There is little doubt that cheating goes on in poker games. In both tournaments and cash games, on the internet and in bricks-and- mortar card rooms, the full range of tricks are tried by the cheats.

Some can be almost innocent, such as "soft play" agreements. This means that a participant in a competition ignores the opportunity to knock out a friend or relation.

Others can border on the criminal. Teams of players can collude in a variety of ways. They can signal their hole cards to one another' they can raise and re-raise a victim involved in a pot to extract as many chips as possible' they can "chip dump" - deliberately lose a large number of chips to an accomplice in order to give him or her a big advantage. Other methods include marking cards, switching hole cards and colluding with crooked dealers.

But the poker scene is not quite as corrupt as described in the recently published book Dirty Poker: the Poker Underworld Exposed by the self-declared poker cheat Richard Marcus. The author clearly knows his stuff and his tome is a thorough investigation of almost all the scams available to the cheating brigade. But it is a bit wide of the mark in its estimate of how widespread the problem is. If Dirty Poker is taken at face value, one would imagine that every other game is bent.

Although he writes primarily about what he has observed in the US, Marcus implies that the European poker scene is equally corrupt. Nothing could be further from the truth. In land-based card rooms (as op-posed to those on the internet), instances of cheating are a rarity this side of the pond.

In the past decade, the number of allegations of cheating can be counted on the fingers of one hand. The truth is that in a live environment reasonably experienced players can quickly spot cheating, particularly if it takes the form of collusion. Just two or three out-of-line bets by the same players will arouse suspicion.

However, Marcus gave himself a point to make in Dirty Poker and nothing is going to stop him making it. Even the World Series of Poker is not spared. There is some justification in this, as it is well known that groups of players set themselves up as teams to divide up the spoils of victory - if there are any. And the discovery at the 2005 WSOP of counterfeit chips in the tournaments caused something of a security alert.

Dirty Poker (Undercover Publishing, priced pounds 10.99) is OTT but worth a read.

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