Collusion
Collusions is the process of creating groups and sides in poker where the groups of players work together towards winning. There are many forms of collusion and almost all forms require the players to settle on a strategy for winning the game.
There are some tell tale signs and common ways that allow others to detect any form of collusion in a game. Soft play is the kind of game where all involved players fail to bet or raise in a situation that would normally increase the worth of that situation for them. This sort of play is normally seen when a person who is part of the collusion team does not want the other partner(s) to lose money on her/his account.
Whipsawing is another major form of collusion that sees these partner players raise a stack and then re-raise the pot mainly to trap the people who are playing other than them on the table. Dumping is a part of the game where the cheater loses deliberately to the partner player and is a common way of trying to disperse any doubts of collusion between the players.
In collusion, there are many major ways of telling partners what hands they hold. There are a number of body signals, hand signals as well as other ways of signaling partners that include different ways of arranging the chips in a stack in a particular way.
Online poker makes collusion harder to pick or find out because the partners can message each other over chat software, talk on the phone or text message each other. This way, they can discuss their cards openly, without anybody finding out about it.
There are many cases where one person may be using two computers to play or two people in the same room may be playing on the same online table as well. However there are records of every hand ever played in online poker rooms, maintained by these rooms themselves. This allows them to identify cases of collusion and such players are usually warned, before being blocked out, if the cases of collusion continue.
However collusion is completely different from what we normally see in poker tournaments where a player may be all in while the others may simple call his betting value and then check away the rounds to the end. While this is a way of ensuring that they don’t lose more money than they should, unless there is a verbal agreement between the other players, this cannot be termed as collusion.
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