Is there collusion in online poker? It would be proper to say that there is ‘attempted’ collusion in online poker, rather than any actual long term collusion between organized players.

It happens again and again, when a new player of a certain type gets involved in the online poker world. I’m not too sure what that type is. It would not be fair to say ‘criminal’ when it is more likely the notion that there is no accountability that is the driving thought behind trying to cheat at poker.

It is probably part of the whole ‘the internet is anonymous’ thinking – thinking that leads to perfectly ordinary people behaving in a disgusting and vulgar way when on a public forum. I’m sure you know what I am talking about.

Well, anyway, when a certain type of player stumbles upon online poker, they soon start to see the angles. One of the first such angle is that they think if they had a buddy at the table then they would have a serious advantage over the other players. So, using instant messenger, or simply having another computer in their house, they set out to collude at the poker table and get rich, and quick.

Yes, it does happen, and probably every day. But the internet is not a new place any more. There are billion dollar companies operating out there on the net, and many of those billion dollar companies are online gaming companies, such as poker rooms.

These companies have a valuable product, and one big part of that product is it’s perception – that is, if it is not seen as safe and secure, it will not last very long.

So these online poker sites spend a lot of money investing in technology and skills to make sure that their product is safe and secure. That means that they are able to detect cheating in all it’s forms, and not just collusion. But certainly detecting collusion is one of their primary concerns.

And they are very good at it. When a billion-dollar product is at stake, you can bet that you either get very good at protecting it, or you go under.

So yes, it happens every day. And yes, those that try it not only get caught and banned, but they also lose whatever money they had in their poker account when they got banned. And they get blacklisted. So, good luck with that.

It has been reported in some online poker forums that a number of poker skins on the Cake Network are planning to change to the Merge Network within the next month or two.

The rooms in question include PlayerOnly Poker, and SportsBook poker.

I couldn’t really say what this will mean for the Cake network, though losing those skins and their players surely can’t be a good thing. And that is exactly what it is for the Merge Network. Not only is it good news, it’s great news.

The Merge software is outstanding in my opinion. The biggest drawback about this network has always been the low player numbers, and the attendant difficulty in getting a game at your preferred stakes.

But with the influx of players from the newly added skins, the traffic numbers should explode. So ok it won’t be as big as Poker Stars just yet, but it will make getting a game a whole lot easier. And this should make Merge a serious competitor and top ten network real quick.

The biggest room on the Merge network is Carbon Poker which is one of the original rooms from before it became a big network. While I never really liked the name too much, Carbon is by far the best room on the network in terms of promotions.

A lot of poker players think that poker is all about bluffing. Those players are usually newer, more recreational players. More experienced players, players that are winning, know that bluffing is a very small (but flashy) part of the game.

Sure it looks good, on TV or in the movies, when you bluff the bad guy off of a massive pot and then you turn over your rags and everyone admires you as a hero and an all round good guy. And you get the girl (or boy).

But bluffing in real poker is not like that at all. In fact, though this is just my personal opinion, bluffing is not about the cards at all, it is about you at the table.

When you sit at a table you are making one big bluff. You are representing yourself as a player. Play for long enough and play solidly and you will be seen as a player. Represent yourself all the time. Whatever image you have chosen – that is your bluff.

Playing solid poker and getting a reputation for that will win you more money with poor cards than any showy big-pot bluff will ever do.

If yo can’t buy that advice, then just take it that it is a mis-conception that poker is all about the bluff. Poker is all about the money. Whatever puts the money into your stack is what is important.

Playing within your limits at poker, whether online or real life, will probably be one of the most significant factors in determining whether you will be a winning player or a losing player.

Even the best players will have a run of bad luck, the deck will be cold and nothing they do can change that.

But what they, and you, can change when luck turns against you, is how much damage this does to your bankroll, and your poker playing future.

By playing within your limits and practicing good bankroll management, you can plan to out-run or out-play your unlucky streak, and still have enough funds in your bank to be able to stage a comeback once the bad times are over.

