When the World Wide Web was first becoming commercialized in the mid-to-late 1990s, many surfers were wary of shopping online and entrusting their credit card numbers to someone they didn’t know in a location that was hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away. Many surfers were even less willing to provide checking account or credit card information to a gambling site hosted outside the United States, particularly because there was no way for the players to verify that sites ran honest games or that they weren’t a scam. Many online poker rooms are licensed by the Mohawk Council of Kahnawake, a Native Canadian territory, so there is the potential for a licensee to lose its permit for cause.
Assuming the games are on the square, which seems a pretty safe assumption in light of the money an online poker room can make legitimately, there is still the potential for systemic problems, such as predictable card orders or players teaming up against you, that give other players an unfair advantage. In this chapter, we’ll show you how players have attempted to hack the system and what you can do to protect yourself.
