet, where it is much more vulnerable to theft than it would be in a bank account. Once that money is stolen, even in jurisdictions where online poker is not prohibited or in a gray area, the fact is that local police will rarely get involved in computer crimes (at least not competently) and getting the FBI or your country’s equivalent involved in tracking down a hacker with your cash will probably take far too long to ever get that money returned. Therefore, the best way to safeguard your earnings is to make sure that this never happens in the first place.

I don’t consider myself an expert in computer security, but you don’t really need to be one to do this successfully. Aside from certain sites with superuser accounts, almost every successful theft/hack that I’ve ever heard of could have been prevented by taking one of a few simple steps. None of them take much time, computer expertise or hassle, and you should already be doing them to begin with, but I think it’s worth it to go over them again just to be sure.


In approximate order of importance, these steps are:


1. Have properly updated, widely recommended anti-virus software. (I personally like avast! and/or Kaspersky, but don’t take my word for it and Google for reviews of your own software.)

This step should be self-explanatory, and yet, a significant amount of people don’t bother with it. These people almost always eventually wind up with infected machines – even if you’re careful, these days, not every virus gets picked up by every scanner, a lot of scanners have false positives that lull people into complacency, and, somewhere along the line, someone that thinks they’re clean but isn’t gives you a contaminated file. That brings us to point 2:

2. Never download pirated software onto your poker computer and never click on a link or accept executable files or Word documents over AIM without thoroughly checking them.

By far the most common way of stealing money from poker accounts (other than just giving your password to your friend and then never changing it afterwards, but I don’t think I need to go into why that’s dumb) is the time-honored tradition of getting a Trojan or a keylogger on the machine and stealing your password. The two ways these things usually get onto the PC of an 18-29 year old with a poker account is through AIM or via a software crack with a virus attached. AIM accounts are notoriously unsecure and no amount of help is going to prevent your login from being stolen if a hacker targets it. Similarly, cracks, especially for poker software, very often come with unwanted passengers. Therefore, when an AIM buddy asks you to take a look at something, be sure that you are talking to your friend and that the link goes to where it should actually go (check the address bar) before you click on it. While I won’t lecture you about paying for software (even though you should...), keep in mind that downloading “free” stuff that actually exposes you to losing your Stars account balance is probably not +EV.


3. Never automatically login to a poker site from a laptop or unsecured machine

This is another self-explanatory concept I’ve seen a few people (not) do over the years. Your roommate might be trustworthy 99% of the time, but you simply don’t know how well he handles being blackout drunk or whether one of his college friends that he invites up for a Halo session is a poker player with a coke habit. There’s no doubt that the people at your WSOP house are all standup guys, but we all know plenty of degenerate gamblers that hang around this scene and almost all of us have had people we couldn’t really vouch for at our parties. If other people can ever use your computer, take the extra five seconds to type in your password every time. Believe me, it’s worth it.


4. Don’t use the same email address for poker sites and forums

Again, I won’t lecture you about not using the same password for every poker site (even though you really shouldn’t). Ideally, you should have random passwords and emails and use a password manager to coordinate them all, but that’s understandably too cumbersome for some people. Even if you do use the same password for all of the sites, however, you need to make sure the email account(s) that you use to access the sites are safe, obscure and untraceable. Much like AIM, most free email services are very easy for hackers to crack, so if somebody wants your account, they’ll get it; most forums are also much easier to crack than they should be. In fact, they don’t even need to be cracked. As a 2+2 moderator, for example, I have access to the registration email address of every user – and unfortunately, not all of our moderators have always proven fully trustworthy. The bottom line is that for optimal security, when somebody decides they want to break into the email address they think you use for 99% of your day, it should have nothing to do with where FTP sends your new password.


5. Miscellaneous

There are a few other things I want to mention that don’t deserve their own paragraphs but should be done regardless. First and foremost, if you don’t need the money on the site immediately, take it off. It’s harder for us Americans, but Europeans shouldn’t ever have any real cash online when it can earn interest and be redeposited in 24 hours or less, anyway. Second, if you’re selling or throwing away an old computer, make sure to destroy your hard drive or at least do a professional (unrecoverable) format; the person you sell the PC to on Ebay might not be able to get your password if you just delete everything without formatting, but he doesn’t really need to know that you’re a professional poker player when he already has your address and all your tax records, either. Finally, if you’re at a poker gathering like the WSOP, try not to use unsecured wireless networks to do anything poker related if you can help it; while it takes more knowledge than most people have to actually hack a PC even on an unsecured network, there’s so much money floating around this community that it’s only a matter of time before the big tournaments start attracting professional hackers.

As I’ve said, all of these things are basic, common sense, and probably take you no more than 15 minutes in total to do if you haven’t already. Chances are that, whether you do these things or not, your account will never be hacked – but chances are you have more buyins in your account than the sum total of ‘bad’ decisions you’ve ever posted threads about online, too. In my opinion, it’s worth taking the little additional time to protect against that particular “suckout,” and after reading this, I hope that’s true in your eyes, too.





Serge adanthar Ravitch is a highly respected member of the online poker community who played a key role in uncovering the AbsolutePoker and UltimateBet cheating scandals. "Adanthar" has performed a large amount of pro-bono work as a representative of online poker players across the globe and continues to dedicate time to increasing internet security awareness.

He is also a very successful cash game player who routinely beats $5/$10 No Limit Holdem and $2/$4 Pot Limit Omaha games. He has a win in the PokerStars Sunday Million for $112,000. His other online tournament scores include a 3rd place finish in the Full Tilt $750k Guaranteed for $56,350 and multiple Bodog $100k victories.