Another very good reason for playing at limits that you are comfortable with is that there won’t be any extra pressure on you. When you play with money that you can not afford to lose you will find it very difficult to be comfortable at the table. The stress of knowing that you will be screwed if you lose will make winning all the harder.

Of course, you may want to play at limits that make you sweat. That may be your thing; if so, you most likely have a problem somewhere in your life.

Play within your limits. Move up only when you have doubled your bankroll. Move down when the cards turn against you. Doing this will put you on a path to being a winning player.

Pay attention. That is right up there with the best poker advice that you can get. You are playing real poker. You are betting real money.

Wake up and pay attention.

Many many players think that the cards they have in their hand are the most important element of a game of poker, and those many many players are very very wrong.

The cards that you are dealt are one of the least important aspects of your poker game. What is far more important is the cards that the other players have been dealt.

You may say that it is impossible to know what cards have been dealt to the other players, and you would of course be wrong.

By paying attention to what is happening at the table, what the other players are doing, and, just as important, what the other players are not doing, you can get a good idea of who has what.

Just because you are not in a hand does not mean that you can drift off, check out a forum, read a blog post, check your email, anyone of the millions of things that you do online. When you are not involved in a hand is a perfect time to watch the other players and see exactly how they behave on whatever hand it is that they are holding.

Look around you. Watch what is happening all the time. It will not only make you more money, but you will enjoy the game a lot more, and more importantly, you will learn an awful lot.

I want to stress the importance of looking beyond what cards are in your hand. You will often see that a player who has been dealt a premium hand, such as pocket aces, will ignore a threatening flop and go to the river with cards that became unplayable – and un-winnable, long before the river card was dealt.

Pocket aces are no good when a flush or straight draw has developed on the board and someone is betting hard. Watch everything, all the time.

Closely related to the Don’t Play Drunk poker tip, the next best piece of advice for online poker players is to NOT play when your emotional state is not stable.

That means don’t play angry, but also when sad, depressed, annoyed, confused, or any other emotional state where your emotions are in charge of you, instead of you being in charge of your emotions.

So if you have had a bad day at work, got called out by the boss, or have just had a row with your significant other, playing some online poker to blow off steam is probably not the wisest decision that you could make.

Assuming that you can have enough self control to recognize when you are not in a fit emotional state to play poker and you can make the adult decision to not play right now, that still leaves the situation where you are in a balanced state of mind when you start playing, but something happens at the tables that causes you to lose your self control.

In other words, you start tilting. For whatever reason, a bad draw, an unlucky river card, some donkey sucks out on a runner runner straight, your pocket aces get cracked for the third time, whatever.

It doesn’t matter what caused you to tilt, now you have to be the grown up and take control of this situation. Playing on tilt can be seriously damaging to your bankroll. And only you can stop it.

Not only is it dangerous to your stack, but the other, more savvy players at the table will recognize that you are on tilt, and some of them will start to push your buttons a bit more in order to get you to donk off your chips to them.

When this happens you have got to walk away. Take a break for a few minutes. Even better, take a break for the nigh. There will always be another day to play – if you can keep your bankroll intact til that day comes, of course.

So this is the best advice you will ever get for managing your tilting; whatever caused you to lose your cool, it happens to everyone. At some time, those bad beats that you just experienced, they happened to other players. And they will happen again, and in all likelihood they will happen again to YOU at some time in the future.

This stuff happens in online poker. The difference between winners and losers is that winners realize that this stuff happens and they are ready to deal with it. Losers play through the tilt. Which do you want to be?

Continuing our series of online poker tips, here is our second most important pice of poker advice;

#2. Don’t Play when drunk.

Drunk includes any form of inebriation, but it also includes any other thing that can affect your mental or emotional state.

Trying to play good poker after having had an enormous row with your wife or girlfriend, boyfriend or all of them, can be detrimental to your bankroll just as much as if you have had too much to drink.

Having said that, a lot of poker players like to have a drink while they play, especially online.

If that is your thing, then by all means have a drink or two while playing.  There is a big difference between having a couple of drinks to relax and being drunk. Generally, the best advice here is to be sure that your current mental state is suited to playing your best game of poker.

