Safety of Online Poker Sites

[bc]

Are online poker sites legitimate?

An avid home player, I’m interested in playing poker online. However, I have reservations concerning the legitimacy of online poker sites. After all, it would be fairly easy to design poker software to make customers believe that they were playing against other human players when in fact they could be playing against “computerâ€Â

[Dave B]

I would recommend searching some of the history on these topics at this forum. Here are a couple of point to consider:

1) there are cheaters/collusion online
2) no problem getting cash back (firepay, iGM, others work well)
3) dishonest sites...maybe, but they dont have to. PartyPoker has 10k-25,000 players at a time...or over 300K-500k per hour in rake. That is over $1 billion per year in revenue for a relatively low cost business. They dont have to cheat to make a boat load of cash.
4) learn to play online...it is WAY different than casinos or home games
5) tournaments either multi table or sit and gos make cheating for individuals of little value

Dont mortgage the house, but give it a shot. If you get frustrated, ask questions here and hopefully some of us w/ some experience can help. I play about 1-2 hours per evening and find that I make about $20 per hour playing $30+3 NL buy in sit and goes and $3/$6 limit. I dont like NL cash games online because I think that it is easier for 2 people to collude on a table.

[DASH7]

Check out John Vorhaus' book "Killer Poker Online". He adresses some of your issues and may alleviate some of your concerns and he also talks about how online poker is different than live poker and some of the pitfalls that are easy to fall into.
I shared some of your fears but after playing on a few sites, reading forums, and reading JV's book my fears have been put to rest somewhat, but not totally though.

[brewcam]

I haven't read the previously mentioned book, but I play online alot (I play live alot too, but when I can't go to a casino, I play online...ok, I'm obsessed

I have found that you can make more money by playing the sit-n-go's (and playing them well) than by playing in the low limit real money games. There are just too many players who will call anything to the river and beat you. Yes, you can win from them, but you can lose too. If you can play the sit-n-go's consistently well you can make quite a bit (multi-table tournys are fun too, but harder to place in the money).