I wrote a post earlier about collusion in poker and now I want to share a strange, almost surreal, experience of attempted collusion that I had many years ago at 888 poker.
It was abut 2005, and the internet poker boom was in full swing, but poker was by no means in it’s infancy even then. I was playing mainly two and three table sng’s at 888 and I was doing very well and cashing out nice and regularly.
But sometimes, like most players, I would switch to a cash game just for the heck of it. (I like cash, it’s where I came from).
So one night I was sat at a half empty 10 seat low stakes cash games and not doing so good. It was a mid week night and so you would expect that it would be a bit slow. Slow nights at slow tables tend to make the regular players a bit chatty, so there was a nice feeling at the table, with a bit of friendly chat and banter.
The players hadn’t changed much in a few hours, one dropping in or out every now and again, when suddenly two new players sat down within seconds of each other. It was habit back then, not so much now, to say hi to new players at a certain type of table, to keep the friendliness alive. So one of the seated players said ‘hi’ but got no answer.
Fair enough, not every one want s to chat, or even speaks English, so nothing unusual there.
After a few minutes, and a hand or two had passed, one of the players said ‘You ready?’ – just like that, didn’t make too much sense in the context of no conversation at the table. It does happen that a player that was multi-tabling would type into the wrong chat box by mistake. So nothing too unusual really, just a bit odd.
The the other new player said ‘OK’. That was it, nothing else. No one had spoken, so that too was out of context.
After the next few hands it became clear what was going on. These two geniuses had figured that by selecting the ‘ignore chat’ option on all the players that we wouldn’t be able to see what they were typing to each other.
And so they proceeded to tell each other what cards they were holding. In every hand.
That was some of the easiest money that I ever made at the poker table.
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