There are a thousand ways to cheat at poker, including all of the classic card-cheating moves—from daubing or bending cards, to slipping in a pre-arranged “cold deck,” to working in collusion with the dealer to false shuffle, stack the deck, and deliver losing hands to unsuspecting marks. Most of these classic techniques, however, are more easily pulled off in private games. And although many of these techniques have been used in major casino poker rooms, they are not highly effective in tournament play, where players have little control over which house dealer is assigned to their table, which decks of cards will be used, and which players will be seated where in the tournament. So, I’m not going to waste much space in this article on the classic poker cheating scams. If you play in big money games, and especially if you play in private games, I’d advise you to invest in a 2-DVD set by Sal Piacente titled Poker Cheats Exposed. Sal’s new DVDs show many of the classic techniques and include a lot of moves I haven’t seen demonstrated before.

What this article on poker cheating will cover are the specific types of cheating I've found in today’s poker room tournaments, both live and online, because many types of poker tournament cheating are different from the classic card manipulation moves. I'll not only cover the types of cheating, but specific examples I saw in recent tournaments, and the countermeasures for them..

Card Switching at Poker

Some cheaters are so brazen that they will actually steal a card by mucking only one of their hole cards, then bring it back into play later when they need it—often much later in the tournament and at a different table! I have been at poker tournament tables where two cards of the same denomination and suit have suddenly appeared on the table. And I have seen another table where a dealer who was counting down the cards just after a table was broken came up short one card, and of course, the missing card turned out to be an ace. All the players at that table had already been sent to new tables. I only knew about it because it occurred at the table next to mine and I heard the dealer reporting the missing card to the tournament director.

Another player at my table who saw this same interaction told me later that he’d asked the tournament director whether the players from that table shouldn’t be searched to find the player who had stolen the card. The tournament director said something like, “I don’t have the authority to do that. I can’t get ten security guards in here to escort all of the players from that table off the floor where we can conduct full-body searches. I can’t stop the tournament for a few hours while this is going on. The casino manager would have to call Gaming Control for authorization to hold and search these players, and Gaming would probably tell us that we can’t search ten players because one of the ten might have stolen a card from a table. I’ll ask surveillance to look at the videos from that table to see if we can see who stole it. Or maybe we’ll see where that ace shows up later, and we can identify one of the players from that table. But there’s a good chance that whoever stole that card will be too scared to play it, and we’ll never see it again. He’ll have a souvenir, that’s all.”

Technically, cheating at gambling is a felony in the state of Nevada and carries a one-year minimum sentence for anyone so convicted. Personally, I’d like to see the penalty imposed. If a player is caught stealing chips from a casino blackjack game, you can be sure he won’t just be temporarily suspended from the casino games, then invited back. Likewise, if an ace disappears from a deck of cards at a blackjack table, this will be taken very seriously by the casino’s game protection personnel. Stealing money from other players, however, especially in the low stakes tournaments, is simply not viewed with the same concern as stealing from the casino itself.

Poker Tournament Cheating: Auto-Dumping

Finally, I know of one player who has been caught in more than one Las Vegas poker room dumping chips to him! He was removing high-denomination chips from one tournament, and then bringing them into play in a different tournament at the same poker room. In some cases, he was reportedly buying the chips in a rebury tournament where the chips were sold at a discount, then bringing them into other tournaments where the cost of chips was higher, most frequently when he appeared to have a good shot at the money. He was first caught doing this at a casino poker room downtown. They called a few of the other Vegas poker rooms where he was also known to play in tournaments, and one of the alerted poker rooms then caught him doing the same thing in their tournaments!

To show you how lightly the poker rooms take misconduct at the small buy-in poker tournaments, the player’s penalty for this scam—and he was caught red-handed—was temporary suspension from playing tournaments at the two casinos where he was caught. His penalty time is now up, and he is back in the tournaments at these same poker rooms after having had his hand slapped.