Every now and then, when a poker player loses a significant amount of money playing online poker, probably because of a bad run of results, he decides that the software is rigged. Somebody for sure out there is cheating or there is a bug in the software or other players in the table communicate with each other secretly against him.
Of course all these are nonsense. Personally I have played hundreds of thousands of poker hands online and the only thing that I noticed were normal, random fluctuations with good and bad runs. Everything totally inside normal conditions, while most of the times when things didn’t go well, I has the one to blame because of my silly mistakes. You can be rest assured that there are hundreds of totally safe online poker platforms out there that are honest and pay directly and on time.
Now that we covered that point, let’s talk about the myth of rigged poker software. Such mentions are simply ridiculous, unless you are playing at a totally unknown poker room, based in a country nobody has ever heard of that is hosted inside someone’s closet. In any other case there is no danger. Take for example the biggest online poker rooms out there that earn millions from the rake they hold from each player. These companies do not need to steal your money to have profits and if something weird would happen everybody would hear about it in a couple of hours. After all this kind of behavior would be visible at once if one would take a look at the playing history of a couple of random players. Be sure that poker rooms have more to lose than to earn by cheating.
There also many people out there who believe that poker rooms deal more premium hands to the players in order to keep them excited, so that they continue to play more. This is also silly to believe because it can also be spotted easily by taking a look at some random player stats. We should not ever forget that online poker is played much faster than conventional poker, especially if a player decides to play in more than a single table. This explains why you are more likely to see more difficult combinations than when playing poker at a table with fiends.
Another concern that many people have is about collusion. I can tell you that this case is not 100% a lie, it does happen sometimes but it is nothing serious that is going to affect your games. It’s like someone overcharges you at the super market for 20 cents on a 100 euro/dollar bill. It’s nothing and I don’t even care about it. First of all online poker rooms can spot such weird behaviors between two or more players. If you sit at a table with another player often then you should know that they are going to investigate your account and the other player’s account and that there are many ways to spot cheaters. They do not necessarily need to have the same IP address to be spotted. Playing pattern changes when playing with another player can be recorded and analyzed with software that does this particular job. I even know a played who was given back some money by his online poker room when two other players were found to exchange information secretly while playing on the same poker table. Therefore there is no reason at all to worry about.