Cheating at poker occurs more often than most of us think. Good cheating is very hard to detect and therefore players commonly do not know that any cheating is taking place. Apart from knowing to perform the cheating itself, good cheats also know to play on human psychology and to walk away with large sums of money not being suspected by anyone.

Forms of Cheating:

Two basic forms of cheating are collusion and card mechanics. These cheating forms can be used separately, but often they go together, especially at home games. In fact, card mechanics is really effective only when the cheat plays as a dealer, which can not happen at casinos or at serious poker tournaments, where the cards are dealt by the house dealer and certainly not in online poker.

How Is It Done?

The most common card mechanics cheating is performed in three steps:

1. deck setting
2. false shuffling
3. bottom dealing

Deck Setting:
This consists of placing the right cards at the right place at the deck. Usually, the cheat notices the cards he needs at the table and then places them at the bottom of the deck, so later he will be able to deal these cards to himself, to his associate or to the victim.

False Shuffling:
When the deck is set, the cheat must shuffle the deck the way the cards will not change their place. This is called false shuffling but this is one of the most difficult method of cheating, especially if the deck is cut by another player before dealing.

Bottom Dealing:
If the cheat succeeds to set the deck and to perform false shuffling, he now must deal the cards he set to the designated player. These needed cards are usually placed at the bottom of the deck, so the cheat deals random cards from the top of the deck to all players, but to himself, his associate or victim the dealer gives cards the cheat wants them to receive from the bottom of the deck.

The simplest scheme of card mechanics cheating is when the cheat deals a good hand to himself and random cards to all other players. However, this scheme is not perfect. First of all, if the cheat will win each time he deals, it will look very suspicious. Therefore cheats common work in pair or in groups. The cheats act as if they didn't know each other and during the game sometimes wins the cheats that deals and sometimes his associate. Another imperfection of the above method is that if the cheat has a good hand, and other players at the table have bad ones, they will most probably fold and the cheat will win only little money. To solve this, the cheat sets two hands at the bottom: a good one and a better one. Than he selects a victim and deals him a good hand, while he or his associate receives a better one, so now the victim, having a good hand will bet aggressively and the cheat will be able to win a lot of money.

Of course, card mechanics cheating must not be detected, and therefore deck setting, false shuffling and bottom dealing must look as if the cheat collected cards from the table, shuffled them and dealt them usually from the top. Doing so is very difficult and very few people in the world know to perform card mechanics cheating perfectly.