Just a heads up, your second link does not discuss any fraud of the players and instead discusses money laundering which the sites had to engage in to pay players from the United States. UltimateBet and AbsolutePoker had a massive cheating scandal, and both they and FullTilt were insolvent and werent able to pay back the players. Pokerstars has shown time and again that they are operating on the up and up, and many of the other pokersites are part of publicly traded companies.

The biggest concern is that of bots, and while some sites arent very vigilant about banning suspected bots, Pokerstars is.

In short, play on reputable sites, and if you are worried about bots, then play at pokerstars and report anything suspicious. Are there cheaters? Yes, but it is easier for a site to detect cheating when they have access to all hands played by every account than it would be for a casino who has none of that information.

It should be noted that the post explicitly recommends using free/fun to play games and links to a problem gambling site.

Exactly. I'm not telling you to play your money on poker. I'm just telling you to play poker for the fun and "benefits" of the activity.

Cheating by the site is a risk, but on Poker Stars I feel fairly safe because they have so much invested and would do their best to make sure their image does not get tainted.

I mainly played heads up before Black Friday, and there is more to it than just simple odds. You get into a psychological battle, which includes odds, and has money at the end.

I stayed around the 50NL games, but was still able to pull in $1000/mo playing in my spare time. Then there was Black Friday.

I would have thought that online poker sites were infested with bots? There certainly seem to be a lot available by searching for "poker bot".

Interesting forum for someone who wants to learn something about poker bots: http://pokerai.org/pf3/index.php