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It was during the latter months of 2017 that Pennsylvania lawmakers passed a landmark gambling expansion bill.
The new law dramatically changed the gambling landscape in the state, allowing for the addition of new satellite casinos (or 'mini-casinos'), video gaming terminals, online casinos, daily fantasy sports, and more.
The bill also paved the way for online poker, making Pennsylvania just the fourth state to legalize it post-Black Friday following Delaware, Nevada, and New Jersey. (Since then, West Virginia has followed suit, and Michigan is poised to do so as well.)
The lengthy process of drawing up of regulations followed, which meant it wasn't until 2019 — in fact, not until early November — that online poker finally launched in the state with the debut of PokerStars Pennsylvania.
Early response has been positive among players in the Keystone State, but there's still a long way to go for online poker in Pennsylvania, and for the country as a whole.
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Play NowPokerStars PA Leads Way With Fast Start
Following a successful two-day 'soft launch' starting November 4, PokerStars PA went fully live thereafter. Early reports showed Pennsylvania immediately surpassing neighbor New Jersey in terms of traffic despite NJ's six-year head start.
As shared here, traffic monitor PokerScout recorded a 24-hour peak of 784 players on PokerStars PA during the first week of operation.
That was about four times the number playing on PokerStars NJ at the same time, and nearly twice the number of players on WSOP.com which can combine player pools from NJ, NV, and DE thanks to the Multi-State Internet Gaming Association.
During that first week guarantees were easily surpassed for all scheduled tournaments on PokerStars PA, with prize pools in some cases more than tripling those guarantees. Checking back in mid-December, PokerScout reports the 24-hour traffic peak had climbed to 895 players with a seven-day average of almost 500.
Less than a month after going live, PokerStars began its first-ever Pennsylvania Championship of Online Poker or PACOOP, a 50-event series for which the guarantees added up to $1.225 million.
That total was increased after the start of the series thanks to some events' guarantees being raised in response to healthy turnouts. While a few PACOOP events did end up having small overlays, by most accounts it was another case of expectations being exceeded with prize pools doubling and even tripling guarantees in some cases.
The PACOOP Main Event sported a $300 buy-in and a $125,000 guarantee. Ultimately that guarantee was easily surpassed thanks to 640 total entries creating a prize pool of $179,200. The winner, 'Gyea08', earned a first prize of $31,335.64.
All in all, PokerStars Pennsylvania earned almost $2 million worth of revenue during November, about four times its New Jersey counterpart.
More PA Sites in the New Year
So far PokerStars has had the entire Pennsylvania player pool to themselves, a primary reason for its fast start and impressive numbers thus far. That will no doubt change in 2020 as more sites should start to come online.
In Pennsylvania, PokerStars has partnered with the Mount Airy Casino Resort per the new law's regulations.
At present six other casinos also have submitted applications that have been approved by regulators, allowing them to purchase licenses to offer online poker in Pennsylvania.
They include:
- Harrah's Philadelphia Casino & Racetrack
- Hollywood Casino at Penn National Race Course
- Parx Casino, Rivers Casino Philadelphia (formerly Sugarhouse Casino)
- Valley Forge Casino Resort
- Wind Creek Bethlehem (via Sands Casino Resort Bethlehem)
Most if not all of these other casinos' online poker operations were once expected to launch before the end of the year, dovetailing other offerings of online casino games first allowed to go live in mid-July 2019.
(In fact, the entire process has moved much more slowly than anticipated — some initially had believed online poker would launch in PA by the end of 2018.)
When Harrah's Philadelphia does finally get in the game, it should present a foremost challenge to PokerStars PA. As a Caesars Entertainment-owned property, the Harrah's site will operate under the WSOP.com brand with software powered by 888poker.
It should also be able to join that multi-state player pool with WSOP.com sites in other states, increasing its overall liquidity and, one presumes, its attractiveness to online poker players.
Meanwhile partypoker is looking to get involved in PA as well, via its owner GVC Holdings partnering with Valley Forge Casino.
Online Poker in Pennsylvania and Elsewhere: 2020 and Beyond
The prospects for online poker in Pennsylvania would seem bright. With 12.8 million residents, PA is the fifth-highest populated state in the country.
It currently ranks as the most-populated state with legal online poker (ahead of New Jersey's 8.9 million), and will likely continue to hold that title for some time.
That said, New Jersey also started strong when online poker first launched in late 2013 before levelling off and then enduring a steady decline over recent years.
Monthly online poker revenue in NJ peaked in January 2014 — just a couple of months after launching — when sites collectively earned $3.44 million. Two years later the total began hovering between $2-2.5 million per month, and during the latter months of 2019 has tumbled down around $1.6 million, less than half its earlier high.
