Do you live in Dublin and need a job? If so, you might want to check out the ads for Full Tilt Poker. It seems they’re looking for everything from support personal, particularly with multi-lingual skills, to supervisors. You can always do a quick check for jobs at telegraph.co.uk .  Now, if you play poker online, you’re probably thinking “Full Tilt Poker is hiring? What are they up to?” Well, they won’t tell us, so we’re left speculating. But over the past few months, speculation about what Full Tilt is doing has proven to be more accurate than the reports coming from Full Tilt themselves. So, let’s look at the Full Tilt Poker story.

Full Tilt was one of the top online poker rooms in the world and then a year ago, they were one of four sites who had their domain names and bank accounts seized by the US.  Of those four sites, only PokerStars has managed to bounce back and into action. But the Full Tilt story proved to be a cautionary one. It seemed that Full Tilt had been using the money in player accounts to pay for operating costs. Now, money in an online poker account is NOT a payment to the poker room. It is the player’s deposit to cover their bets when playing. That money should only move from player to player as hands are won or lost. Or be used to pay entry fees for tournaments. The poker room is supposed to make money to run the operation by taking a “rake” or portion of the pot from each hand played. If the poker room operates this way, everything is fine. Think about it. In a live poker room, you won’t expect the manager of the room to walk over, pick up the chips from the board and leave an IOU behind.

When American players were forced out of Full Tilt, they did something reasonable and asked when they’d be able to get the money out of their accounts. Full Tilt said “we’re working on it.”  Sounds reasonable, you might think. After all, Full Tilt had just been forced out of the country by the US government, so may be US players weren’t their priority. True. Then players from the UK and EU asked to cash out from their accounts and they were told “we’re working on it.” This caused a bit of concern since unlike US players, UK and EU players were still putting money into their Full Tilt accounts. The Alderney Gambling Control Commission, which licensed Full Tilt, stepped in to investigate and discovered that Full Tilt owed about $600 million to players and that they’d been using money from player accounts to run the site. So there was no real money in those player accounts. Meanwhile Full Tilt was claiming that top players owed them money because they’d made loans to their pro players. And even small stakes players owed them money because when a player made a deposit, the company made the funds available before it was processed through the player’s bank. And well, sometimes they never balanced that out, so players had been playing on both their money and Full Tilt’s money.  Players weren’t ready to just take the excuse of “you owe us money, so we’re not paying you back” and Alderney revoked Full Tilt’s license until they could show they were a viable poker room.

News has been out that Groupe Bernard Tapie is taking over Full Tilt, so the ad for support people is an encouraging one. I can imagine that if they open back up, the first thing that they’ll have to deal with is players calling to demand their money back. So, I wouldn’t apply for the job unless you’re prepared to deal with angry poker players.

Bodog poker room and its American cousin Bovada poker have informed players that they can now request hand histories to see the hole cards (sometimes refered to as hold cards) of other players at their tables.  In many poker games, all players are not required to reveal their cards as part of the game. Players who fold during a game don’t have to show what they held and if a player out bets every other player and forces them to fold, he doesn’t have to reveal what he held.

Not revealing the hand is often part of a player’s bluff strategy. If the player bluffs the other players into folding but playing aggressively with a weak hand, it isn’t to his advantage for the other players to know this. Now on the professional player level, players eventually end up revealing their hands often enough to get a reputation for bluffing or playing it safe. That’s all part of playing in the public eye and playing the same players more frequently. If you play in a game at the local pub, you probably know who tries to bluff with nothing in his hand and account for that. But online play means that players are often sitting at the table with others that they have no acquaintance with and who have unfamiliar playing styles. To a certain extent, this can teach the player to play a stronger game and be prepared to go up against anyone. It’s no surprise that the winners of the World Series of Poker Main Event for the last few years have all been online players.  They learn to play against anyone and everyone and they are often practiced simply at playing for long periods of time. So, they do well in tournaments.

But there is a problematic side to playing poker online and one that online card rooms work hard to combat. Since the players don’t know each other and no one can see what the other players are doing, player collusion is a constant battle. This happens when a group of players decide to work together to force pots up and often to make sure that a specific member of the group wins. Collusion can also be used by a group to keep other members in a tournament by betting up a pot then folding to “donate” chips to a player who’s low in them. Other players tend to consider this cheating, but since they can’t see the other players and can’t see the hand the other player folded with, it’s hard to determine.

Which is why Bodog and Bovada have both made the decision to allow players to review the hand histories and see the hold cards of tables they played at after play has ended. This means that if a player feels that some people at the table were making strange moves, he can check to see if their hands show any signs of odd betting and odd folding. He can then report that to the casino who can check to see if there is a pattern with certain players working together.  The ability of players to monitor this helps make them feel more in control of the situation and in the end, everyone gets a better game. If you’re looking for online casinos, like Bodog, that are open to UK players, check out http://www.onlinecasinos.org/uk-casinos/ for safe and reputable casinos.