Official Poker Site Data Analysis and Discussion Thread

[MicroBob]

Originally Posted by 1p0kerboy

You're interpreting the results wrong FOR THE FIRST TIME I think.

I've made money in all-in pots. But I've made 51 buy-ins less than I should have over this sample.

Point taken (and fixed your post!!)
Getting an overlay on all of those of course will just make you way LESS than what you SHOULD have gotten.

So you have bottom 0.25% over the 750k hands.
And then the next sample of 100k hands or whatever just happens to be in the bottom 2% as well.

Having a 0.25% followed by a 2% is really really slim. And I really doubt this just HAPPENS to be happening to you and am far more inclined to look at whether one's style of play actually CAN make a difference on these calcs.
On it's face it sounds ridiculous since you are just looking at the equity AFTER you've gotten it all-in and are done betting and it does make sense that there should be no skew at all to that. That's why everyone believes those things are so legit. Because it makes logical sense that we can just dismiss the 'evening out' aspect of folded cards after the flop, etc etc.

But I think it's even more ridiculous that you just happen to be in the bottom 2% or whatever pretty much over and over like that.
And also think it's ridiculous that Stars would be tinkering with the cards in just that way.

So of the 3 somewhat ridiculous options I think that my preferred ridiculous option of the pokerEV thing being slightly off (and that one shouldn't accept the results from that as 100% accurate) isn't that far out there.

[MicroBob]

the steam - You don't understand the graph.
It is not including the times you just steal the blinds with AA.
It only looks at the hands AFTER you get it all-in and whether your equity is running up to par or not. Your post is not relevant at all really.

[1p0kerboy]

Originally Posted by the steam

Mathematically poker EV is correct but there are simply too many factors that can determine winning and losing.You may flop a set and win a tiny pot then 2 hands later another guy flops the same set against someone who has top pair and someone who has a flush draw and takes down (or loses)a huge pot.Next round you flop the same set against someone who lays down an over pair and take down another tiny pot when it would have been huge had a different player held that overpair.You flop that same set again this time against a guy who is willing to go all the way with his over pair but he just lost a huge pot to a bad call so instead of having $2500 he has $700.

So this guy making a bad call on say a gut draw and getting there affected your stack by $1800 even though you never played against him in a hand.You raise to 3-4 times the size of the bb with AA and only win the blinds.3 hands later another guy makes the same raise with AA and he runs into a big stack with KK or someone makes a huge steal play with QJ,so your profit on the hand is $75 and his is $6000!! When you would both play the hand the exact same way.

A friend of mine would get completely pissed when he'd get premium hands in a lower stakes game.His reasoning was you only get AA,KK,QQ,AK so many times in life and he didn't want to waste them in a 5-10 game..Conversely if he played small and got no good hands he would be happy because he now reasoned he would get good cards in the 25-50 because the law of averages owed him.(I know,insanity)

Math can tell you how many times 77 should beat AK in 10,000 hands or how many times you should get AA in 42,000 hands but there are simply way too many things that can affect winning and losing in poker.There can be no formula for that

Sigh.

So many people don't know how the program works and it's so hard to explain it to them.

The program calculates your equity in the pot. Sometimes it is big (when you are way ahead). Sometimes it is small. The program tells you how close you came to reaching your equity.

It doesn't matter how often you get your money in good or bad. It tells you how much you should have won ALREADY TAKING THOSE OTHER FACTORS INTO account.

[the steam]

I hadn't even looked at that graph I was just trying to point out factors why people would think online poker is rigged.

[the steam]

Even though I personally think it isn't

[MicroBob]

1p0kerboy - I agree that others don't understand and that that is the intention of the program and that it is mostly accurate.
But is it 100% accurate? That's the question and I think it's a fair one.

When myturn is getting stuff like being 5% off where he should be on all-in's (almost positive he said this) then I start to wonder what the hell is going on too.

[1p0kerboy]

Originally Posted by MicroBob

Point taken (and fixed your post!!)
Getting an overlay on all of those of course will just make you way LESS than what you SHOULD have gotten.

