Where money is involved, there is always someone who doesn't want to play by their rules. Poker is no exception. Richard Marcus who is, according to the cover of this book Dirty Poker, "the world's greatest casino cheater" want to expose the dark side of poker; he wants to reveal how conmen and cheats try to separate the honest poker player from his money. The book starts with the following introduction:

"A performing artist who has newly taken up tournament poker at about the same time she took up a tournament poker-playing boyfriend has stunned the poker world by winning the Ladies Championship at a recent World Super Bowl of poker. Sounds like a great movie script, right? Wrong! It happened. And it's bullshit. This win was bought and paid for with a little help from her poker-playing boyfriend and Hollywood contacts ... What I’m saying is that a deal was made to distribute her winnings among the other players at the final table so that this win could happen and make everyone happy." (p. 7)

Though he doesn't give any names it's clear that Marcus is talking about Jennifer Tilly who won the Ladies No Limit Texas hold'em event 2005 at the World Series of Poker and her boyfriend Phil Laak a well-known tournament player. I don't doubt that what Marcus writes could be true but it's not clear if this is a fact, is it based on what somebody told him, or is it just something he thinks did happen. This is a general problem throughout the whole book. Most of the time it's not clear if Marcus is talking about proven facts, hearsay or his own belief.

Marcus starts by talking about cheating in a casino. He treats the well-known topics of collusion (by chips and hand signals), mucking and switching cards as well as dealer and player cheating partnerships. The most interesting section is the one about marking cards. For a long time there has been a rumor with the cards can be marked with a completely invisible solution. Only the cheat wearing special glasses or contact lenses can see the marks. Best of all the cheating is undetectable by examining the cards because the markings leave not the slightest trace. The "card marking solution disappeared from the cards 30 minutes after its application," according to Marcus (p.64). He claims that the ordered a bottle of this magic solution together with the contact lenses (five pairs!) from an optometrist in New York. Together with two friends Marcus tested the card-marking solution successfully in a $3-6 game at the Commerce in Los Angeles. Okay, all this sounds very scary. Maybe this is the reason you can't win at casino poker? Hardly!

"The solution was very expensive, five grand for a little perfume sample size bottle that contained enough stuff to mark aces and picture cards of about a hundred decks." (p. 64)

Even if Marcus story is true nobody is going to spend five grand to cheat in a low limit game. There are a lot of things that work against a cheater: Especially in low limit games players ask constantly for deck changes, players are hiding their cards or dealer rotation (in California dealers have their own decks). In the mid-limit games where I play there is a shuffle machine with two decks that are used alternatively. That means the cheat has to mark two decks instead the one. In one hour you get about 35 hands that means you have actually touched 70 cards. Unfortunately these are not all different cards which means the cheat can mark about half the cards in play and don't forget after 30 minutes to solution starts to disappear. Of course it helps if you don't play alone. With two or more players marking the cards the effectiveness increases as do the costs. I seriously doubt that in a typical middle limit game like $20-40 the cheaters advantage is big enough to overcome his investment.

I am not saying that there is no cheating in casino poker, of course there is, but if you choose your casino carefully the effect on your overall results are negligible. As a rule of thumb the larger the casino the better the player protection is in place and Nevada is better for player protection than California. In over 10 years of playing mid limit poker I only saw one case of cheating when, in a $20-40 game at the Mirage someone got caught for holding out cards. On four occasions where I have been at the table there may have been cheating in involved. Two of these times someone found a card under the table. Interestingly both times it was an ace. The third time all of a sudden one of the cards in the deck had a different back color.

