Angle Shoot Poker Cheats Cheat Online Poker as well as Brick and Mortar Poker

Those nefarious and annoying angle shooting poker cheats will cheat you in your local poker room and in your online poker game. Here is a bit of how online poker angle shoot cheats and brick and mortar poker angle shoot cheats connive and strive to remove you from your money.

As you might suspect, technically, angle shooting is not cheating. Angle shooters don’t break the rules—they just make it their personal mission to bend them as much as humanly possible. Angle shooting occupies a strange gray area in the game of poker. It’s unethical and poisons the atmosphere of the game, and yet it’s not really illegal.

Angle shooters will use a wide array of underhanded tactics, but a favorite ploy is deliberately acting out of turn. By putting out false information this way, an unethical player can either get a better read on his opponents, or try to encourage them to do whatever it is he wants. For example, an angle shooter will bet out of turn, hoping this will induce players still to act in front of him to check, and then he can just check along and take a free card. Or he can check out of turn, perhaps even fake-fold before the action gets to him in a bogus show of weakness, and then gleefully raise after another player bets into him.

A similar ruse is for the angle shooter to pretend he is about to bet or raise when it’s his turn to act. He picks up his chips and holds them out over the middle of the table—all the while watching his opponents carefully to study their reactions—and then at the last minute he pulls his chip-laden hand back and announces “check.”

Before it was made illegal, the string-raise was another common angle shot. Even now, an underhanded player can deliberately make a string-raise, knowing full well that it will be declared invalid, and then he simply calls when the action gets to him. This brings two potential benefits: he can study how his opponents react to the “raise,” or even intimidate them into playing their cards more passively.

Yet another standard angle-shot happens when a player intentionally miscalls his hand at the showdown in the hopes of convincing any player with a better hand to muck. For example, you hold top two pair at the showdown and the angle shooter has bottom two pair. But on the river the board looks scary, with four cards to a flush. So at the showdown Mr. Shooter declares: “I have the flush.” This is exactly what you were afraid of and you throw down your cards in defeat. By the time everybody realizes that he was lying, it’s too late and your cards are in the middle of the muck pile, officially dead. The angle shooter gets the pot.

Here’s a potpourri of some other common angle shots. A player “accidentally” flashes one or both hole-cards to another player, to watch his reaction and/or induce him to do what the angle shooter wants. A short stack deliberately stalls when the tournament is on the bubble, hoping to force other short-stacked players to bust out first. Or a player declares a misdeal when in fact he knows the deal was legitimate, simply because he didn’t like his cards.

Angle shots are used to gain an unfair advantage in the game—to obtain information that a player shouldn’t legally have yet, or to manipulate opponents. What can make angle shots so frustrating is that they are nearly always impossible to prove. Nobody can prove intent, and the angle shooter can always insist that he simply made a thoughtless error, a legitimate mistake. If it only happens once, maybe even twice, perhaps it really was only a slip-up. But when the same player keeps making these types of “mistakes” over and over again, recognize that this player is an angle shooter and should be avoided like the plague.