After reading half this thread I'm sure the answer is no, but just to clarify: There is no affiliate program that provides rakeback for Bovada correct? I'm a long time player of 7 years (almost exclusively online) who has been grinding it out live since BF, and I just cannot take it anymore. Since BF i was timid to play on any site b/c i just didn't trust it, but numerous people have told me recently about "bovada". They say the cashouts are reliable, and to me, especially in the state I/and internet poker are in, thats all i care about. I just need some online poker in my life, ya know? So i will be creating an account soon. I just want to know A) there is no rakeback option with bovada. And B) Is there a better option out there right now as far as sites allowing US players? Thanks.

I'm assuming to play mostly cash games? Bovada has no rakeback at all and the tables are all anonymous. Cashouts are reliable and come in a reasonable time.

In my 7 years i've actually played most formats. Super early days i grinded STT's. Quickly moved on to full ring cash and stayed for a good while. Then when online cash dried up i transitioned over to HUSNG's. However, i will be looking to play cash on bovada for the most part. Do they offer HUSNG's there?

While reading this thread ive come across this anonymous feature. I assumed that it was just applied to some tables, i didnt know it was universal to all cash tables. What exactly does this entail? All user names are hidden/generic? Pretty brutal if so, but as i stated in my previous post; at this point i just don't care. I just want to play online again.

This leads me to another question i would like answered before i start up on the site. What type of games on bovada do you guys feel are the softest? Ie: FR cash, 6 max cash, HU cash, HUSNG, MTT...etc etc. ?

I joined this board for the sole reason of making the following statement, which I think needs to be made.

For a little background… I’m a middle-aged U.S. resident, and have a corporate gig for which I’m paid well. Accordingly, I have no desire to become a full-time, professional player, and I do not rely on any income I make from these pursuits in any way, shape or form. I play primarily for the love of the game, which I do take seriously.

Prior to Black Friday (“BF”), I was a low-stakes cash game multitabler on Stars (24 at a time), with a rig that included multiple screens, HEM, TableNinja – all the standard tools. I also had a professional coach with whom I worked in an effort to continually improve my game. I wasn’t a great player by any stretch of the imagination, but I was a winning player. When I started playing no-limit, I deposited $100. A couple of years later, I cashed out approximately $26K (immediately following BF – the only cashout I ever made). In the interim, I used VPPs to purchase all sorts of goodies – flatscreens, video/SLR cameras, an espresso maker, all that crap. All in all, pretty good for a hobby – but it was nothing more.

After BF, I tried to convert to live games, but quickly grew bored of the single table action. Later in the year, in dawned on me that, years earlier, I had made a very small deposit on what is now Bovada, which I never cashed out. In discovering the site was still allowing U.S. players, I downloaded the latest software, and logged into my account – et voila. A $50 balance.

I initially tried a couple of small sit and goes, which I never played before – and found them relatively easy to cash in. So I continued. Over the last few months, the $50 has grown to a current balance of close to $3K, through a steady progression of sit and goes, cash games and MTTs.

Not having the ability to use a HUD didn’t bother me so much in tournaments (single table or MTT), as the relatively fast structures didn’t allow for much full-stack cash game type of play anyway (at least from my perspective). I found that playing a standard style served my purpose well, retreated into the "most actions mean exactly what they represent" type of thinking, significantly reduced instances of bluffing and generally curtailed metagame type of activity, and instead focused on Dan Harrington-inspired tournament theory. Things were fine.

Then came the anonymity, and the remarkable backlash from the poker community. Honestly, I wasn’t terribly concerned with this initially, from a pure gameplay perspective. Since I wasn’t generally basing my play on the specific tendencies of my opponents (assuming most players on Bovada were fairly poor seemed accurate enough), and my standard approach was working well (my sng ROI, which I tracked using excel, was > 25% over about 600 games), I actually felt this might help me, as opponents wouldn’t be able to use sharkscope to identify me as a winning player at the tables. So, I marched on.

For all the time I played on Stars, I never once questioned the integrity of the game. I logged over a million hands there, and, well, statistics don’t lie. You can cut up any statistically significant number of hands any way you want using HEM, Pokertracker, whatever, and if you’re honest with yourself, the bad beats you experience on a site like Stars are in the context of standard variance. I never once suspected anything out of the ordinary.

I have to state the foregoing regarding Stars, because I simply can’t say the same thing for Bovada. At least, not definitively, as I’ve never been able to download Bovada hand histories for later analysis. But compared to my significant prior experience on Stars, there did seem to be an astounding percentage of action boards/situations. By this distinction, I mean obvious action boards (e.g., monotone or two tone with multi-connectors, etc.), or less obvious boards that hit competing players equally hard (e.g., set over set, with the underset turning quads, etc.).

I’ve seen a fair amount of commentary regarding this perception on a variety of message boards, and most of it seems to come down to the thinking that action increases the rake, which obviously benefits the house. That may be the case, but my thinking has always been along the lines of the following: if (and that’s a big if) a site with a relatively small flow of traffic (like Bovada) wanted to influence the games to their benefit, an alteration of the RNG so that it regularly benefits the underdog hand would be of greater benefit.