So you have bottom 0.25% over the 750k hands.
And then the next sample of 100k hands or whatever just happens to be in the bottom 2% as well.

Having a 0.25% followed by a 2% is really really slim. And I really doubt this just HAPPENS to be happening to you and am far more inclined to look at whether one's style of play actually CAN make a difference on these calcs.
On it's face it sounds ridiculous since you are just looking at the equity AFTER you've gotten it all-in and are done betting and it does make sense that there should be no skew at all to that. That's why everyone believes those things are so legit. Because it makes logical sense that we can just dismiss the 'evening out' aspect of folded cards after the flop, etc etc.

But I think it's even more ridiculous that you just happen to be in the bottom 2% or whatever pretty much over and over like that.
And also think it's ridiculous that Stars would be tinkering with the cards in just that way.

So of the 3 somewhat ridiculous options I think that my preferred ridiculous option of the pokerEV thing being slightly off (and that one shouldn't accept the results from that as 100% accurate) isn't that far out there.

MicroBOB

There's probably a decent chance that pokerEV isn't 100% accurate. But for sure it's close. As mentioned by Fozzy I think there are a couple of different ways to arrive at these calculations.

I've run really, really bad this year. Whether my results are in the bottom 1% or 2% or 5% it doesn't much matter and it probably won't change anything if we were ever able to accurately pin it down.

I'm not blaming Stars for my bad luck. In fact, I think I'm just the 'lucky one' who ended up in the tiny left corner on the bell curve. Actually I'm outside of the curve because my results are outside of three standard deviations.

If a site were able to manipulate results of the cards once the betting is done I hardly think they would be stupid enough to do it to the extreme.

But the point MTTR was making was that the regular players (and by this I mean the grinders who are pumping out a ton of hands) seem to always perform badly (not ridiculously badly like me) on these calculations as a whole and that seemed a bit weird to him (and me also).

I think me posting my graph took the conversation away from that main point.

I'm not saying that Stars put me in the bottom 1% of possible results. But a little manipulation with a little bad luck could have caused that.

So the new graphs are over 889,353 hands, 21,616 of which were all-in at some point.

[NoLimitLeagues]

if you guys want to prove that a site is rigged, its very easy. simply observe the mtts/sngs at Cake Poker. Track any hand that has exactly two players all in prelop. If it is two overs vs a pocket pair, track which hand wins. For all other all in pre hands with exactly two players (non-coinflips), track if the favorite or underdog wins.

I have done this numerous times in the past 3 months and the underdog has won 76% (150 hands), 78% (265 hands), 71% (176 hands), and 82% (224 hands). I was watching a friend in th $5r last night on cake, tracked 42 hands with this criteria, twice the best hand won.

I havent totaled up all my coinflip situations but the overcards are about a 65-75% favorite so far.

[Devilboy666]

To check if PokerEV works proprerly:

Take a large database (say 10 million hands+)
Order the players by number of hands played and pick the top 1000 or so
Run each of their histories through PokerEV and get their normalized outcome range
Plot all of them on the same graph
Check that the graph is centered around 0 and normally distributed

[MicroBob]

Actually I BELIEVE THAT I'm outside of the curve because POKEREV SAYS that my results are outside of three standard deviations.

Fixed again.
Sorry to harp on this semantic thing. But I think this is a more significant possibility than you realize.
You are 3 SD's off ACCORDING TO POKEREV.

I would hazard to say that there are a lot if tight players who are 3 SD's off then is realistically possible if they did the same thing you did and took such a large sample.
If that were true then I really dismiss the possibility that you just happened to be running super-bad just like everyone else because that many people being 3 SD's off or whatever would be WAY unrealistic. Probably like billion to 1 type stuff after you get enough players who are ALL 3 SD's off.

Again, this is all really warped estimating and I don't know if all the tighter regulars are running that far off. But if we did a study and found this to be true then that would sure be interesting in determining the accuracy of this pokerev thing OR determining that Stars really does have it in for their regular players.

