Security & Safety In Online Poker

You know what really ruins fun? Worrying about all of your money being stolen by an anonymous stranger. Guess what stops you from being able to concentrate on a big hand at the poker table? Stressing that right that very moment, your identity could have been taken by fraudsters.

Neither of those worse case scenarios are very pleasant to think about but the reality is that you need to. Just taking a few easy steps before you go handing over all your bank details will reduce your risk massively.

Here are a few things you can do to keep yourself and your money safe when you play poker online.

Beware of unknown Sites
Only send personal details via secure pages
Check where poker clients are actually downloaded from
Check in-game security features
Ensure regulation and fairness

Below we’ll take a look at the major online poker security concerns and see what the best poker sites are doing to keep you safe.

Fairness

All the big poker websites are inspected at regular intervals and assessed for how fair and random they are. If any site proves to be dealing cards in any other way than completely randomly, the company will shut down and fined.

If the site you choose to play poker on is regulated, then there should be details in the security section about the tactics they use to ensure fairness for all players.

For example, PokerStars give some pretty mind-blowing details on their card shuffling policy:

“A deck of 52 cards can be shuffled in 521 ways. That’s 80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,404,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000 ways. We use 249 random bits from both entropy sources (user input and quantum randomness) to achieve an even and unpredictable statistical distribution.”

To give you some perspective; if one man sat shuffling a deck of cards once every second since the dawn of the universe over 14 billion years ago, he still would not have shuffled them that many times.

Keeping Your Personal Details Personal

All of our top most recommended online poker sites for South African players feature SSL encryption. Titan Poker explains their SSL encryption steps really clearly, “Titan…uses Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology on all web pages that contain your personal information. SSL works by encrypting all the data by using complex mathematical algorithms, to ensure we maintain the highest possible level of web security.”

A Final Word About Gambling Gangs

Once you’re content that your personal details will be kept safe and that the poker site you’re playing at isn’t ripping you off, you need to be sure your opponents aren’t either.

In the real world at land-based poker rooms, teaming up with other players to take advantage of strangers at the table is illegal. It’s the same online and you know that the most reputable poker sites are policing this because sites like PartyPoker take it really seriously:, “When you're trying to sit at a table you may, on occasion, see a message indicating that you are associated with a user already seated at the table. This happens when our system detects a close association between your account and another account at the table. This association is based on a number of parameters, and a system is in place to prevent any possible collusion by two people very well known to each other. This is a standard security restriction that applies to all of our players. We are not targeting your account in particular.”