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]).

[BigStick_25]

I would tell your buddies to relax its a $10 game relax I am sure your not getting hustled in a $10 game it just would be a waste of time for a group of 3 to travel an hour to try and scam everyone and when $20 a piece for their work. I can see it in a $100 buy in or something or a ring game but not a $10 tourney.


[img]/images/graemlins/cool.gif[/img]

[SCfuji]

seriously. tell your paranoid friend that he is being moronic, probably because he thinks he is good and lost his money to newbs.

[samjjones]

Let me get this straight: everybody in this game is horrible players except you and the suspected "cheats"? Maybe the players just suck and that is why they are losing?

[unloaded]

Eplain that they are getting cheated out of their money. Cheated by themselves. First, they are playing against people better at the game than them. Second, they are adding to the skill handicap by drinking while playing them. Third, the *smoking* is causing them to be paranoid and figure they had to have been cheated.
The best thing for them to do, if they want to play casually and party while doing it, is to look at it as $10 worth of entertainment.(Cheaper than bar-hopping or even a movie.)
If they want to be a bit more serious, they should play with a clear head, and do a bit of homework. They could probably even learn a bit from the "cheaters".

peace.
unloaded

[toots]

So, basically, you're saying "Me and a bunch of friends regularly get together to do drugs. After a while, some of them get real paranoid."

I remember this pattern from the 70s.

[bholdr]

i'm gonna print this thread and bring it to the game. you guys keep hitting the nail right on the head. very nice, unloaded.

[LALDAAS]

Toots [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

[GoneFishing]

[ QUOTE ]
So, basically, you're saying "Me and a bunch of friends regularly get together to do drugs. After a while, some of them get real paranoid."

I remember this pattern from the 70s.

[/ QUOTE ]

LMFAO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!

[img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img] [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img] [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img] [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img] [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img] [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img] [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img]

[Luskmonster]

I run a home game for the guys I started playing with years ago. Home games can be tough when there are a couple of players who "stepped up" and the rest still just play for fun. In my experience the only way to keep it going is to more or less ban tournaments and keep it dealer's choice, and long as the dealer's choice is a casino style game. I mean, the fight we had to put up to go to .25/.50 blinds from a .25 ante was ridiculous. However, we still like playing with the guys so we play for nothing and don't play too aggressively.

The problem with the tournaments is two-fold. One, everybody is so cracked out on TV that all they want to play (and mistakenly think they understand) are tournaments. Two, once a couple of the guys get serious about the game, if you're always playing tournaments, those few serious guys are going to end up winning almost all the time. Before long no one wants to play anymore and they blame the people that tried harder to win for taking all their fun away.

This is why the cash game must be enforced. There's almost no way to win all the money if the blinds don't go up over the course of the night. Good players are almost always going to win, but the bad player's money is going to last way longer than it would in a tournament where he's got his fuzzy eyes on the prize that he honestly has no idea how to get at outside of sheer luck. Not only that, but sometimes the weaker players have profitable nights, and that means a lot to them. Hell, even break even nights are good for keeping the action going. There's going to be none of that with these silly tournaments. Almost all the tournament home games I know, or have known of, peter out eventually.

I've mentioned to new guys coming into my game that I knew were power players to "maybe take it easy on these guys, we're going to play all night, they play for fun, and not that well, and if you beat them out of the money before midnight it isn't as fun, and besides you're going to be able to quadruple-up between midnight and 3am most of the time anyway."

You might also just tell the "cheaters" that they're outclassing all the guys in the game and it's taken the fun out of it for them. In a $10 game you're trying to have fun, not get rich. If the same people win the money every week that isn't fun, it kills the action, and will kill the game.

That's my experience with this, for what it's worth. I've been running a game exactly like you describe above for over three years, and it's still running strong.