But the point MTTR was making was that the regular players (and by this I mean the grinders who are pumping out a ton of hands) seem to always perform badly (not ridiculously badly like me) on these calculations as a whole and that seemed a bit weird to him (and me also).

And me too. I think it's really noticeable and really weird.

I'm going on the assumption that the Stars cards are fine and that the bit about 'these calculations as a whole' might be incorrect.
He's going on the assumption that the calculations as a whole are 100% correct and thus the cards on Stars might be incorrect.

There's probably a decent chance that pokerEV isn't 100% accurate. But for sure it's close.

My point is that 'close' isn't good enough for a large sample where that teeny change makes a bigger and bigger difference the more you hit it over and over again.
For all I know, 99.9% accurate could end up yielding super skewed results after 800k hands or something. I don't know.

This is similar to why it's profitable in the first place. You have a smallish advantage over your less-skilled opponents and you hit that advantage over and over and over again to eventually get to a profit.

After 800k hands this bit about pokerev maybe only being 'close' could become a bigger and bigger error until, after a while, we get end results that are further and further away from correct.

Yes, the difference is ever so slight for individual hand calculations so that it doesn't matter at the time.
Just like our advantage is slight from one hand to the next so that it doesn't really matter at the time (I don't play just one hand with the expectation to actually profit).

[MicroBob]

I think this could be especially true for a guy like MTTR in a sample of 6-max shortstacking for example where he gets it all-in quite a bit (not sure how much of his sample included shortstacking).
He pushes with 33 on the SB and gets called with A7 by the BB. And the A7 guy seems to suck out so much more than it should on him.
Well, the CO and button folding (as well as MP and UTG) show a pretty high likelihood that they may not have held an ace.
Similarly, the fact that they did fold gives them a higher likelihood of having folded a 3.

This would explain why AQ vs. KK all-ins or something appear to be 'ace magnets'. Because if somebody else had AA then those two wouldn't have gotten it all-in in the first place or would have with completely different percentages against somebody with AA.

For a shortstacker like MTTR I can very easily see how this effect could be even more drastic and up even more.

[MicroBob]

Track any hand that has exactly two players all in prelop. If it is two overs vs a pocket pair, track which hand wins. For all other all in pre hands with exactly two players (non-coinflips), track if the favorite or underdog wins.

No.
There's still some bias there.
Every time two players get all-in with AK vs. QQ you absolutely know that every single other player at the table did NOT have AA or KK.

How much such a bias would effect the sample I don't know.
But this sample would not be 100% bias-free.
AK would almost certainly have a slightly better than expected chance of 'sucking out' on the QQ due to the slightly increased chance that there are more A's and K's remaining in the unused cards simply due to the fact that everyone else folded.

After time this sample might skew the results.

[MicroBob]

Originally Posted by Devilboy666

To check if PokerEV works proprerly:

Take a large database (say 10 million hands+)
Order the players by number of hands played and pick the top 1000 or so
Run each of their histories through PokerEV and get their normalized outcome range
Plot all of them on the same graph
Check that the graph is centered around 0 and normally distributed

No.
This would not work.
You do not know if there is total randomization of the tightness or profitability of these players.

I might think that the very top of the list of 'most hands played' may tend to contain tighter-than-average players of the group.

Maybe not. But you are assuming that there is no correlation between total hands played and whether the top of this group MIGHT be a tad tighter (24-tabling types who play 11/7 for example).

[MicroBob]

And therein lies my point.
I believe I am finding POTENTIAL (not definite) for bias in a couple other decent ideas to try to make such a determination.

It's really a minefield to try to figure out a TRUE way to make such a determination.

But the Cake Poker SNG one may really be testing whether AK vs. QQ is really a 45/55 proposition (or whatever) or whether the effect of card-removal (or bunching which is a term I hate) can have a significant impact over time.

The 2nd one really could be determining whether some of the tighter players end up skewing the results more than slightly looser players. And I definitely think that assuming that hands played of 1000 players will have completely randomized playing styles is potentially dangerous.

[Rek]

I'm starting to get intrigued. If it turns out there is a bias on Stars we may as well pack up and go home. This is the most trusted site out there.