During the coming months I will be playing online poker at all the big poker sites to once and for all determine if indeed online poker is a scam or it is exactly the same as poker being played with real cards and real people. There are many people who have played online poker and lost money and therefore there are obviously a lot of sore losers out there who immediately shout ‘scam’, so have these people really been scammed or are they just gamblers who are annoyed at losing their money ?
Well first of all poker is gambling – despite what all the experts and the pros tell you and all those glossy advertisements on TV – if you put money down at a poker table then you are gambling – it’s as simple as that – if you cannot afford to lose the money then you should not play.
I am not a professional poker player by any means – however I can tell you that I have played at real tables and with real cards and I have also played online with computer algorithms deciding on the cards and with what the poker room makes out as real people. Whether or not these are all real people or that there are other people seeing the cards we will never truly know, because a gaming websites purpose is to make money and therefore it is quite possible for any website to get up to all kinds of hidden or illegal activity in order to do so, in fact already no less than 3 of the biggest online poker sites have been found guilty of illegal activities, these include Poker Stars who had to pay back $731 million and $547 million and Full Tilt Poker who the prosecution described as a “global Ponzi scheme,”, both were both charged with civil bank fraud and money-laundering. Now would you trust such a company to behave with absolute integrity when it comes down to dealing virtual cards ? especially when the entire online system can be so easily manipulated as opposed to real cards which even though cheating may occur is much more difficult to do and much more easy to spot.
Next we have the case of Absolute Poker – this website had to close down because staff were found out to have been cheating – some staff had accounts and were actively playing but were able to see all the cards of all the other players at the table – thereby giving them an enormous advantage and impossible to beat. The scam had been operating for 3 years until it got uncovered by suspicious players.
So bearing all this in mind would it actually be any surprise that all online poker was in fact nothing but a scam ?
Is Party Poker a Scam ?
Over the last 8 weeks I have been playing poker online at Party Poker and my experience has undoubtedly led me to believe that YES – online poker is nothing but one huge scam – so what has led me to this conclusion ?
Well first of all, I have not deposited any money with Party Poker – simply because if I cannot win in the freeroll tournaments then what chance would I have in a real tournament with real money where more scamming undoubtedly occurs.
So I played the freeroll tournaments and I played them hard – in fact I have played around 4 or 5 everyday for the last 8 weeks and I have to say that there is absolutely NO DOUBT in my mind that this website is undoubtedly impossible to win on.
I have played poker at real tables and yes, from time to time someone gets lucky, they bet more than they should but they hit their card and it pays off, but the thing about real poker is that over many hands the odds do justify themselves – for example if you had two aces you are a huge favourite to win the hand and therefore you can raise preflop knowing that over the long run you will get a good return – however with online poker it seems that these long term odds do not exist at all and every hand seems to be a complete gamble. You simply would not believe the sheer amount of hands where I bet when I was well in front and people called but needed one of only 3 or 4 outs that could save them – they put money into the pot at well below the odds that they were getting in real time and yet somehow managed to hit that card. I could provide hundreds of examples of this – which funnily enough always seems to happen when you get into the latter stages of these freeroll tournaments and will earn more than a few dollars. Yes we are not talking about a lot of money here – but considering Party Poker site says they are giving away around $10,000 dollars per day then over a couple of months that is a heck of a lot of money for any company to give away – hense it becomes pretty apparent, (especially with the track record of other poker sites in the past) that perhaps they are not really giving this money away at all – after all the bulk of this free money goes to the top 4 or 5 players in each tournament leaving the rest with a couple of bucks or even just a few cents.
Now I have by now played around 200+ of these freeroll tournaments, which range from from having anything from $50 to $5000 in prize money and every single time the exact same thing has happened and in many cases some players seem to do everything exactly right and some hands that occur just seem so out of place that alarm bells ring – let me give you just one example and tell you which the hand was so suspicious.
