Poker sites don't need to cheat. They make enough money. Been playing more than a decade with over a million hands online. The only incidents I know are the UB super user.

I play on Ignition. Played on Bovada. I have had downswings and the evidence supports the losses or my own fault. On Bovada and Ignition I have been a solid winner @ the NL $100 and NL $200 NL games for as long as it has been up.

But.....

At the start of 2017 I have had a massive downswing 10 BIs over 6000 hands. This is nothing like I have experienced before. Not in terms of amount of BIs but in terms of the sheer percentage of bad beats all in post flop ahead. I am not being bluffed more than normal. I check my hands the next day. I am losing almost all my allins ahead vs a single really bad player. The decent players are not the ones handing me the losses.

I will say this is the dynamic shift I have been seeing recently of people getting tricky and slowplaying a lot more combined with variance. Some hands I have lost the absolute least only because of my skill and their foolishness. I have adjusted to the slowplayers.

But it is extreme to the point I am actually questioning it due to it starting right on Jan 1st. I checked my December 2016 and it was normal.

I feel like I am playing the devil.

I just put this out there. IMO this is just variance and a shift in patterns from players. But it is well beyond the extreme of every downswing I ever experienced in more than a decade playing online.

I noticed Ignition's traffic seemed to drop after the switch. More regs less rec players.

What is your point here? Asking seriously because I too am having the worst downswing I have ever had. It all started around the first of the year as well. It is uncanny how badly I have villain crushed and then they somehow get the miracle runners or river card they need.

My post is serious. It happened literally after the new year. Right now it is ~8000 hands and I am at -11bb/100. I am not worse because I smashed a big hand for 3 buy ins. It has been my only big winning session of the year.

I have played on Bovada ever since they allowed note taking. They gave me $200 to play and I cashed out thousands. I had to actually deposit for the 1st time in a decade on a poker site (beyond initial).

I have a large database I keep track of information about hands I play, general player tendencies, and results from different situations. Yes I am that anal.

Every single column is way off the mark. It seems almost all losses are from very bad players. Of course the better players and myself don't really tangle.

I know ignition lost players during the transition because the player pool dropped. But my ability to win money since September has not...... until Jan 1st.

I am not saying it is some super user account because the bluffing frequencies of my opponent's have not gone up. I also know 8000 hands isn't a lot. But it is the severity across all columns. When I have a bad streak usually it is due to one or two factors. Like losing a few more big pots all in that I should have won. Or a string of smaller pots where they happened to hit more. But this is different.

But I am seriously questioning this when normally I am the 1st one to defend the poker sites. I might actually pull out.

Just contacted another very good player with a solid winrate on that site who plays Zone Poker. He also is having a down turn since the start of the year. I believe he plays more than I do online.

I had a serious downswing, 30K+, from late December 2015 until late July 2016. I lost in every conceivable fashion and it is infuriating. I went on a two month tear last fall and seemed to either be way ahead with caller/s on the flop or come from behind runner runner. I recovered almost 2/3s of the loss. I'm part of a private poker group and we post/share hands a lot. I had quads 6 times over the course of a couple days during that run. Thanksgiving through New Years was ridiculously good to me and since mid January I am getting smacked around like crazy. It occurs at all stakes on down to the $3 and 5 games. It drives me nuts.

Obviously a coincidence, but I get beat up the first couple months of every year it seems. Last night I had four games that I got knocked out of with crazy runner/runner cars all within two hours. No joy in seeing others go through the same grief, but it makes me realize I'm not the only one.

Spoke to someone I know in the industry. They say they are a good company. I am still chalking it up to absurd variance like I had been hexed.

I've given Ignition 3 chances and every time it's so depressing:

- You can only play 4 tables
- The action is so slow it feels like I could mail the cards to my opponent and get a similar number of hands in
- Anonymous tables pretty much offsets any edge I would have had from the "soft" field
- Takes a ton of steps and research to get your hands into any database to see if you're getting screwed or not which is next to impossible to do anyway due to anonymous tables

I was a big winner on Stars, big winner on Tilt, and big winner on Merge. For whatever reason I've been a small lose on Ignition.

Everybody was a big winner on stars and full tilt :-)

No they weren't and I also listed Merge post Black Friday. The only site I'm not up is the shadiest one. Could just be a coincidence but regardless I think Ignition is the nut low.

Hate to break it to you but 10 buyin super standard swing in poker( 20-30 buyin even standard )I've lost 10 buyin in 3k hands before, granted I play lots of poker. Also I hate bovada and they screwed me over about a year and a half ago. No experience with ignition but considering they are bovada they are a scum of a company offering little to nothing to its players. .

People still make a killing on Ignition. Check out people on twitch. Watch their sessions and then look at their PT4 graphs at the end. This one dude, AndyTheTimid, has pretty much a full wall of green (a.k.a. crushes every session) at 200NL.

I think what it comes down to is people don't play the same way at Ignition that they do at other sites where you actually have usernames. The reasoning is obvious. You have to adjust or play on a different site.

