Furthermore, if you suspect that collusion is occurring at your table - whether the culprits are friends or strangers to you - you should report it to the poker room management. You should never engage in it, never agree to it, and actively warn others against it if they propose that you join them. I think it’s important to state this bluntly: Collusion in poker between two or more players, in all of its many forms, is always cheating, pure and simple. Introducing collusion, wherein a player tries to help or at least not hurt specific other players, tends to distort the essence of the game so much the result is often barely recognizable as poker. Over the last ten years of the “poker boom,” many organizations have tried to put together forms of poker that use teams, often for the purposes of making exciting television. In fact, poker doesn’t even work right if the players don’t approach it with that attitude. It is an intensely individualistic, dog-eat-dog game. Maybe if they end up as the only two in a hand, they’ll always just check every street rather than betting and raising each other.įor our purposes, all of these agreements, plus many other forms they might take, are equal - and equally wrong.Maybe they’ll use a secret hand signal to indicate “I’ve got the goods this time, so you should fold and let me take these other people’s chips.”.Maybe they’ll never slow play each other when dealt a monster hand.Maybe they’ll never bluff each other, so that a strong bet always indicates a strong hand.Maybe if one of them puts in a raise, the other has to drop out of the pot.They’re worried that the cutthroat nature of the game - a game in which the whole point, after all, is to win the other players’ money - may cause hard feelings and damage their friendship if they really go at each other hard. That practice is collusion.Ī typical example is two friends heading to the casino to spend a few hours playing poker together.

This week I’m dipping back into my “ Casino Poker for Beginners” series to warn about a practice that is common among players new to poker, who engage in it innocently, not realizing that it is both unethical and a violation of one of the most important rules of the game.

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