integrity
Cheating is real, and it is not why you lost last night.
Both halves of that sentence matter. Cheating in poker has been documented, investigated by a regulator and paid for in fines and refunds. It is also the first explanation a losing player reaches for, and the one that costs the most to believe. This page covers what exists, what actually exposed it, and what you can do. It contains no methods and names no software, because a page that did would be a manual.
last checked 30 August 2026
what exists
Six things, described as what they are rather than how they are done. They have one feature in common: each one gives somebody information or decisions the game assumes they do not have.
One person, several seats
A single player at the same table under more than one account. It breaks the game because the whole structure assumes that every seat is a separate person with separate information, and it is the reason operators verify identity at all.
Players sharing what they hold
Two or more people at one table who know each other cards. Nothing spectacular happens in any single hand; the edge is small, quiet and constant, which is exactly what makes it hard to see and worth catching.
Someone else making your decisions
A stronger player deciding the hands that are played under your name, whether over your shoulder or over a screen share. The account is a person in the eyes of the site, so a second person in the chair is fraud even when nobody sees a card they should not.
Moving money by losing on purpose
Deliberately handing chips to another account. It is usually about moving money rather than winning a pot, which is why it tends to be treated as a payments problem as much as a poker one.
Software making the decision during a hand
Anything outside your own head that answers the question while you are still in the hand. It has its own page, because the line between studying and playing is where almost all of the confusion lives.
Access to information nobody should have
The rarest and the worst: someone seeing cards that are not theirs. It has happened, it was an insider problem rather than a player problem, and the case below is the one the whole industry still refers back to.
The last two have pages of their own, because they are where most of the questions land: software that answers during a hand is covered on the page on real time assistance, and software that plays the hand for you on the page on poker bots.
what you can see from your seat
Almost nothing, and that is not a comfortable thing to publish on a page about cheating. It is still the honest answer, and the four points below are why.
One hand proves nothing, and the arithmetic is not close
A pair of aces against a pair of kings before the flop wins 81.3 percent of the time, counted across every one of the 1,712,304 boards the deck can still produce. That still leaves roughly one time in five where the best hand in poker loses to the second best. A beat that felt impossible is a beat that was going to happen about that often.
You are looking at one seat, and the operator is looking at all of them
The signal is never a hand. It is a pattern across thousands of hands, several accounts, shared addresses and the money that moves between them. Every one of those is on the operator side of the glass. This is not a reassurance that they always look; it is the reason a report from you is worth more than an accusation from you.
The famous case was not caught by a read at the table
In the 2007 case, players had noticed play they could not explain, and what turned suspicion into evidence was a hand history file the site itself released after a complaint, containing every player hole cards and their addresses, followed by an outside analysis of how one account had been playing. The pattern was visible over many hands, in data, after the fact.
Suspicion is expensive, and it is charged to you
An evening spent certain you were cheated is an evening you played badly, and the losses from that are real while the cheating is usually not. The safest reading of a bad session is the boring one, and the way to test it is to look at your own decisions rather than at the other seats.
How wide the swings get before any of this comes up is a separate subject with real arithmetic behind it, and it is worked out on the page on skill and chance. The equity figure above was computed with the same hand evaluator that runs the odds calculator, by counting every board rather than simulating.
the case everyone refers back to
In 2007 and 2008, two related online poker sites were found to have had insiders with access to other players hole cards during play. According to the overview we read, which is linked in the sources below, the mechanism was software access rather than anything a player at the table could have done, and the cheating at one of the two sites ran from January 2005 to December 2007.
What made it provable is the part worth remembering. A player complained, the site released a hand history file, and that file turned out to contain every player hole cards along with their addresses. An outside analysis of one account play showed a pattern that only made sense if the cards had been visible. The regulator, the Kahnawake Gaming Commission, investigated and issued a report in January 2008. One operator was fined 500,000 dollars, roughly 1.6 million dollars was refunded to affected players in November 2007, and in September 2008 the commission named an individual as the main person responsible for and benefiting from the cheating.
We are not repeating that name here. It is in the source, the finding is the regulator and not ours, and the lesson does not depend on it. The lesson is that the thing which exposed the biggest cheating case in online poker was data and an audit, over a period of years, and not a player at the table trusting his instinct.