One of the most important reasons for being in control of your mental state when playing relates to our poker tip #1 Playing less and winning more.  Even though you may be playing less hands they still have to be reasonably good hands, or you need to be a reasonably good card player, in order for this advice to help you to win more at online poker.

As an online poker player you must always be aware that you need to protect your online bankroll.  Doing anything that might put that needlessly in jeopardy is to be avoided, and that certainly includes not playing while drunk, but also includes anything that can have a bad affect on your ability to judge what is happening at the table, and how it relates to you and your cards.

If you are already drunk, and must absolutely play poker or you don´t know what will happen, you could always consider playing at the play money tables that most, if not all, online card rooms have available.

I realize that advice probably won’t suit most cash game players though, so my next best suggestion for protecting your bankroll while playing when drunk is to limit your games to only multi-table tournaments, and keep the buy ins reasonably low.  Low enough so that losing a few of them won’t cripple your online poker life, but not so low as you won’t take the game seriously.

If you don’t think that either of those tips will be of any help to you, then my last suggestion is that if you know that you will be drunk, and will be unable to resist the temptation to start playing at some point, then before all this happens I suggest that you log in to your poker account and withdraw most of your bankroll, only leaving whatever amount you would be comfortable with losing.

This is the first online poker tip in our series of helpful advice for online poker players.

#1. Don’t Play Every Hand.

This piece of advice is old news to experienced online players, but it is the most common mistake that most beginner players make.

It seems counter-intuitive to most players that playing less poker can make you more money, but the truth is that most players play way too many hands.  Part of the problem is that a lot of online players play below their ideal limit, so they do not really take the money seriously because they are not staking at a serious level.

When playing online you can get a game at stakes as low as one cent.  When playing low stakes it may seem foolish to fold middling cards in the face of a raise of only a couple of cents, but the truth is that the raise is relative to the stakes.  Would you still play that seven five suited if the raise was a couple of hundred dollars?

Hopefully your answer to that question was ‘no’.  If it was ‘yes’, you probably should not be reading this article.

Poker, whether online or in the real world, is not about winning so much as it is about getting the right odds to play.  We will discuss poker odds in future articles, but for now you should try to understand that not every two cards are worth playing, no matter what the stakes are.

The only exception to that rule would be when you have already paid the big blind and there were no raisers.  Although it might seem foolish to fold your two bad cards in the face of a ‘check’.

Even so, sometimes you might be better off to fold right there, as all too frequently, getting into a hand with two low cards can leave you in a bad position later on, if one or both of those cards get paired on the flop.  That can see you staying in a hand against better cards simply because you cannot fold a pair (or two) no matter how low they might be.

Picking your starting hands carefully and sticking to the top quality hands will see you playing a lot less hands than you might hope for.  One buig problem with this that a lot of players have is that they get bored with having so little action.  When they are playing poker they really want to play.  And Now!

If that is a problem for you, perhaps you should consider playing more than one table at a time.  Playing with proper starting hands on two or three tables will be more worthwhile than playing any two cards on one table.

Bear in mind though that playing multiple tables can take a bit of practice. Start with one table (prepare to be bored), then when you are comfortable with the software you could try playing two tables for a while.

The initial rush of wanting to play as much poker as fast as possible usually wears off when you have lost more or all of your bankroll.  It is a far better feeling to have gotten your fill of poker hands and still have your bankroll intact.

Simple rule: play less, win more.

Pitbull Poker, the only flash poker room, has run into some problems recently and it seems that the issue is not going to go away.

Initially reported on the 2+2 poker forum in July, a Pitbull poker player aired his suspicions of ‘superuser’ accounts operating on the Pitbull site.

Over time, and with contributions from other forum members, the list of problems has grown with the addition of, among other things,  suspected security concerns with the Pitbull software.

Pitbull Poker has not responded to the satisfaction of the players so far. Until they do respond it seems this issue will not go away.

Read the thread on the 2+2 forum here