Dirty Poker

There is no question there is collusion when playing poker online. No poker site will ever admit it but it's so easy to spot and unless you are one of them there is very little chance of ever winning in a tourney. Say five raise and reraise around the table everytime when you are playing a tourney. 1st 2nd and 3rd payout really good money to win a tourney. Over time they transfer money to their 'friends'? So unless you have lots of friends you can't win.

Over the past few years the game of poker (especially the forms known as Texas Hold'em) has become more popular and widespread than ever. Now almost every casino in the country has its Poker Rooms, and every week television viewers can watch poker tournaments -- which further inspires them to play in home games, online games, and aspire to make the 'final table' at gaming casinos. But as with any other game of skill and chance where money is wagered, won, and lost, there are those who cheat their fellow players. The many ways of cheating at poker range from the subtle to the obvious, and include collusion, slight-of-hand, marked cards, and chip dumping. Now poker expert Richard Marcus has provided aspiring poker players with an exhaustive manual focused on the phenomena of cheating at poker, how to insure any game they enter is an honest one, and how to spot cheating when it occurs whether it is a local game among friends, on the part of strangers in a regulated card room, or even in such massive and televised tournaments as the World Series of Poker that takes place annual in Las Vegas. Informed, informative, and thoroughly 'reader friendly, Richard Marcus practical and definitive study "Dirty Poker" should be considered 'must' reading for anyone who enjoys the game, and most especially for those who aspire to become professional poker players themselves.

Richard Marcus loves to tell a story. There are some pretty good ones near the end of the book in Chapter 8, and some pretty lame ones sprinkled throughout the text. The problem is, it is hard to tell in the reading just where Marcus's story telling leaves off and the reality begins. Just how prevalent is cheating in the world of poker? Marcus is here to tell us that it is rampant, in the casinos, in the clubs, in your home game, online, and even in the World Series of Poker. Should we believe him? To be honest, I am not quite sure how much to believe and how much to take with a grain of salt and how much to flat disbelieve. Marcus tells a lot of poker stories and he seems to know a lot of cheats, but how are we to know that he is on the up and up? After all the guy is a self-confessed cheat himself, a guy who not only cheated the casinos, but in this book reveals how he and some confederates cheated other poker players. What's to keep him from cheating the reader--that is, to hype the danger of cheating in order to sell some books? I'll give you the answer to that in a word: nothing. However just because he would lie doesn't mean he is lying. And just because he likes to hype the cheating doesn't mean it doesn't take place. In any human activity involving love or money, there will be some cheating going on, you can count on it. Here are some of my conclusions about the book. First, there are a few mistakes in the text and more than a few misconceptions. One of the mistakes is on page 67 where Marcus says that dealers in the California card clubs (in the 1990s), in particular at the Bicycle Club, take the "two decks of cards, one red-backed and the other blue-backed" with them when they change tables. Not true. The dealers take their trays with the chips, but the cards stay on the table. Only the floor men and the managers are allowed to bring and remove cards from the tables. One of the misconceptions is his idea that professional poker players are not getting proper money odds for entering tournaments such as the WSOP because of what "the host casinos remove from the entry fees to pay expenses and take commissions" (p. 107) and therefore shouldn't be entering those tournaments except for the fact that they can put the odds in their favor by colluding in various ways. Marcus calls this "the WSOP Consortium" (p. 109) Now it might be true that regular pros who play against one another time and time again on the poker tour, might find it convenient to make some kind of agreement before hand to equally distribute winnings regardless of who in the "consortium" actually wins or loses. I can recall reading one of Doyle Brunson's books about the early days on the road in Texas and noticing that the same guys playing together would, even without necessarily having the intent, help one another rather than the current tourist they were playing against. So this can and probably does happen to some extent at the WSOP. ("Chip dumping"

I read Marcus' first book American Roulette and am convinced he knows his stuff. Lots of people think he's mouthing off about nothing, but what he says about online sites doing what they feel like is certainly believable, since there is no cyber police out there to control them. I also believe his theories about poker cheating syndicates in the WSOP and the collusion bt Hollywood and Las Vegas that he talks about. I mean really, are we to believe that Daniel Negraneau, Ted Forest, Barry Greenstein and others are really playing for $100,000s in cash under the cameras on the GSN network? I think it's a big hype job as Marcus says, and I also think that the upcoming extravaganza in July where Phil Ivey and five other players are supposedly putting up $10 million each to win a $60 million freezeout is also nothing more than a hype to boost network ratings and bring more endorsements to poker superstars. Anyone who really believes these tournaments are real is a fool. When there's gambling and money, there's cheating!

Great revelations! I was always suspicious of the tournament play on TV and how juicy the ESPN and the Travel Channel make it. I've played in many tournaments and have seen chip-dumping going on right in front of my eyes. I don't believe for a second that all these celebrities suddenly winning major tournaments is for real. The collusion is out there and it stinks! Thumbs up for Marcus. He may have been a cheater but I think he's the real deal about this.