Figures that circulate elsewhere about the fine and the reimbursement at the second site are deliberately absent from this page. We did not read them at a source we could check, so we do not print them.
what to do about it
Four things, in the order they are worth doing.
Report it where it can actually be checked
Support at the site you played on, with hand identifiers, table names, dates and times. They can compare accounts, devices and payments; you cannot. Keep it factual and leave the conclusion to them.
Keep your own hand histories
If you have exported and stored your own hands, you have dates, hand identifiers and an actual record instead of a memory of a bad night. That is the difference between a report someone can look into and a complaint nobody can act on.
Read your own site rules rather than a forum
Operators draw the line in different places, and they move it. Whatever a thread told you two years ago about what is allowed is not a defence, and the terms of the site you actually play on are the only text that binds you.
Do not accuse in the chat box
A public accusation you cannot support is its own problem, it tells the person you suspect exactly what you noticed, and it does nothing that a report does not do better and more quietly.
The part you control is the part in front of you. Reviewing your own hands after a session is what the leak finder is for, and where you are allowed to play in the first place is a question of licensing rather than of strategy, which is covered on the page about where you can play.
what is not on this page
No software names, no methods, and no list of signals that give a cheater away. The first two are obvious. The third is the one people ask for, and it is the one we are most sure about: a list of what gets somebody caught is also a list of what to avoid next time. It would make this page feel more useful and the games slightly less safe.
What replaces it is duller and works better. Report what you saw, with identifiers and times, to the people who can see across accounts. Then go back to your own decisions, because those are the ones you can still change.
sources
Everything on this page comes from these, read on 30 August 2026. Where a figure was only available in a summary we could not check, it is not on the page.
- Wikipedia, Cereus Poker Network
The overview we read for the 2007 and 2008 insider case: how the hole card access worked, how it surfaced, and what the Kahnawake Gaming Commission concluded. It carries its own references to the regulator documents.
- GGPoker, Security and Ecology Policy
One operator policy, read in full: what it forbids, and that the listed penalties include a permanent ban and confiscation of funds.
- PokerStars, Third Party Tools and Services
A second operator policy, drawing its lines in noticeably different places. Read alongside the first, it is the evidence for the one instruction on this page: read your own site.
next
Keep the record before you need it.
A report with hand identifiers and timestamps in it goes somewhere. A memory of a strange evening does not. Exporting and keeping your own hands takes one evening to set up, and it is also the thing that turns a suspicion about the table into a look at your own decisions.
questions
What counts as cheating in poker?
Broadly, anything that gives you information or decisions the game does not intend you to have: playing several accounts at one table, sharing card information with another player, letting someone else decide your hands, deliberately dumping chips to another account, using software that answers the question during a hand, or having access to hidden information. Operators publish their own lists, and those lists differ.
How can I tell if someone at my table is cheating?
From your own seat, usually you cannot, and this page deliberately does not publish a checklist of tells. The evidence that has actually exposed cheating was statistical and came from data covering many accounts over many hands, which is a view only the operator has. If something feels wrong, report it with hand identifiers and dates and let the people with that view look.
Is online poker rigged?
That is two questions. Whether the deal is fair is a question about the operator and its regulator, and whether a site is licensed at all is something you can look up in a public register before you deposit. Whether other people are cheating is a separate question, and the documented cases have been about insiders and about players, not about the shuffle.
Has online poker cheating actually been proven?
Yes, most famously in 2007 and 2008, when insiders at two related sites had access to other players hole cards. The regulator that licensed them, the Kahnawake Gaming Commission, investigated, issued a report in January 2008, fined one of the operators 500,000 dollars, and in September 2008 named an individual as the main person responsible for and benefiting from the cheating. Money was refunded to affected players. The source we read for this is linked below.
Why does this page not name any cheating software?
Because a page that names it is a shopping list. The same goes for methods and for detection signals: a list of what gets someone caught is also a list of what to avoid. We would rather be less useful to one reader than useful to the wrong one.
Does Pokiq play against real money games?
No. Pokiq is a training platform. There is no buy in, no prize pool and no payout, our practice opponents sit on a practice table and nowhere else, and the coach refuses to help with a hand you are playing right now. Those two boundaries have their own pages.