Collusion in Online Poker: How It Works and How to Protect Yourself

Collusion is the lowest-barrier, oldest form of poker cheating: no hacking required — two players on a voice call is all it takes. Which is exactly why it is the form of cheating a regular player is most likely to actually encounter. This article helps you understand it, recognize it, and respond to it.

Three typical collusion patterns

• Information collusion: partners tell each other their hole cards. Even knowing “my partner folded an ace” is a huge edge in equity calculation — this is the most common form and the hardest to spot
• Betting collusion (the squeeze): two partners raise and re-raise around a victim, whipsawing them out of pots or charging them a premium for marginal hands
• Soft play: partners go easy on each other — checking hands that should bet, folding hands that should call — preserving chips for the partner to win from outsiders. Especially lethal near a tournament bubble

Six warning signs

• Certain players always appear together at the same table, with highly overlapping schedules
• They almost never play big pots against each other, folding early whenever they collide
• When you are sandwiched between two of them, the raising frequency is abnormally high, yet showdowns rarely justify it
• Folds revealed at showdown only make sense if someone knew another player’s cards (for example, precisely dodging the nuts)
• Chat interactions suggest off-table familiarity while they pretend to be strangers
• Over a larger sample, the pair’s win rate when seated together significantly exceeds either player’s solo win rate

Any single signal can be coincidence; a cluster deserves suspicion.

The complete self-protection routine

• Preserve evidence: note table, time, and hand numbers; export hand histories; screenshot suspicious chat
• Report: use the platform’s formal channel and attach specific hand numbers and the pattern you observed — specificity determines whether a report can be acted on
• Cut losses: change tables immediately after reporting; if the same group keeps reappearing, change hours or platforms
• Don’t confront publicly: open accusations tip them off and may violate the platform’s community rules

What architecture can contribute

Collusion is player-side cheating; cryptography cannot directly eliminate it (no protocol governs two people on a phone call). But architecture can shrink its habitat: Fair Poker games are primarily private tables among real friends, so the “strangers teaming up on random victims” scenario is naturally rare; fully replayable hand transcripts give post-hoc analysis a solid footing; and play-chips-only tables remove the economic motive. If you mostly play with people you trust, collusion risk approaches its minimum — one more dimension worth weighing when choosing a poker site.