For the world's millions of online Poker players, it's hard to turn around twice in a poker room without someone asking the question, "Can someone really use a tool to read my hand? This typically happens after someone at your table has exhibited near perfect play against a series of really wonderful hands that you had. It kind of makes one wonder, right?

1. Poker Odd Calculators - these "poker cheat" software programs collect the visual available card information at the poker table you currently play and give you feedback on how likely your hand is to win. Most often it will show you the pot odds, the position where you currently play.

A good poker calculator which is keyed to the brand of game being played might be able to show you mucked cards that have already been played. So from a historical perspective, you might be able to readily bring up back mucked cards and match them to the behavior of the opponent in order for example to pinpoint a player that generally never bluffs.

2. Poker Profile Databases - the best "open poker cheat secret" to gain advantage over your competition is to know their playing patterns and profiles. How often do they win, at what tables to do they win most, what is their playing style? Those questions can be answered with poker cheat databases that constantly collect publicly available data from the poker rooms. You can often buy software that creates an overlay over your poker room software. Not all poker rooms allow that, so often people run this kind of software on a separate computer while they do play and look up players as they encounter them. There is even software that alerts you to join poker tables that have a high amount of bad players in them. I would consider this a good poker cheat option.

Professional poker players, you know the ones that you see on TV but more to the point the urban legends that haven't had a real job since before you were born. Well these people really exist. And if you have a few hundred to play with and they have nothing to special to do, they may be idling at your table and picking up 1-200 dollars per hour. For that kind of money, they will be using aids to track anomalous behavior on your part. The most basic of those aids is straight up pen and paper, but it can get more complex than that. They will always appear to be reading your hole cards.

4. Poker Bots - those are programs (many of them are outrageous poker cheat scams) that automatically play poker hands for you according to given set of rules and behavior. Those that work well can be pre-programmed to operate out of the box or they can be finetuned by better players. It is said that they can sometimes help one to get over those "boring" periods in online poker tournaments where you stick to a "tight Tens or Better" playing style in order to make it into the later stages where you take over yourself.

Now that we have covered what can happen, why don't we talk about what can't.

So, did any of the above mechanisms look like they could really look at your hole cards? No, not really. The only person looking at your hole cards is your sweetheart behind you, so tell her to get off the cell phone with your friends, lol.