Your new to poker. You’ve wanted to play more than once but every time you thought about it, your temperature went up, your breath started to explode in and out of your lungs, your heart began to race and you felt an anxiety attack coming on that would send even a lepton to a cardiac specialist.

One day…from some unknown reason…you decide to sit down in a poker game. A real live game with a center dealer, in a casino. You’ve read a few books and listened to all of your friends talk about how it’s the best play in the casino, “There’s no house edge! You play against the other players and a lot of them are tourists!” Which means they are inexperienced like you – and it’s all in fun anyway. Right? Right!!!!

You managed to survive the first few times at the table and even got to visit with a lady from Baltimore and guy from China and someone that grew up in your neighborhood in Cleveland and went with a guy that knew your sister!

What a small world you’re saying to yourself just as you pick up split Aces with an A-K of diamonds, (well you had to start in $1-5 stud because it’s the easiest game to play and the least expensive), and you get caught in a raising war between 2 other players that are sitting beside each other. Only problem is…you’re in the middle…you know you have a hand so you doggedly call all of the raises.

The end of the hand finds you with those same lone Aces. After all of the raises, you ended up with those 2 players and one of them dropped on 7th street and you’re forced to call because you just might have the best hand and the pot’s got a lot of your chips in it. Your opponent shows you 5’s and 2’s. Two pair claims a big pot and you watch the winner stack your chips while the player next to him – who was in the pot with you, doing a lot of the raising – is laughing and giggling with him.

Something sour slowly slides over your taste buds and settles somewhere in the back your mouth. You start thinking back to a few hands before and you’ve seen this scenario repeat itself. Are they cheating???

Good question. The most amazing part in every limit of poker is that some players always think they got cheated – they just can’t accept the fact that they could lose in an honest game. Some players never even consider cheating to be a possibility and the smart money would be that it’s somewhere in between.

In most low limit games, you can always ask to see all hands if the bet is checked or called. This way you’ll have a pretty good idea of what the hand was all about. Sometimes the action just dictates a lot of raising. You may have a few players that are ‘jamm’n’ and that’s how you make money. Wait for a hand to trap the ‘jammers’ with and then do a little ‘jamm’n’ of your own. Be fair and be realistic about the action in a game before you go to management and put a bug in their ear.

There are cheaters in every profession. Let’s face it…crime does pay or we wouldn’t have criminals. Cheaters caught in casinos are prosecuted, usually taken from the premises in handcuffs…that goes for people who work in the business and people who play…sometimes they work together to steal from the house.

There are other forms of cheating in poker rooms…selling your seat to a player when there’s a long list of names to get into the game…the house is usually savvy on this and one player can play another player’s chips, (with their permission), but when the next dealer comes in, the outgoing dealer is supposed to inform the incoming one of the situation and the new dealer gives an “absent” button to the set of chips. If the original player isn’t back in the allotted time, they are picked up even if their seat is in action. Wow! That was a mouthful, huh?

Upon a rare occasion a player will come in and use some kind of device to slip a card in and out of play. They are almost always caught because a lot of players that know how to cheat are aware of all of the ways to cheat and they will spot the move. Beware the player that can spot a cheater when you’ve seen nothing out of the ordinary. They may have worked in surveillance but chances are they know all the angles themselves because they’ve worn that ‘face’ somewhere else.

There are dealers that can set up a deck and do it so smoothly that you wouldn’t even know it happened and dealers that can slip extra chips out of a pot as they pass it to the winner. Most of these types never last long in a casino because if anyone is suspected of this type of behavior, the camera’s on them ’till hell freezes over’! Most of dealer moves/stealing is more apt to be done in a home game or small town game in the back of the barbershop or pool hall.

But the worst kind are the ones that you can’t catch. You know something’s not right but you can’t put a finger on what it is. Those are the kind that ruin everything for all of us. They may put a red chip on their cards to signal to their partner that they have a set. They may put 2 single chips on their cards to signal that they have 2 pair. Maybe they lay their hand over their cards in a certain way…we hear and see all of it…are we just paranoid or is it happening? Proving it is difficult. The smart ones aren’t going to be sitting together and laughing and giggling with each other. But consistently one of them will take home the money.

If you’re playing in a casino and you honestly believe that something’s going on in a game, go quietly to the shift supervisor and tell them what you think is happening, why and with whomever it may be. Don’t point a finger and then not be prepared to back it up. It doesn’t help management if you say, “Someone’s cheating!” Management asks you where and what makes you think so and you say, “I don’t want to get involved!” If you don’t want something to be done about, then shut the hell up and play.

If you’re getting jammed in between 2 players that always seem to have a hand and you’re playing in a home game, cash out!!! Don’t even think twice about it and don’t ever go back there to play again. You know that old saying, “Fool me once, shame on you! Fool me twice, shame on me!”

See you there!