In an on-line environment, collusion, hackers and ensuring fair cards are key areas of concern with respect to maintaining games of the highest integrity.

Collusion
Poker players are always aware of the possibility of collusion. Collusion is when two or more players on the same table work together as a team, unfairly knowing each other's cards, and betting with this knowledge in order to maximize their team's profits. Collusion destroys the integrity of any poker game. Any player that attempts to collude at PiratesOfPoker.com will be permanently banned from our games.

We use sophisticated algorithms to identify, track and uncover collusion. Though not foolproof, we feel our collusion monitoring makes the integrity of Pirates Of Poker games higher than even those played in real card rooms. Our analysis includes automatic tracking of betting patterns related to the strength of a player's hand, and cross-correlating those results with other players at the same table to determine if they may be acting in concert with one another. In addition, management will thoroughly investigate all complaints registered by players suspecting collusion. Hand history recap emails are instantly available for all players and will show the exact betting of each game and the final hands of all players that called the river card. Hand histories will obviously not display any cards of players that folded since that is part of the integrity of any poker game.

Our goal is to prevent collusion and make Pirates Of Poker games the best, most honest and enjoyable anywhere in the world.

Hackers
Pirates Of Poker offers our clients world class security against hackers. All of the communications between the Pirates Of Poker server and the client program running on your computer are encrypted using the internationally accepted industry standard SSLv3/TLSv1 encryption algorithm. What this means is that your cards, your name, your address, your credit card number, your password, and everything else that goes back and forth is protected using the same level of security that a bank would use. Packet-sniffing by other players cannot be used to gain any sort of advantage.

Furthermore, each player's cards are sent exclusively to that particular player's computer. None of the other computers know what your hidden cards are, thus preventing an opponent from hacking their client software to determine your cards.

Card Shuffling
Pirates Of Poker is pleased to provide our clients with the added comfort of an independent third party review of our shuffling. We engaged the services of the London office of PricewaterhouseCoopers, the world's largest professional services firm, to review our card shuffling.

No deck of cards in any brick and mortar card room is ever shuffled as well and thoroughly as we shuffle our cards. Each game, the deck is shuffled 10 times with each shuffle moving each card somewhere between 1 and 51 times throughout the deck (10 passes at Knuth's full shuffle algorithm). There is no bias towards any card, any card patterns, or seats at the table. In fact, during our testing we have shuffled more than 21 million decks of cards and we have yet to find even one single deck that was shuffled the same way as another deck; each one turned out to be shuffled in a completely unique manner. We have another web page which describes more details about why we shuffle this way.

That's a great way to shuffle, but the shuffling algorithm is only part of a good solution. The random number generator used during the shuffling process is even more important. It needs to be based on unpredictable events and it needs to have a large enough seed and a large enough entropy pool to make it impossible for any player to have an advantage over the other players. Our random number generator is based on several independent non-predictable entropy sources that continue to modify the generator sequence in real time. Our random number generator is not reseeded for every hand using the time of day; any cryptologist would tell you that method is simply far too predictable to offer any security. We have another web page which describes more details about the importance of a good random number generator with a large enough seed.

Extensive distribution tables were analyzed to ensure the shuffling routine is of the highest integrity and randomness. It is.

If you have any questions with regard to any integrity or security issues, please do not hesitate to contact us.