Listen to Phil Helmuth talk about it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpMELRn8_l0

Basically, the online casinos are making so much money, they want it to be on the up and up so they can keep taking the rakes.

Unlike games like chess or backgammon there's currently no AI / bots that can beat no limit holdem or omaha. The University of Alberta and others are studying the game but it will be some years yet before we have a poker equivalent of 'Deep Blue' beating the best players in the game.

The major poker sites are well know and trusted and have proved themselves competent in preventing 'cheating' like what you describe. They're very good at all things security, and you can even get a RSA keyfob to log into your account much like some online banks.

> Unlike games like chess or backgammon there's currently no AI / bots that can beat no limit holdem or omaha. The University of Alberta and others are studying the game but it will be some years yet before we have a poker equivalent of 'Deep Blue' beating the best players in the game.

If I were successfully researching poker bot I would not go public with this.

So basically you just trust that poker sites do not have backdoors? That's not something I'd bet my money on.

Everyone who plays poker online shares these same concerns, so it's not surprising that the largest sites care deeply about their reputations (especially since they make so much money playing it straight up).

That said, there has been at least one major incident where one of the original employees of a poker site used a "superuser" account to see his opponents' cards at the high stakes tables and win lots of money. The players figured it out based on his statistically improbable win rate and an accidental release of the full hand history of one of his tournaments.

Congratulations, you win. In fact this has already happened as was the subject of a 60 Minutes piece over a year ago:

http://news.cnet.com/60-minutes-report-how-online-gamblers-u...

I particularly enjoyed this quote:

  "This Grey Cat person was new. And at first, he seemed like a live one. He seemed terrible," Witteles remembers. "He seemed to play crazy. It seemed like he was giving his money away. Except the only thing was, he wasn't losing. He was playing in a style that was sure to lose, but he was killing the game day after day." 

Sound familiar anyone?

It seems that discovery of this cheat was mostly due to the newbness of the cheater.

If skilled player possessed backdoor access to poker system and used it wisely, peeking in only from time to time when it's necessary and might go unnoticed he'd be rather undetectable.

Bot support is nothing compared to collusion.

In an online game, how can anyone be sure that information sharing is not taking place?

Pattern recognition. When you haves 10s to 100s of billions of hands on record it becomes easier to spot anomalies in player strategy that would imply collusion.

Eh?

Collusion over a very short period of time from specific (and easily changed) IPs can make a lot of shared money - it's not clear how (and even if) online poker sites would monitor this.

Collusion isn't that hard of a problem to tackle when people are colluding at a poker table as they act very differently to when they aren't. Since the poker site can see all the hands this becomes visible very easily.

They obviously won't catch all people colluding but they will catch most of them. And just changing IPs won't help much when they ban your account/payment details and you have to arrange another fake identity that checks out at a payment processor regularly.