Are Online Casinos As Cheat Risky As Online Poker Rooms?

You certainly can feel safer while gambling at online casinos playing blackjack, craps, roulette and baccarat than you can while playing online poker, right? Of course you can! Why? Because when you are playing any of those casino games you are playing against the casino only. When you’re playing online poker, you’re playing against other players who might have the incentive to cheat you with bots and collusion methods of play. Even more important is the fact that while playing in online casinos you face much less risk of being cheated by employees of the sites or ex-employees of the sites who have access to the source codes. For instance, in the recent online poker insider-hole-card scams, employees or ex-employees of Absolute Poker and UltimateBet used their access codes to peek at opponents’ hole cards, allowing them to cheat their victims mercilessly. This kind of cheating would not occur in online blackjack, roulette or craps games because other players would gain absolutely nothing from your losses. There could not be bots or collusion efforts against you either. Does this mean you are absolutely free of cheating threats while gambling at online casinos? No, but it makes you much safer than when playing online poker. There is still of course the remote possibility of running into a crooked online casino whose software is rigged to cheat you, but since the very early days of online gambling there has not been any major cases of casinos messing around with random number generators, and in the last few years I have not heard of any major online casinos simply absconding with players’ funds.

So in all, do not worry about being cheated in online casinos. As far as online poker goes, don’t worry about cheating too much—just keep in the back of your mind that it’s part of the game.