Am I witnessing the demise of online poker?

I started playing poker well before the poker boom took place. Before the world was introduced to online poker thanks to Chris Moneymaker’s amazing performance at the 2003 World Series of Poker. Even though I was familiar with online poker at this time -I use to play sparingly in the early 2000′s at sites like Planet Poker, Ultimate Bet, and Paradise Poker-I never considered myself an online poker player until about 2003ish when I started grinding away on Party Poker and the defunct CryptoLogic Network.

In fact, I remember the early 2000′s vividly, where most of the live poker players scoffed at the idea of a “fair” game at an online poker table, and honestly, after everything that has come to light in the past 3 or 4 years I’m starting to think that these “old-timers” were right, and online poker is indeed rigged. Rigged by cheating players; rigged by cheating employees at the sites; and rigged by greedy owners.

The latest head-scratcher is just starting to come to light on the 2+2 poker forums, where it turns out that William Hill Poker is not only allowing players to use poker bots, but is employing them as some sort of strange “prop” player for the site! The good news is you no longer have to worry if the person you are playing is a bot; the bad news is that these bots are actually winning in small-stakes games.

I’m not sure the veracity of these claims -from my own quick look into the matter it seems the T&C being cited as proof has to do with William Hill CASINO GAMES, and not poker… But who knows at this point.

The point is, I really don’t know how much shadier online poker could possibly become: If you can somehow manage to avoid the Chinese cheating packs, colluders, poker bots, multi-accounting and ghosting, hacker software and viruses, scammers and so on, the sites themselves may just close up shop on you, or freeze your funds indefinitely, or even hole-card you out of your entire bankroll.

Just five years ago the idea of an online poker site cheating its players was a laughable question, but after Ultimate Bet, Pitbull Poker, Full Tilt Poker, and now these bot allegations against iPoker skin William Hill (which makes it a network-wide issue) is there anything a random player could allege an online poker site has done that would not be immediately investigated? If a person showed up on 2+2 tomorrow telling a tale of an online poker site’s practice of allowing people to use their first-born child as collateral, the ludicrous claim would actually be given some amount of plausibility!!