It is obvious that there are several differences between an online poker room and a live poker casino. Most of these differences are easy to see and transparent to the general poker playing public. However, many contrasts are not visible or apparent when playing online poker. The main difference between online poker and live casino poker is the cards and how they are dealt to the player.

There are great advantages to playing at a live casino as the integrity of the game is rarely in question as shuffling, dealing and “eye in the sky” keep the game fair and make it almost impossible to compromise that integrity. . However, online poker lacks many of these player protections, as a computer program manages to shuffle and deal the cards.

Therefore, understanding how online poker site software works is crucial for any player looking to put money into an online poker account in hopes of building up funds and getting paid. Simply because, if you understand how the software works, you can be sure that you are not subject to illicit attempts by other players, the poker room or even the software to trick you out of your hard-earned money.

All online poker sites use a variation of a random number generator to create a shuffled deck. Although this may seem like enough, many times over the years these shuffling algorithms have broken, subsequently giving cheaters the opportunity to exploit the game and other players. The discovery of the cheaters by the affected poker sites led them to create additional poker algorithms to prevent cheating attempts and collusion.

Those algorithms would monitor the action at a table to ensure that a player cannot win every hand, as was the case in the Absolute Poker scandal. In that case, a single player won nearly 98% of all hands played in a major tournament, beating out several hundred players. Mathematically it is impossible to win every hand in a tournament and therefore poker sites have installed software to prevent this from happening.

In addition, software programs at online poker sites can detect a player who may be in collusion with another player, and therefore the program has the ability to alter the outcome of the cards to prevent that player from winning. This same software also has the ability to detect poker bots. In the case of a poker bot, the software will take into consideration each individual action of a player and logically compare that to determine if the player is in fact a bot or a real person.

The problem with these additional poker algorithms is that they inherently affect a skilled player’s ability to cash consistently. The fact that any alteration in the statistical outcome of poker hands is equivalent to cheating on the part of the house. In other words, it’s no different than if a live dealer were setting up the deck to allow a particular player to win or force a player to lose.

So what can we as poker players do to ensure that we are getting a fair game and are not subjected to subversive online poker software programs that essentially change the outcome? One solution is to learn the patterns and glitches in the software and then adjust your game to evade detection and of course the other answer is to just play live poker at a reputable casino.