First of all we are in the latter stages of a tournament that over 14,000 people have played, there are just under 200 people left and I have been playing for coming up to 4 hours. My stack is getting low considering other stacks and I am dealt a pair of kings (KK). I am first to act, the blinds are at 10,000/5000 and I have got about 155,000 chips. I decided to go for it and I go all in, afterall the blinds and antes are eating away at my stack and I may never get a better chance, I am snap called by the person next to me who has 13,000 chips (lets call him John), others fold and then another person at the table who has 167,000 chips surprisingly calls after a delay of about 40 seconds.(call him Fred)
The cards show this
My hand KK, John QQ and Fred 42, YES you read right – we are in the latter stages of a tournament and Fred has gone all in with 42 after two previously players showed obviously strength by putting their entire stacks at risk with what can any poker player must read as a very very strong hand.
The flop comes out 242 the turn 6 and the river 8, giving Fred a full house !
Now we can sit here all day long saying that Fred was lucky, he went for it and he won – afterall he still does have a 17% chance of winning – so what is suspicious then ?
Well first of all despite how good or bad Fred is at poker there is no poker player in the world who has any experience of playing poker who would even consider calling such a bet, so to me that totally rules out the possibility that Fred is a good poker player, no good poker player would ever have called that bet, if they went around calling bets like this then they would lose every penny that had within minutes and would be relying purely on sheer luck to win any hand. So….. maybe Fred was just a bad player who got lucky – well like I said we are at the latter stages of a tournament, if Fred was calling bets like this then it is without question that he must have been calling similar bets over the last 4 hours – there is absolutely no way that he could be this lucky – it’s simply beyond the realm of logic. Let’s not forget he was willing to risk his entire stack that took him over 4 hours to build up on one single hand of 42 – after 2 other players showing huge strength so surely he must have been involved in many other hands and called many similar all ins and big bets when being well behind, so to amass 167,000 chips from a starting stack of 3000 he must have had more luck than someone who won the lottery 2 weeks on the trot then dug up a hoard of roman coins in his back garden while hitting an oil well at the same time.
And then there’s the time delays, I have noticed than on many many many occasions when you go all in many players seem to take ages just to decide on their next move and more often that not when you are called they are always well behind but hit silly cards like running suits to make a flush or two cards to make a straight.
Now let’s not forget, I am talking about one single hand alone here – but just looking at this hand and the way it played out, looking into the chances of the player either being good or bad or just plain lucky, we can easily see that beyond doubt something suspicious is happening, simply because this hand will never ever happen in a real game.
Now I am not judging Party Poker as scammers simply because of this one hand – but when this same thing has happened to me at hundreds of times – nearly always in a hand that will take all my chips, often at the latter stages of a tournament and always in a hand when the other person is far behind calling with a hand that no decent poker player would consider betting/calling with and often after a long delay before calling – then it really does become blatantly obvious that Party Poker is nothing but a complete scam – there is simply no way on earth that this can happen once on a real poker table – let alone over and over and over and over again.
This is my experience of Party Poker, if you are considering joining this site – or in fact any poker site whatsoever then I urge you to think again. I have provided you with evidence that three big poker sites were involved in illegal activities and I have tried to explain my experience with Party Poker, choose to ignore my advice at your peril because in my opinion these sites are set up simply to fleece you of your money and it has already been proven on more than one occasion that some people playing online poker are employees of the company who can see the cards.
If you really want to play poker and you want to be sure that you are playing in a safe, trustworthy and fair environment then simply look for some low stakes local poker clubs, and if you manage to enjoy it and not lose too much or perhaps even consider yourself good enough to raise the stakes then at least you can do so fairly safe in the knowledge that you will be getting the correct mathematic returns for the decisions you make based on the cards you have been dealt and that the chance of anybody seeing your cards or fixing the hand are kept to an absolute minimal.
Thank you for reading my blog and please, please if you like this article and want to spread the word and the truth about online poker scams then please do bookmark my site, twitter and facebook it etc,, thanks, I need readers to do this so that the site will appear higher in search results – because more results for online poker scam, party poker scam etc are from sites that actually just want to tell you there is no scam and cohease you to join up through their affiliate links, meaning they actually make money by you getting fleeced, so don’t trust these sites at all they have a conflict of interests and will always only ever tell you things they want you believe in order to get you to sign up
Thank You.
Paul
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