You cannot see your opponents online. That is what makes it convenient, and it is also what gives cheating room to operate. Most players have heard that “someone was using a bot”, but few could say what actually happened, whether the site can catch it, or what they should watch for themselves.
This page covers six real methods in three groups: players working together, players borrowing outside tools, and attacks on the system itself. The last section is the four things you can actually do.
- ✓Of the six, collusion is the most common and the hardest to prove — and the one sites spend the most resources hunting.
- ✓Multi-accounting breaks the rules everywhere. Getting caught normally means a ban and a confiscated balance, with no exceptions.
- ✓Solvers are not cheating. Using one during a hand is — that line is called real-time assistance (RTA).
- ✓Superuser accounts are extremely rare, and the defence is not in your hands — it is in which site you chose.
- ✓What you can do is limited but effective: pick the right site, protect your account, record suspicious hands, and report properly.
Group one: players working together
This group needs no tools at all. It only needs two or more people who have agreed on something.
Collusion
Two or more players at the same table cooperating through a private channel to share information or coordinate their actions. It takes three common forms.
Sharing hole cards. Exchanging cards over chat or a phone call, so one side effectively sees eight hole cards. In any spot that turns on reading a range, that is an overwhelming edge.
Soft play. Partners deliberately avoid betting or raising into each other and fold easily when the other bets, concentrating their aggression on everyone else. It is the hardest form to spot, because every individual action looks reasonable.
Chip dumping. One player deliberately loses to a partner to concentrate chips in one stack. In tournaments that hands the partner a disproportionate stack; in cash games it is often used to move or launder funds.
Sites catch it by comparing hand histories: how often two accounts share a table, whether their fold rates against each other are abnormally high, whether chips only ever flow one way. No single hand proves anything, but the statistical bias across thousands of hands is obvious.
Multi-accounting
One person running two or more real-money accounts on the same site. Every legitimate operator prohibits it explicitly.
Why it is treated so seriously: two accounts at one cash table means one person seeing four hole cards; two accounts in one tournament means an extra life. It is also routinely used to claim first-deposit bonuses repeatedly.
The defences are identity verification documents, IP and device fingerprint matching, and reports from other players. It is also why the verification process at sign-up, tedious as it is, cannot be skipped.
One distinction matters: one account each on several different sites is completely fine and entirely normal. What is banned is multiple accounts on the same site.
Group two: borrowing outside tools
This group is the most contested, because the tools themselves are usually legitimate study aids. The difference is when they are used.
Ghosting
Taking advice during a hand from someone who can see your cards — or simply letting another person play your account.
In practice it usually runs through screen sharing, with a coach watching and offering opinions live. It is most common late in high-value tournaments, where reaching a final table with big pay jumps ahead creates the strongest temptation to ask a stronger player to “take a look”.
The direct damage to other players is smaller than with the other methods — no extra information is obtained, just an extra brain — but it breaks the same principle: one person entered, and someone else is making the decisions.
Real-time assistance (RTA)
Using any decision aid while a hand is in progress: solvers, preflop range charts, postflop frequency tables.
This is the one that most needs its line drawn clearly. Solvers are excellent study tools, and reviewing hands with one afterwards is completely fine — nearly every professional does it. What makes it cheating is the word real-time. Consulting a chart or running a solve mid-hand is reading the answers during the exam.
The common forms, most to least severe:
- Automated tools: read the board, stacks and bets directly from the poker client and output a recommended action instantly. The biggest threat, because they can be used on every hand.
- Manual-input tools: require you to type the situation in, which is slow, so they are typically only used on key decisions.
- Static charts: preflop push/fold tables, postflop frequency sheets. The lowest barrier and the most widespread.
Sites detect it by running AI over large volumes of hands and flagging accounts whose play sits “too close to GTO” — a real player, however strong, drifts with emotion and fatigue, and a machine does not. Some sites also scan for programs running on the device.
Group three: attacks on the system
The most serious group, and also the rarest. It is not something personal vigilance can prevent.
Superuser accounts
An account with privileges ordinary players do not have, most notoriously the ability to see everyone’s hole cards. It requires an insider or a system breach. It has happened historically, but the confirmed cases can be counted on one hand.
The architecture of a legitimate site is itself the defence: hole card data sits on the server, and only the information a given player is entitled to is sent to their client, so no client ever holds another player’s cards. Your only protective action is choosing a site with scale, regulation and third-party auditing — which is exactly why chasing a bonus onto an unknown site is a bad trade.
Bots
Programs that play automatically. Their edge is not really in skill. It is that they never tire, never go on tilt, can play many tables at once, and run around the clock.
Bots do best at low stakes and in the late stages of tournaments, because those spots are highly mathematical — whether a short stack folds or moves all in is close to a formula already.
Warning signs include unusually regular action timing (almost the same number of seconds every decision), very long unbroken sessions, no response to chat at all, and play that stays highly consistent across every situation. None of these proves anything alone, but together they are worth reporting.
The four things you can actually do
Of the six methods above, only one is directly within your control. The rest depend on the site — but you can avoid being an easy target.
1. Choose the site well. This is the single most effective step. Only sites with scale can fund an anti-fraud team, hold enough hand data to run statistical comparisons, and absorb the cost of reimbursement. No bonus is worth risking your bankroll on a site nobody has heard of.
2. Protect your account. Turn on two-factor authentication, never share an account, and never leave yourself logged in on someone else’s computer. If your account is used for chip dumping, you are the one held responsible.
3. Record first, then report. When something looks wrong, note the hand numbers, the time and the opponent’s ID, and file it through official support. Do not accuse anyone in the table chat — you tip them off, and if your read was wrong you may be sanctioned for harassment.
4. Read the rules of the site you play on. Whether a HUD is allowed, how many tables you may open, which assistive programs fall inside the permitted list — every site is different. Reading the terms before installing anything beats appealing afterwards.
