mirage casino :: poker bets
Players in a poker game act in turn; in clockwise rotation (acting out of turn can negatively affect other players). When it is a player's turn to act, the first verbal declaration or action he takes binds him to his choice of action; this rule prevents a player from changing his action after seeing how other players react to his initial action. Over the course of one session pick a single player and watch them play. You are looking for patterns and habits in the way they play--for example do they often bet out on their draws? How do they play their very strong hands and their very weak hands? Do they try to bluff a lot or do they almost always show down the best hand? It's important that you concentrate on one person for a while and not try to evaluate everyone's play at the same time. The player should be careful about the online poker cheating while betting the game.
Count the pot. You can't utilize pot odds if you don't know how much money is in the pot each time you act. A method you may want to try which can help you get a good estimate.

Count the pot by the number of small bets. Ignore the small blind--it isn't going to affect the pot odds much, and if those couple of chips would have made the difference on a particular draw then it's probably not worth making the draw in the first place.
Hand histories from the tournament (which is standard practice for online sites). In this case, Absolute Poker “accidentally” did not send the usual hand histories, but instead sent a file that contained all sorts of private information that the poker site would never release. The file contained every player’s hole cards, observations of the tables, and even the IP addresses of every person playing. (I put “accidentally” in quotes because the mistake seems like too great a coincidence when you learn what followed.) I suspect that someone at Absolute knew about the cheating and how it happened, and was acting as a whistleblower by sending these data. If that is the case, I hope whoever “accidentally” sent the file gets their proper hero’s welcome in the end.
Then the poker players went to work analyzing the data — not the hand histories themselves, but other, more subtle information contained in the file. What these players-turned-detectives noticed was that, starting with the third hand of the tournament, there was an observer who watched every subsequent hand played by the cheater. (For those of you who don’t know much about poker, anyone who wants can observe a particular table, although, of course, the observers can’t see any of the players’ hole cards.) Interestingly, the cheater folded the first two hands before this observer showed up, then did not fold a single hand before the flop for the next 20 minutes, and then folded his hand pre-flop when another player had a pair of kings as hole cards! This sort of cheating went on throughout the poker tournament.