Meanwhile, revenue from other types of online gambling and sports betting continues to increase every month in New Jersey
All of which is to say, it is probably unlikely online poker in Pennsylvania will grow considerably, and indeed one challenge will be to avoid New Jersey's fate and continue to maintain the positive numbers of the first few weeks.
Even so, 2019 was a better than average year for online poker in the United States with Pennsylvania launching and two more states positioning to do so in the next year or two.
One hope for American poker players is that with each new state that legalizes online poker, others may become increasingly encouraged to do so as well. Such has been the case (albeit much more swiftly) with sports betting since the Supreme Court's lifting of the federal ban a year-and-a-half ago.
For now, though, like a poker player having to wait through a prolonged stretch of bad cards, American online poker players must continue to remain patient.
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Since the birth of poker on the internet, allegations have been widespread that “online poker is rigged”. Such accusations generally come from poor poker players, or those with insufficient experience to grasp the concept of variance. But yes, history has shown poker sites have rigged sites in almost every way imaginable. There’s only few I would trust anymore, and IgnitionPoker.eu (previously known as Bovada) will continue to be the best until dozens of state ran sites take over which will be awhile.
But let’s discuss the answer that more players feel they’ve been “robbed”. Say you go all in with big slick (Ace-King), and are called by Ace-Queen. You’re a heavy favorite, but on average you’re still going to lose 23% of the time. Even when you go all in pre-flop with pocket aces, someone with a smaller pair is going to beat you about 18% of the time. What many players can’t get their minds around is that little factor called variance, or the statistical measure of how your results will be dispersed. In plain English, the odds may say one thing, but it’ll often take a large sample size for those odds to truly even out. You may be a 77% favorite, but you could still lose that play two or three times in a row. Winning players understand odds and variance, and the difference between them, whereas fish just assume the site must be rigged in somebody else’s favor.
The reason most poker players lose is due to poor bankroll management. Let’s say you had $100 to your name, and I offered to flip a coin. I take 100% of your wager every time it lands on tails, but I give you a 120% payout if heads comes up. It’s a 50/50 proposition, but you’re getting an extra payout every time your side comes up. Surely this is a great deal that every poker player would jump on?
However, what if I told you that you’d have to bet $33.33 on each bet? With only a $100 bankroll, and despite the large advantage I’ve given you, it would be foolish for you to continue. That’s because there is a 14.3% chance that I’m going to win the first three bets, and you’ll then be broke.
Even if you happen to win the first bet, I’ll win the next four 6.7% of the time. If you win that first bet, there is a 3.2% chance I’ll win the next five. And if you’re up three bets on me, there is still a 1.59% chance I’ll win the next six.
This goes on and on and on. But the crucial point is that if you’re a skilled poker player who goes bust often, your failure probably isn’t down to you being unlucky. It’s because you don’t understand odds and variance, and are not properly bankrolled for the games you’re playing.
Do Poker Sites Need to Cheat?
Now that we’ve covered the reasons explaining why so many falsely believe that online poker is rigged, let’s look at the reasons why it isn’t (considering you only play at top ranked sites).
Let’s start with the world’s largest online poker site, PokerStars.com. This company is licensed and regulated by the Isle of Man, a British Crown authority. It was purchased for $4.9 billion in June, 2014, by the Amaya Gaming Group, a well respected Canadian gaming company. PokerStars also operates a live card room in Macau, China, and makes billions of dollars in annual profit without cheating. All regulation aside – and it’s pretty hard to simply discount the stringent regulations that govern these sites – why would a company risk these billions of dollars in revenue just to set up a rigged game? The answer is pretty simple – they wouldn’t.
Smaller poker sites, especially those new to the market, have everything to lose by attracting serious allegations from their players. It’s always important to do a quick search on a prospective poker room, just to look for any player complaints or issues. For that reason, we only have a few left who have realized it’s more profitable to run a legitimate business than rip off customers.
For example, a room called Pitbull Poker cheated players using “superuser” accounts, allowing certain users to see other players’ hole cards. The room only made it through a couple of years, and was dealt a fatal blow once the cheating allegations hit. Pitbull operated out of Costa Rica, a country that doesn’t require online gambling licenses from companies based there.
With larger sites, the risks usually outweigh the rewards of cheating, but that isn’t necessarily the case. Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet, two rooms that made up the Cereus Poker Network, had a similar scandal years before PitBull’s. The details of this scandal are still not fully known, but there are many indications that management was working in tandem with the cheaters.
