Cheating

I guess I've read something about some cheating scandal at Absolute Poker. That's the extent of what I know about it. I've never played at Absolute, and I don't really play online poker often enough to be up-in-arms over it. Maybe that's the wrong attitude to cop, but I've got enough other issues in my life that I can't be bothered to take a stance on something that doesn't impact me in a meaningful way.

I remember my own days of cheating. Back in high school, when we would spend random Friday nights in someone's basement playing games like guts and mofo, I was almost always the dealer, because nobody else wanted to deal. A typical night would see a swing for each individual player of $20-$40 in either direction, although sometimes the swings were as high as $100. My money in those days came from umpiring Little League games at $15 a pop, and working in a school supplies warehouse each summer. Yes, you heard me, I worked in a warehouse.

The cheating started out just with all of us picking on one guy that we nicknamed Stanley (because he was a tool, you see). With the blessing of the other guys at the table, I'd set the deck against him, or deal a bad one off the bottom of the deck to him in mofo -- those sorts of shenanigans. He would lose, get really pissed off, and we would all have a good laugh and rake in his chips. The worst kind of juvenile behavior, I guess, but we were 16 years old at the time. It goes with the territory.

As the weeks progressed, I realized that I could also help myself out. For some reason, nobody ever thought that if I were able to get away with cheating against Stanley, that I might cheat in favor of myself. I was no mechanic, but sometimes a card wouldn't make it back into the deck; sometimes I'd deal myself an extra card; sometimes I'd deal myself a favorable card off the bottom of the deck. I was never caught.

Our interests, and college, took us in different directions after a few years, and the game died out. The sum extent of my cheating since then involves asking other people -- in the room, or in girlie-chat -- how they would play the hand of online poker I was involved in at the time of asking, and playing on someone else's online poker account, for a nice $5k tourney score, at that. I have never had more than one account at any online site. In live games, I have never again attempted to pull any dealing shenanigans. I have never deliberately peeked at anyone else's cards at a live table -- in fact, I'm usually the first one to tell a player if he is exposing them to the point that I can see them. All in all, I think that for however much I may have strayed from the moral path during my high school poker games, I've been back on it for a long time since.

The crux of the issue is the same thing that these issues always come down to: money. When we were in high school, winning an extra $60 in a Friday night session seemed like quite a bit of money. Greed overruled my basic moral compass. Of course, that's not to say if I found myself in a game now for "quite a bit of money" that I would cheat. I most certainly would not. My moral center is much more firmly in place now than it was when I was a stripling of 16 years. The thing is, whenever money is involved, for at least a certain segment of the population, the rules either become much more flexible or go out the window entirely. You can put regulations in place to try to safeguard against that as much as possible, and I'm certainly in favor of that in an effort to make games as fair as possible, but you'll never be able to change basic human nature. Where there's money, there's a will. Where there's a will, there's a way.