I originally attempted to post the below in reply to post #14, but I was blocked at work (they have a very sensitive filter for “gambling”) - RickJay has since covered some of it but a lot of what I wanted to say may still be relevant.
Sure, yes, wherever there is gambling there will be cheats. My opinion is that it is not possible to systematically cheat at online poker in a way that significantly affects other players, without being caught and banned. As such, although I haven’t done so in several years, I am happy to play poker online without worrying about it. If I see something really suspicious, I’ll report it to the site.
Your point about the rake hurting profit is correct for most players (I’m a losing player myself, lifetime) but is a totally separate issue. There are players good enough to turn a consistent profit even with the rake.
No, but you’d think even the most clueless criminals would do a little research if they were planning to cheat a highly secure establishment out of a large sum of money. Possibly they did, and found chip counts were not routine at this particular venue, hence it was chosen. But then they were caught anyway.
Possibly, after all it’s better to have one person make the money and the other not, even though it costs you two entry fees.
It’s a lot easier to have two cheaters each with a pocketful of counterfeit chips than to try and pass (real) chips between them during play - I’d say the latter is much more likely to be caught. And tournament chips can’t be cashed in - in fact, this is most of the reason you have separate tournament chips.
There’s always the Absolute Poker case. And the UltimateBet one. Had the Absolute Poker guy or the UltimateBet people, not been so stupid as to cheat blatantly enough to get a winrate several SDs beyond what even pros could expect to get, no one would probably have known.