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So you want to beat Poker Stars?
Online poker is a game of skill. While some luck is involved, the best players typically leave
with most of the money. This article describes some tactics to get a real advantage in Poker
Stars, as well as some ill-advised cheating strategies that you may encounter.
Player Statistics let you analyze and track your opponents
Poker Mate reads the hand history of your game while you play to generate player statistics
for you and your opponents. See how often they call the flop, how much they've won or lost,
and what portion of showdowns they win.
Poker Mate does all of these things.
Knowing your opponents well is how you can really
beat Poker Stars.
The Cards Played Database
If you know exactly what cards an opponent is holding, that's probably cheating. But knowing
the kinds of pocket cards he plays will help you make an educated guess. Poker Mate
records any hands revealed by your opponents at the table, so you can begin to study just
how tight or loose a player appears to be.
How Some Try to Cheat Poker Stars
Cheating at online poker does happen, despite vigilant efforts by poker sites to prevent it.
Here are some approaches that people use to cheat Poker Stars. We don't recommend that you
try any of these, and you should know that most cheaters are easily caught.
Abusing disconnect protect (DP)
The "Disconnect Protect" feature of Poker Stars and Empire Poker is designed to protect your investment in a hand should your internet connection hiccup at a critical moment.
Essentially, it lets you go to the showdown without having to call any remaining bets/raises to get there - your bets go into a side pot. This particular instance of online
poker can be abused by "pulling the plug" on your ethernet card at a critical moment in hopes of slopping your way to a win. Be warned, this is not only a lousy way to treat
your opponents, but easily noticed by them and (more importantly) by the poker software. Still, people use this tactic and the only way to avoid them is to join a table with
"(no DP)" in its name, indicating that disconnect-protect is disabled.
Colluding with other players
This is probably the most widely used technique for cheating on Poker Stars - also known as "playing with your buddies". The concept is simple - fill most of the seats
at your poker table with people who all agree to share their pocket cards (by phone, IM, yelling, etc). Knowing what most of the other hands are is a tremendous [unfair]
advantage to any player, and teaming up on unsuspecting non-buddies really puts the hurt on them. Most colluders get caught - poker players are encouraged to report
suspected collusion to the poker sites, and they have all the digital footprints they need for proof. Poker Stars also believes in prevention - no two players with
the same IP address can join the same table.
Hacking the poker software
Because online poker networks depend on communication with the software running on each player's communication, it's tempting to think about intercepting or hacking that
information. In particular, you probably want to know if there's some hack that will magically tell you what cards your opponents hold during the hand.
While it is true that any piece of software has the potential to be compromised, Empire and Poker Stars have erected legal and technical barriers to hacking their software.
The player software is very adept at detecting and/or blocking potential intrusions into its data stream or programming. Picture hundreds of programmers in India putting
in thousands of hours of development time to make Poker Stars secure.
Using a card scanner
Here's the ultimate pipe dream - some kind of software or robot that scans each hand you're dealt, does the math, and makes most (or all) of your plays for you. You'd start
it first thing in the morning, and by the end of your second nap that day, it would have accrued a bunch of money in your account. I've written an entire article about the
idea of a Poker Stars scanner. A key point was this: a computer that plays every hand precisely by the
odds might make a little bit of money, but not a windfall. The most profitable hands in poker are often ones you had no business playing in the first place - low pocket
pairs that make trips, a flush draw that hits on the river, etc. There's no getting around the fact that good poker is a human game.
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