Part I: Card Game Cheating · Collusion & Electronic Cheating at Card Games

Scam #3: Soft Playing

How it works

Two or more players who know each other deliberately play less aggressively against one another than they would against other opponents. This includes checking down strong hands heads-up when either would have bet against a stranger, or failing to raise with premium hands when a partner is in the pot. The effect is that colluders preserve each other’s chip stacks while freely attacking non-colluding players. Unlike overt chip dumping, soft playing is subtle and harder to prove.

Where it appears

Poker (all variants), live and online

On the record

Soft playing is one of the most common but hardest-to-prove forms of collusion. Many high-profile cases have emerged from online poker where data analysis revealed statistically impossible patterns of passivity between specific accounts over thousands of hands.

Published as a detection reference for surveillance, compliance and gaming-operations professionals. Thresholds and tuning are set by the property. Nothing here is instruction — the method is described so it can be recognised.