Usually by having their RNG audited and/or open-sourced/testible (though that has its own potential problems) followed by marketing and support and time in existence.
The newer a poker site is, the more likely it is to be shady, simply because it hasn't had anecdotal reports of it not being shady from actual players.
I experimented with this a few years ago. Even going as far as creating https://bitflop.me. I came to the conclusion that the future legal battles would just not be worth it.
The house makes money from rake. This means it's not in the house's interest to enable any cheating, since cheating makes the house less trustworthy, and therefore, there is less rake being generated.
Unfortunately the criminal mind discounts the possibility of getting caught. There have been several big scandals of this sort in online poker. Scams at Absolute, Full Tilt and others have been uncovered.
Most poker-room scandals are separate from the house cheating and more to do with bad accounting/book keeping practices and out right stealing.
The Ultimate Bet / Absolute scandal involved super-user accounts being used to reveal hole-cards of opponents and that most certainly was cheating.
The end result is that room went down in infamy and most of the people associated with it at the highest levels are looked down upon in the poker community.
On the other hand, Poker Stars ended up picking up the tab for Full Tilt, which is now a fairly trustworthy room thanks to Poker Stars' management.
Not to mention that fult tilt probably could have gotten away with it indefinitely if they weren't shut down. They were basically practicing a form of fractional reserve.
Not reassuring. If there's money to be made, people will try to make it. It's reasonable to assume a group of friends would take a weekend trying to collude at poker.
There are a few things you could potentially do to make it not worth their time. The first is to take money before assigning a table, and then randomly assigning the person. The second is to have the house take such a large cut that even with collusion it's not profitable.
You still have to worry about Sybil attacks. It's one thing for me and my 3 friends to play poker together and try to land at the same table. It's another for me and my 1000 bots at different IP addresses (bots who will, of course, play computationally perfect games and collude any time they are at the same table) to try and beat the odds.
There are few enough IPv4 addresses that just about any hash forms an injective mapping which can be completely reversed: the best you can do is use something like HMAC and "pepper" it, but that only works if the clients can't verify or generate them.
No, but you can definitely identify collusion. It's really very simple. When you see the guy with JJ fold preflop and the two remaining players have, say, AA and AQ, it suggests that JJ and AA have colluded to keep AQ in the pot. So you build a pipeline to process and detect this sort of thing. It doesn't have to be realtime. Same day would suffice. Besides, you will need hundreds, maybe thousands of hands to classify it reliably.
And you can be certain that none of that is happening in this example and I'd never play there -- unless I wanted to collude with friends.
There is no way to stop serious and experienced collusion from any table in any online poker room in the world.
As others have mentioned, proxies and out of band communication make it nearly impossible to really detect.
That said, detecting blatant or clueless collusion is fairly simple, as things like chip dumping and soft-playing can become fairly obvious just by observing play.
Their problem was accepting players from legal states (Nevada, Delaware, New Jersey), and in this case, specifically the Nevada Gaming Commission came at them for not registering to be regulated while accepting US players and having "company officers" in the US.
The truth is, Micon was the "chairman", but the actual operations and such all took place out of country.
Crypto currency gambling is legal in the United States so long as there is no USD involved because crypto currencies are akin to stocks. You don't pay capital gains until you convert stocks into USD or other fiat currencies.
The implication is that somehow Micon may have been turning BTC from seals into USD and not giving a cut to the Nevada Gaming Commission.
(4) Financial transaction provider.— The term “financial transaction provider” means a creditor, credit card issuer, financial institution, operator of a terminal at which an electronic fund transfer may be initiated, money transmitting business, or international, national, regional, or local payment network utilized to effect a credit transaction, electronic fund transfer, stored value product transaction, or money transmitting service, or a participant in such network, or other participant in a designated payment system.
No person engaged in the business of betting or wagering may knowingly accept, in connection with the participation of another person in unlawful Internet gambling—
(1) credit, or the proceeds of credit, extended to or on behalf of such other person (including credit extended through the use of a credit card);
(2) an electronic fund transfer, or funds transmitted by or through a money transmitting business, or the proceeds of an electronic fund transfer or money transmitting service, from or on behalf of such other person;
(3) any check, draft, or similar instrument which is drawn by or on behalf of such other person and is drawn on or payable at or through any financial institution; or
(4) the proceeds of any other form of financial transaction, as the Secretary and the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System may jointly prescribe by regulation, which involves a financial institution as a payor or financial intermediary on behalf of or for the benefit of such other person.
The items you posted seem to be pretty squarely related to USD. I am not aware of a BTC credit system or financial institutions involved with BTC in the US aside from the likes of Coinbase, et al, who, being involved in the USD side of things, are explicitly anti-gambling themselves.
Crypto coins are stocks, not money, according to the IRS. There are no written checks for crypto currency. There is no financial institution involved in the transmission of crypto currency.
I'm in the United States. To my knowledge online gambling is not strictly illegal, but it's illegal for online casinos to send or receive money to or from any banking or crediting organization, therefore preventing users from transferring money into casino accounts. Bitcoin is still in a weird realm where it's considered property rather than a currency, which I imagine would make it similar to gambling with gold. (My knowledge is outdated by a couple years, so please correct me if I'm wrong.)
The anti-gambling/anti-poker laws from "Black Friday" in 2011 actually have to do with banking and USD.
This is why there are actually several US-facing card rooms operating out of country semi-legally - they do not do banking in the US, so they are not afoul of laws in most states. I believe New York is a notable exception along with a few other states which sites like Bovada will not accept US users from.
it has been cleared up, and completely legal now federally. That is why NJ, and NV, and DE have their own online gambling laws. The problem is that they all are designed to help the local business owners, and not promote the freedom of their residents.
i'm mildly terrible at poker, but trying to improve. unfortunately, it's hard to practice unless money is on the line. i'd like to be able to play online (with smaller blinds and rake than a brick and mortar casino). i'm not interested in being able to "cash out" ... it's a purely money losing proposition because of my lack of skill
any idea if there's a way i could play on any of these sites in this manner ?
> therefore preventing users from transferring money into casino accounts. Bitcoin is still in a weird realm where it's considered property rather than a currency
...for tax purposes by the IRS. That's completely separate from its treatment in regard to other things, like financial services (e.g., money transmitter) regulation, and potentially gambling regulation.
It's illegal in the country I live in, but we still have tons of TV commercials for online gaming. So it's legal to play, but the site and company needs to be located in a country where it's legal. And they also would have to pay taxes.
Ahah, yeah, that's a quick bug we introduced today, you were able to join a table without paying the first blind :D
It's been fixed for a few hours now :)