As for the super user comments, I would say it's possible. I've seen some people sitting on 1K big blinds and crushing it almost every hand making every correct decision on a lot of tables. I just avoid tangling with that person and crush everyone else.

All I am saying is it would not be the first time someone could see others hole cards and get away with it, while ****ing over all the players on the site. Who knows could be Russ again

I know what's super standard. I have experienced a 3k hand downswing on Bovada. I was just saying statistically for what happened when I looked at the possibilities it was off the chart like I have never seen before in my life. And it was a combination of statistics that all dropped.

Races, big hands, 75% ahead losses, etc, etc, etc. Then specifically on Jan 1st?! That was just too weird for me not to notice. And I do incredibly well at the game.

Like I said... I am chalking it up to variance. I have played for 13 years and I have never experienced this swing in this fashion.

As for the play? Now I am not up to what PS or other sites allow for HUDs. Last I knew HUDs, with the right scripting, basically told players how to play. All you needed to do is read the HUD and interpret the data. So this took a decent player up to a much higher level of experience.

Bov/Ign plays more like live play. People have to enter in their bets. There is no HM3 HUD with super stats. This makes the game very different where the skill difference is more of a difference.

If I am better than my opponent OTB but he has 150k hands on me that says I am raising 22% of my hands in the HJ and I fold 75% of the time to a 3b he can very accurately take advantage of that when the HUD says "hey he is raising too many hands and folds too often, 3b bluff more".

Now go to Ignition where you have no idea who is in the HJ except he seems tight and aggressive. Much harder to 3b.

Live play even different casinos you have to adjust to the field in specific ways.

4 months after my last post....

Same results 2 stakes lower. Can't win @ $100 NL, $50 NL, $25 NL and I won well in 2016 within all of those stakes. A sudden and complete shift in luck as of exactly Jan 1st.

I must be the unluckiest guy.

I did play SNGs and the frequencies in those feel normal.

Not saying but..... 2 good players I know have already left Ignition for the same reasons.

I play mid to high stakes PLO on the site and ever since they switched to ignition its pretty obvious that the fish got replaced by a stable that works together and wouldn't surprise me if they all share cards.

why would the site randomly switch cash game lobbies to this format where u cant table select and pick who u play against. No one likes these new changes so why would they keep them?

I was thinking the same thing. They also shifted the rake up Jan 1st.

The cash games don't feel right. It has gotten to the point I am starting to feel everyone is bluff raising me on the turn. But when I look up my fold it is correct the correct frequency of the time... so lets say 14 of 15 turn raises are value and 1 in 15 are bluffs. It is correct to fold 100% of the time. So that's what I mean.

If I had to speculate some stupidity I would say they are getting rid of the more winning players via deck manipulation. And since you can't record the hands in a database..... I am just speculating here.

I don't even want to go to ACR with the HUDs. What a ****ing nightmare having some prick have mega detailed stats on you. Then me using HM3 on it with the lag on my PC. No thanks. I'll stick to live play.

Do you use holdem indicator or anything on ignition winky? That might help your results. Im a sng player and as you said I havent noticed any difference this year.

Ignition does allow you to download all hand histories with all hole cards. Can very quickly form a statistically significant sample when you have every instance. I think the games have suffered a bit because all the software issue and removing sportbetting, but if really seems off, seems worth a day to download all hands and go through it.

and do what? To make what he wants to out of statistics he probably can't even interpret correctly so he can come to the conclusion that most fits narrative? If he doesn't trust Ignition, he shouldn't play there. Nobody here's going to care about the results, nor will Ignition.

It is never in a poker rooms best interest to cheat.... never. Makes no sense. But it doesn't take much to make a winning player a losing one. Just have them lose one extra big hand every 400 hands.

I have recorded a couple weird things..... People hitting 2 outs is way off.... including myself when all in in 3b pots. I have hit more 2 outs this year than I have all last year where I played ~40k hands online. And I barely play online now.

My 12 out draws or better are hitting 20% of the time and I have over 50 samples.

Last year $100 NL and $50 NL. I was over 10bb/100. It took a lot of data analysis and 3 years to get to that point. January I was -4bb/100 in both..... I even dropped to $25NL in which I am -7bb/100. But now I think much of the loss is due to rake increase.

And granted all this weird **** has affected my perception of what I can expect. For example one day almost always when I bet the turn I got raised and folded. That impacts your expectations. Only looking at the HH the next day kept my sanity which showed they hit or slowplayed every time. But a scenario like that now impacts how some other players play at you. You look weak even though you are making the right fold and they play back costing you more. I had an incident like that at the casino this week. I kept folding to turn raises to players who just...don't... bluff and this guy raised my river bet when the board was paired and straighted. A guy who never bluffs. I had TPGK. I almost folded but considered that my image was so bad at that point that there was a chance his bluffing frequency was higher than normal and the odds I was getting... he had bottom pair no draw for some stupid reason.

One thing I am noticing is that many players are incredibly slow to act. Which is very weird. I mean like taking 5-10s to act. Sometimes it's 1/2 the table. I have no problems. Many of them have good player stats. You can only play 4 tables at a time so I have no idea WTF is going on.

