Collusion in Poker

The easiest and most common way for players to cheat, by far, is collusion. It's also the most difficult to detect. Collusion is a situation in which any two or more players work together to develop an unfair advantage in a game. One type of collusion occurs when a player manipulates the deal to favor a partner. The rule that makes your hand dead if another player folds his cards into yours, even if it is accidental, is a protection against collusion, to prevent him from passing cards to you. But that same rule can be turned around by cheaters, one could become "frustrated" and "accidentally" throw his cards into the victims hand, thus killing it, and allowing the cheater's partner to take a pot uncontested. The moral of this story is to always protect your cards by keeping them close to you on the table and protecting them with a chip.

The classic collusion play is for players to covertly share information with each other that is not available in fair play, by somehow communicating what types of hands they hold or what actions they want their partner to take. Signals could be encoded in anything from the way that chips are stacked to footsie under the table. Players who communicate in this would have increased power to shape the hand to their advantage by keeping other players in or getting them out. At its lowest level, collusion can be as simple as two players playing easy against each other. No covert communication or elaborate planning is required for players to develop an unfair advantage this way. This is not a significant issue in a regular live game, but it can really taint tournament play.

Collusion is something that people are genuinely concerned about with Internet poker, where particular players could be privately chatting with each other about a game in progress or where two or more players in a game could even be the same person. Internet poker rooms are on the lookout for this, but it is not clear how effective they are at preventing it. No one has ever positively detected malicious pre-planned collusion in a live game, but you can occasionally see open collusion of the soft-play variety of players who have never taken the time to think that it might be an ethical issue. In casinos, drunken blackjack buddies who have stumbled into the poker room sometimes communicate and cooperate with each other without realizing that they are cheating. It also happens occasionally when a couple of players, usually losing players, develop an "us against him" mentality toward an opponent who is winning. These players will show each other their hands, tell each other what to do, and go easy against each other in order to collectively target the odd man out. A lot of this falls into the "fooling around" category, but it is not allowed by the rules and is flagrantly unethical. It can be hard to keep a poker game together after it turns into a team sport.