my freinds think there is are cheaters at the table- there are not.

[bholdr]

ok i sit in a weekly home game- NL with a 10$ buy- its more of an excuse to sit around and drink and *smoke* with our buddies. anyway, my freind, who hosts, and two other players in the game are convinced that we have cheaters- three guys that come together and usually win (they live like an hour away, so of course they carpool).

my freind, the paranoid one, claims that he saw them shuffling their chips in a highly suspect manner, specificaly, making stacks of 5, 10, or 15 chips and placing them on their cards and changing the order of the colors within those stacks. This didn't happen. i watched. any pattern in the stacking of chips was, IMO, the result of poker's usual OCD hubris. The night in question, they did clean up, however.

so paranoid guy and his cohorts are convinced that the stacking was, in fact, signaling. they claim that the three players in question were alerting the others as to who had the best hand, so they could 'get out of the way' or some such nonsense. i pointed out that if they were cheating, there is no real benefit to doing it that way, since they'd be splitting profits anyway. then they said, perhaps they are sharing their reads, or maybe they signal when they see sombody's cards. and i responded by saying who would trust somebody else's reads at this table? (they are all poor to terrible players, except a couple of the suspected cheats and I [which is why, i suppose, they are the suspects]) Basicly, they think that they were signaling with chips, but can't explain how that helped. an attempt to explain the backwards logic in their accusation left everyone pissed off with a headache- sylogowhatism? correlawhosit?
hmmph.

two of the suspects are good freinds of the group, and, IMO, their integrety is beyond reproach. the other is an idiot, incapable of playing even avarage, let alone cheating well. they have now heard of the suspicions, secondhand of course, and are understandably upset.

How do I convince everybody to, well, 'come back to the table?' (i wonder if this saying is rooted in poker). they are all decent people and our 'fun game' isn't so much fun without everybody. is there a good link, or something, explaining the mechanics and types of cheating, and how to spot it, that i may direct the accusers to? or is this a bad idea, to fuel their paranoia? usually they trust me on any kind of poker question, but not on this one (don't know why, they couldn't suspect ME of cheating, they know i don't need to [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]).