In our previous blog post we touched the big cheating attempt at Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet. Today we want to continue on the topic of cheating in online poker and ask ourselves a few questions.
Can Something Like This Happen Again?
To be blunt: Yes. There can and will be attempts of fraud no matter whether we are talking about poker, buying cars or whatever else. Wherever money is involved you will find crooked people who try to take advantage. This has been the case forever, the internet simply provides more and easier means to do so. In the case of online poker this doesn’t necessarily have to happen with superusers (as discussed in How Secure Is Online Poker? – Part I), there have been and will be enough other attempts that are however in general prevented by the poker rooms before they happen or at least caught when they do take place. This is also a reason for some of the restrictions that players have to endure when playing at some online poker rooms – they don’t simply want to annoy you by letting you wait for your money when cashing out for example, it is simply an added security measure for everyone involved.
So should you abstain from online poker? Well, that comes down to your personal discretion. It should be mentioned however that you can do your part trying to avoid getting ripped off. First of all you need to decide whether a poker room is trustworthy. At Max Poker Bonus we do not present any poker room where the integrity has been questionable at any point. We also clearly advise against rooms like Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet (UB just recently had a software flaw – as was the official statement – where a certain Phil Hellmuth ended up winning a Heads Up despite having the worse hand and as it turned out this wasn’t the only time this happened). We would like to make it known that these things remain the absolute exception (no pun intended) in online poker. If you steer clear of dubious rooms with a questionable reputation the danger of getting cheated is indeed very small.
What Do The Poker Rooms Do About It?
Personally I am convinced that in general all the well-known and so far respectable poker rooms are virtually fraud-free. The big poker rooms will usually invest a lot of money and time to make sure no cheating takes place simply because they want to avoid their name being connected to any fraud. It is nearly impossible (as well as very expensive and time consuming) to restore one’s image after such a scandal. Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet thrive on the lack of information of new players which also the affiliate industry is to blame for. There are still a lot of affiliates who put their own profit ahead of their customers’ security and well-being and who still actively promote poker rooms like Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet. Some of the bigger and older affiliate programmes even list them in their Top Ten – simply because they get great deals from them (otherwise no one would list poker rooms with such bad reputation on their site). We want to put as much distance between those kind of affiliates and us which is one of the reasons that we only accept a poker room in our listing after careful research and talks with responsible personnel as well as active poker players.
An important factor concerning the security of online poker is the huge poker player community. Often times people don’t realise how much power and means of control this crowd of poker players actually possesses. The prime example for this is once again the Superuser Scandal mentioned in the previous blog post – while the management denied and disavowed everything as long as possible the community prevailed despite havin limited tools and access. The fraudulent actions were being monitored by thousands of poker players and eventually proven step by step. It is nigh impossible to keep something hidden from thousands and thousands of people, some of whom spending more than 10 hours playing online poker each day.
How Secure Is My Poker Room?
Unfortunately it can be very difficult for new players to assess the security situation of a specific poker room. Even more so when some rooms pretend to be above all speculations by using some famous professional poker player as their figure-head. Ultimate Bet for example uses Phil Hellmuth to promote and no matter what you may think about him as a player or a person, he has high profile and sells very well. It is just a shame that in this case he seems primarily interested in making money (which we assume he doesn’t really need anyway) regardless of how it affects his reputation among some of the long-established poker players (some may say that he obviously never cared about his reputation his whole life the way he behaves on and off the poker table). Be that as it may, it still is a very big selling point for Ultimate Bet.
To be upfront: There are no guarantees. It is hard to guarantee the honesty and integrity of other people. We can ensure you however that we do very thorough checks (which sometimes drive our contacts at a poker room crazy) before adding an online poker room to our list. Therefore our limit of 10 poker rooms on Max Poker Bonus at any given time. We want to distinguish ourselves from most other affiliates by offering you quality over quantity. Yes, we could offer a hundred rooms but we would not feel comfortable telling you that it is a good idea at a poker room that we are not completely certain about. And if you profit from our quality and thoroughness we will profit as well because we thrive on being mentioned with a positive image. Which is why we have no interest to be connected to rooms like Absolute Poker or Ultimate Bet. We can only wish for more fellow affiliates to advise their customers against dubious poker rooms instead of presenting them on their website and hush up all the existing problems.
So please read up on the poker rooms that you might be interested in and trust your instincts when they tell you that something sounds to good to be true (because usually that will be the case, not only in online poker). We would also like to take the opportunity to suggest you contact us if you think that there is something shady going on in any poker room (it doesn’t even have to be one in our current list as we will archive everything for future reference) or if you have to wait too long for a withdrawal, the client support is unfriendly or incompetent,… We count on you to let us know so we can take the appropriate action and confront the responsible people as well as reconsider whether this room deserves a spot on our list.
At this point we would also like to thank the players who have sent us information thus far. The negative as well as (so far) overwhelmingly positive feedback really helps us evaluate the poker rooms presented on Max Poker Bonus. The community of poker players lives on relaying of information in order to effectively take measures against equivocal poker rooms.
We would also like to once more direct your attention to our RSS Feed that will keep you informed at all times, be it about serious topics like this, promotions, special bonus offers, info on tournaments or players,…