There is a difference when you are being out played and when something is off. And due to checking hand histories I am not being exploited enough that my folds aren't right.

I have made a lot of money on Bovada for years. Now all of a sudden I don't have a winning month since January 1st? Very weird. I actually had to deposit for the 1st time in a decade.

How long needs to pass before a winning player that the site turns into a losing player (and continues to lose) becomes a losing player in the site's perspective?

Obviously some players that used to be winners become break even or losing players as the game advances or some changes to the player pool take place (ie: Black Friday booting Americans), and most of those players tend to not believe that could happen to them, but the site would in theory have to differentiate from the now proper losing players from those that are winning players that continue to lose artificially, due to the site targeting them for some reason.

We had one app claim his 4 year losing streak over 15,000 games on Stars was just due to bad luck for instance (he even said that if he just won more coin flips he would have won more money - quite the revelation), so players can be very good at not accepting reality at times.

If this was gradual I would know it is me and I would 100% agree with you. This was literally overnight. December was my best month in 3 years of escalating winrates. Then 1st day of the 1st of the year was a loser and it literally hasn't stopped. I won 81% of my tables in 2016. in 2017 I have won 27% of my tables.

Just like my winrate kept going up on Bovada year to year steadily via hard work.

$200 NL I stopped playing in 2016 because my winrate was slowly going down. The fish dried up completely. 2015 there were many regs, some decent, some crappy, and about 3 fish per table. By the end of 2016 1/2 fish per table. So it wasn't worth it anymore. I made way more per hour @ $100 NL. Not necessarily that the regs were better but with no fish it is still hard to make money at a table of regs. That is normal.

This **** isn't even close to normal. I'm always thinking about things and I just thought of one. I have noticed a dramatic increase in people slowplaying hands like AA and KK preflop in spots they shouldn't online.

Like limp, limp, you raise, call, AA calls behind, call, call, call ..... and I own myself with JJ. Maybe bad luck and **** like that has cost me more.

I went overnight winning the max I could to -5bb/100 across both limits. I just actually worked it out on my sheet. Wasn't sure before on the exact numbers except I only saw red.

I know it takes so little so change someone's winrate. I have a friend in which we play heads up for fun SNGs. He is better than me. We split the matches.

But in cash games he makes a good amount more than I do. A ridiculous amount actually. It is tiny mistake differences. Maybe I it's what I said above and I am running well below average on top of it then add tilt.

It is just not normal. I have bad streaks live but they just don't last for thousands of hands.

Odds are it is something simple like the games got harder/changed, and not much more, but in the end it is your choice to play where you want, though I would suggest not playing at a site that lacks your trust.

The slowplaying KK/AA thing to be honest is in the whatever category that any person can fill with dozens or hundreds of ideas if they try to find them. One person we work with is convinced he can never be lucky on a Monday, so we just say stop playing on Mondays then if it makes him feel better.

In the end the odds are that it is much more likely to be a change in the players (fewer donks) along with your play than the room deciding to target you with some sort of awkward doomswitch, but again in the end it is your choice where to continue to play.

A lot of players that play on Bovada also simultaneously play on other sites.

I'm not really sure how this means you're not being exploited somehow.

You could be a 7bb/100 winner in the games you play and still break even for 50k hands. It's not "normal" in the sense that it doesn't occur that often for an individual player, but it happens all the time.

How many hands have you played this year?

Exploited - Ok lets say the pot is $100 and you bet $60 on the turn and get raised to $200. So it's $140 to win $360. The player raising either has complete air or has you crushed. He needs to be bluffing 38% of the time (if my math is right) for you to make this call. Lets say he is bluffing only 15% of the time. Then folding every time is correct. That is what I mean.

Hands this year? Been playing cash on and off due to this madness. I get raped, take a 2 week break. repeat. It's been 9k hands split between $100 NL to $25 NL. I dropped to $25 to see if it was me. There are barely any competent players @ $25 NL.

I know about variance. But this is a drop off a cliff on a specific day non-stop that coincidentally been Jan 1st? I didn't suddenly be a 2bb/100 winner then one month a 10bb/100 winner and claim I'm a genius. It slowly increased over 2-3 years. Then it fell off a cliff the 1st day of the new year. I had bad runs in the last 3 years.

Today I played in the morning and had a very high rate of low odds outdraws with 2-5 outers in heads up or 3 way pots. I don't even count 9 and 8 out draws. Somehow I lost very little. Most of my money came from bluffing and bluff inducing not value.

Here is another if I was on PS or ACR where everyone has lots of stats on you.... I would 100% it's me. But Ignition is anonymous. Which is the thing I love about it.

Hate HUDs because they raise the skill level of otherwise incompetent players. There is no reason any player shouldn't be able to read a stat and exploit it. Like if someone is CBing 70% on the turn they are clearly betting too much and one can easily figure out a bluff raising rate to counter act that.

From what I understand about the HUDs from 4 years ago you can program them to tell you that it is likely this player is bluffing or not bluffing. Don't they now also tell you how this person plays specifically vs you?

No thanks. That's not poker to me.