Poker Cheats Held in Check 1st Quarter 2008

Cheats at Poker finally on the downside? Well, I do have some optimistic news to report, but it's not as entirely rosy as that. The results of a statistical analysis for the first quarter of 2008 carried out by data technicians associated with this website show that there has been a noticeable decrease in one area of poker cheating that was absolutely pandemic in 2007: account selling and multi-accounting. After the numerous major account selling and multi-accounting scams of 2007 involving Josh Field, aka JJProdigy, and Bluff Magazine's Chris Vaughn, and the news of CBS' upcoming "60 Minutes" segment on rampant online poker cheating, it appeared that 2008 was going to be the black eye on the right side of online poker's face if 2007 was indeed the black eye on the left side of its face.

But, perhaps surprisingly, this may not be the case--at lease in the murky worlds of account selling and multi-accounting. There have been no recent reports of either cheating activity, which does not mean they haven't been happening but does mean that they've been happening less. Why the sudden drop off of these type of poker cheats? Probably because they've begun abandoning these cheat methods by their own volition. Even though, at least in my opinion, both account selling and multi-accounting are not near the top of the list of heinous online poker infractions (I consider bot play, collusion, and superuser accounts much more serious), they have been condemned by online poker purists and honest players more than any other form of cheating. Notorious poker cheats such as Josh Field and Chris Vaughn have inasmuch been declared "enemies of the online poker state." Field has been banned from a wide spectrum of online sites and tournaments while Vaughn got canned from his job as editor of the popular poker magazine Bluff. So it would be my opinion that existing or potential account-selling and multi-accounting poker cheats are simply walking away from opportunities to cheat via these methods.

Is online poker cheating on the downslide overall? Unfortunately, I can't give you any good news on that. In fact, it's on a steady increase, although not congruent to the marked decrease in account selling and multi-accounting cheating. Both collusion and bot play are on the increase in online poker, and as I have stated in numerous previous posts, these two forms of cheating continue to threaten to land the knockout punch to online poker right between its eyes!