The fourth case was the most interesting. It happened many years ago in a $10-20 game at the Mirage. I had folded, the player to my left raised and got a couple of callers. Because the player on my left and I knew each other very well and I had already folded he let me see his hand: he had two black kings. The flop came something like K75. He had flopped a set of kings and the nuts. The problem was that the king on the flop was the king of spades! What would you have done in this situation? Clearly the correct course of action would've been to call the floorman and inform him that there were two kings of spades in play. The floorman would annul the game and everybody would get its money back. Not a good decision for you given the fact that you hold the nuts at the moment and the very likely winner at the end. My friend was not only an excellent player but a quick mind as well. He realized that he had a win-no lose situation. He could win as long as he hadn't to show his hand at the end and if someone beats him he could turnover in his hand, pretend that he now realizes that there are two identical cards in play and got his money back. His play showed that he understood that perfectly.

Normally with the hand that strong you are inclined to keep people in the pot. Instead he put the maximum possible pressure on his opponents right from the beginning. At the river he had eliminated all but one opponent. He bet out immediately. His opponents thought for a while and folded then reluctantly. Then, while the dealer was shuffling for the new hand and he was still stacking his chips, he informed the dealer almost incidentally: "Please check the deck! I think there are two kings of spade in it." Astonishingly none of the other players involved in the last pot said a word so my friend got away with his little ploy.

Back to Marcus’ book. The second main chapter is about tournament poker where he treats collusion and chip cheating (e.g. passing chips to other players). The chapter is somewhat annoying because he says tournament poker is completely rigged but he can't or won’t provide conclusive evidence. He is no tournament player and he has no inside knowledge, he is just speculating. His main argument is that tournament poker is mostly luck nonetheless there are some players who win more often then luck dictates ("three guys winning two events in a row, and two of the three then tacking on a third win? This was nothing short of incredible, and to me it was not credible", p. 93). This may or may not be credible but disbelief alone is no substitution for plain facts.

The third main chapter deals with online poker. Here Marcus talks about collusion, poker robots and site bots then he comes to another topic that is very controversial. There is a great fear among online players that it's possible to see other players hole cards. Marcus claims that he has a friend - he calls him Peter - who has such a software program and that Peter was willing to give him a demonstration.

Marcus is impressed about what he saw: "If the Peeker software had saved Peter $ 9'400 on that hand alone, how much would it increase his earnings over the course of a year playing high-limit online poker?" (p. 191)

Before you start running to buy a copy of Peeker, according to Marcus it's expensive and hard to get the software.

"Peter explained that it was impossible to estimate the number of people who had both the money and desire required to purchase the software. He knew lots of people interested in making money by cheating at online poker, but putting up 30 grand to buy Peeker was very exclusive. He also enlightened me that Peeker was available only on the ‘white market’, which meant that not just anybody could buy, even if he had the money. The inventors of the software actually had the integrity to keep their product out of the hands of those who by misuse would shorten the life of its productivity. Peeker could not be copied. Something that good was not about to become available as a freebie." (p. 187)

Quite frankly I'm very skeptical about what Marcus tells the reader about Peeker. First, I don't think the hand he mentioned ever took place. Sure, a lot of things can happen in poker but this hand looks like it is made up. Second, the way Peter plays he wouldn't survive more than one session in any ordinary online poker room. Every Internet poker site has some sort of anti-cheating software running. It doesn't matter how sophisticated this software is, it would flag Peter's play immediately. What's the most suspicious play you can make? Probably folding the second nuts when the nuts are out and that's exactly what Peter was doing. Nobody, not an expert not an amateur, would make this play. Remember we are talking about pot limit not no limit. The worst odds you can get in pot limit is 2:1 which means that if your chance to have the best hand is better than 33% your call is sound and this is definitively the case here. Third, internet poker is big business today. At least the big sites have a lot of money behind them. It's hard to imagine that they cannot protect themselves and that someone can hack their server and software.

The rest of Marcus book is mainly filler material like the chapter about "Great Poker Scams". As I already said I have mixed feelings about the book. Marcus definitively knows a lot about cheating but he doesn't know much about poker. Nonetheless I think everyone who plays poker for money should read a book about cheating like this one, not to become paranoid but to know what can be done and what to look for.