Does Google likes to be cheated?

Since weeks ago, I’ve doing SEO for a poker website and as seo does, I’m trying to put them on higher SERPS.

On the strategy I planned, the first step was to change all html templates into a CSS version (the less the code, the more the text density). After that I also got rid of “iframe” and “frame” tags because we all know that Search Engines dislikes them in order to avoid hidden content or non-related content that will cheat them. We got a reward for our effort, after less than a week Google gave us a boost from page 9 into page 2.

After that, I started an analysis on my competitor’s websites just to learn from them… so I discovered something strange was happening…

By doing a search with the keyword “online poker” at Google, take a look at result number 2 (www.pacificpoker.com) and number 15 (www.888.com) which used to be number 2 and 3…. a week ago. But what are the weird things over those sites… Let’s compare Google’s cached result against the website’s source code…

If you are able to find the 7 differences and enumerate them you’ll beat the game and then you’ll discover an easy way to cheat Google by serving different content to search engines instead of content received by visitors. Of course I’m a little “upset” because they have being there for over 6 months as I heard from my boss.

I would like to know your comments about why the mighty and powerful Google’s algorithm admits these kinds of websites doing suspicious techniques against their guidelines.

A friend of mine said that Google may like to be cheated from time to time, just to put on a test or to confuse SEO consultants from some industries, by changing the way to rank pages using different combinations that can give them control on the demand, but some failures as those may occur. Is that true ? or should I say: “Are these Gray hat’s SEO examples?