Cereus, along with Absolute and UB, went down in the “Black Friday” indictments of 2011, when the US Department of Justice busted several large poker sites – including PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker – for UIGEA violations. PokerStars and Full Tilt (via a PokerStars buyout) repaid their players, but Cereus did not. The company is insolvent as of 2014, and owes players an estimated $50 million.
While the above examples might scare players off, the online poker world has come a long way in recent years, as have the fraud prevention and security teams. The era of superusers and cheating scandals orchestrated by operators are likely behind us. However, players should still be alert and watch for suspicious activities by operators.
So What About Cheating? Can an Online Poker Player Cheat?
Well, now we’re on to a topic that might have some substance to it. If you’re not careful with your computer security, a hacker could get access to your hole cards. Such a situation is highly unlikely, and would entail the hacker accessing the data stream from the poker site to your computer, and cracking the poker site’s extremely secure encryption in the process. In all honesty, if you were advanced enough to pull off such a feat of hacking, you’d be more likely to target the World Series of Poker, rather than picking on some poor schlep in their front room. Nonetheless, we can’t totally dismiss the possibility.
We would recommend not playing on public wireless internet connections. Using a secure wifi network from your home is highly advised. In truth though, even here, the chances of being hit are relatively low. The main concern would be that a hacker could access your password before it was streamed to the site, or could possibly get visual access to your monitor. It’s highly unlikely, though, that anyone capable of cracking SSL is going to be concentrating their efforts on poker.
In recent years, hackers have taken to more drastic methods. Thanks to laptop theft, high-stakes players at a 2013 European Poker Tour event in Barcelona were left with computers infected with malware. There was another incident during the World Series of Poker, a year later, where players had laptops and cash stolen from their hotel rooms.
Of course, these players were targeted due to their reputation for playing at higher stakes, but their story should be a warning to all players to be aware of their surroundings. Password protect your computers, and safeguard your poker accounts. If you begin playing at higher stakes, and become even slightly well-known, take extra precautions to avoid becoming the victim of theft or hacking.
What About Players Chatting on Social Media or the Phone?
This is called collusion, and it is the one area where cheating in online poker is a moderate concern. Online poker sites take collusion very seriously. Sites such as PokerStars.com have several security methods to prevent collusion. One of these methods is a charting system, where they log how many hands you’ve played with the same opponents.
If you’re playing with the same opponent more often than the mean, this may cause your account to be flagged by security. Your hands involving action with this opponent will then be run through anti-collusion software, to see if your plays were logical.
If the plays made little sense, and deviate from the norm – as well as from your usual style of play when not seated with this opponent – your account may be locked, and a manual review could follow. At most poker sites, if the audit reveals there is a high likelihood you were cheating via collusion, you can more or less kiss your ability to play at that site goodbye.
If found guilty, you may be subject to fines, and could potentially lose your balance and past profits. Depending on the amount taken, some jurisdictions will bring criminal charges against players for cheating at online poker. Civil suits can also be expected.
In the legally-regulated online poker markets such as Delaware, Nevada, and New Jersey, sites can choose their punishment for the player depending on the situation. The penalties can be light, but cheating at online poker site can range from a small fine to a class B felony. The latter comes with a potential prison sentence of up to six years.
Online Poker Sites
Not all collusion will be automatically picked up on, though. If players only engage in collusion a small percentage of the time, such behavior may fly under the radar. If ever you feel you’re being colluded against, stop playing, and email the site telling them of your suspicions.
If it is found (either now or in the future) that these players were colluding, and that you were the victim, any online poker room worth its salt is likely to refund your money. Your chances of getting compensation will be vastly increased if you’re polite, so write your email using a friendly, non-accusatory tone. Also bear in mind that it can be hard to conclusively prove collusion, so don’t assume you’ll be successful. Just be sure to leave a game once you believe collusion may be occurring. Poker sites are doing their best to keep the games safe and free of cheats, so leave it to them to take care of these matters.
Which Online Poker Site Is Not Rigged?
All in all, collusion should not be much of a concern unless you’re consistently being taken apart in high-stakes games by a team of professional cheaters. In the vast majority of cases, it won’t take long to catch these guys.
10 Best Free Poker Sites
Most people who conspire to cheat or collude against other players are also bad at the game. The most common type of collusion involves players sharing their hole cards via instant messaging applications. While this is wrong, and still amounts to collusion, it doesn’t provide them with much of an advantage. Many cheats will resort to such behavior only once they’ve tried and failed to win legally. For the most part, they’re harmless.
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If you’re looking for info on which sites are the safest to play at, you can read about that in our article Safest US Poker Sites.