To the extent the rationale for this isn’t obvious… more players means more games, and more games means more rake. For a site like Stars, which had hundreds of thousands of players, this wouldn’t be much of a concern. But what about a site like Bovada, which now struggles to fill its complement of sit and go and cash game tables? If the strong players were able to easily feed on the weaker players, relieving them of their bankrolls, those weaker players would quickly disappear, resulting in a notable compression of the player pool. Add to that the current difficulty associated with getting money on sites like Bovada from within the U.S., and it should be clear why a site like Bovada would have an incentive to alter the game in favor of its weaker players.

What’s one way to accomplish this across the board? Figure out a way to program the RNG so that the underdog hand gets there more frequently than it should. Why? Well, weaker players tend to get it in relatively bad.

Now, here’s the thing: I’m not stating that I definitively think either of these things is going on. And I honestly don’t know if it would even be possible to alter the RNG so that it would have the systematic ability to accomplish the latter task (i.e., consistently interpret how to help the weaker hand improve). But even if all of the foregoing were occurring, at least it would be happening systematically – meaning everyone would be subject to the same software bias. The way I see it, the strong players would still win, but perhaps not quite as much. So I really wasn’t losing sleep over the possibility.

Cutting to the immediate moment… my perception has recently changed dramatically, due to the recurrence of a certain type of situation that leads me to believe any such bias may not be systematic, but rather, one which only positively impacts only certain players. I can best describe this by recounting a couple of specific hand histories. In the interest of disclosure (and as I’d like to protect my identity from anyone at Bovada who may read this), I selected these hands as examples from a list compiled by myself and a couple of friends who also play at the site – and none of us are necessarily directly involved in these hands (although we were, by necessity, at the given tables when the hands occurred, lest we would not have access to the hand histories).

Example 1: Tournament Hand History 2580673876
600/1200 Blinds, 60 Ante
Player A: UTG+2, 27397 chips
Player B: UTG+3, 13670 chips
Pre-flop: Player A raises to 1800, Player B reraises to 4590, Player A calls.
Flop: Jd5c4s. Player A checks, Player B bets 9020 and is all-in, Player A calls.
Turn: 9s.
River: 6s.
Player A shows 8s7h.
Player B shows KhKc.
Thoughts:
Approaching the end stages of the tournament, and 3 of the 4 other remaining players (besides Player B) left to act after the initial raise had stack sizes at or below 8K, meaning the initial raise was both (a) inviting a shove from a smaller stack and (b) really didn’t have all that much to gain in the way of implied odds. Very interesting that this player would choose to raise with this hand from EP given the scenario, call a smallish (but committal) 3-bet from an apparently very strong hand and call a flop shove for another 1/3 of his starting stack with nothing more than a gutshot.

Example 2: Tournament Hand History 2573962545
10/20 Blinds
Player A: UTG+2, 1500 chips
Player B: Button, 1500 chips
Pre-flop: Player A raises to 100, Player B raises to 330, Player A raises to 1500 and is all-in, Player B calls.
Flop: 4s5d2h.
Turn: 9d.
River: 6d.
Player A shows Kd3d.
Player B shows QhQs.
Thoughts:
First round of the tournament, all-in preflop with K3s. I’m not sure there’s anything more that really needs to be said here, except that I did just notice the relative similarity of both boards in these two hands.

I need to clarify something at this point. I’m not concerned with these hands because of the “bad beat” component. What I am concerned with is a pattern I’m discovering involving players who are playing hands in such an unreasonable and irrational manner (and being rewarded for that play), that it seems as if they know, beforehand, what cards are coming. Please keep in mind, while these are just two examples, I’ve seen instances of this occurring over and over again.

I don’t remember the specifics regarding the Potripper situation over at UltimateBet. What I do vaguely remember is that the general consensus was, if he had approached things with a modicum of intelligence, it would have taken players much longer to discover what he was doing – assuming he would have ever been discovered. In other words, it was this person’s ridiculous pattern of play that ultimately exposed him.

Unfortunately, on Bovada, we have no way of identifying who the individual players are who making this type of play, so there is no way to identify a repeating pattern attributable to a single player.

In further consideration of the foregoing, the following thought occurred to me: if one goes to the “Game Play Settings” tab of the “Preferences” table, one can check a box titled “Rabbit Card”. This particular option allows players to “rabbit hunt” – which, as we all know, is to find out what card would have come had a hand not ended prematurely due to everyone folding.

Let me rephrase that: the Bovada programmers have developed and incorporated code in their software that allows players to see cards that will be dealt before those cards are actually dealt.

I have no knowledge as to whether this particular function is present on other sites. What I do know, however, is that any other sites incorporating this function do not hide the identities of its players. How difficult would it be to expand on that code so that the values of all board cards could be seen before the hand is actually dealt? Does anyone really think the “auditors” at a firm like PWC would be able to readily identify this code (unless it was highlighted with blinking Christmas lights)?

Is it really a stretch to imagine that the internal Bovada team consists of players who have the ability to regularly access this functionality, and play their hands accordingly? Given that most of Bovada’s traffic seems to center on MTTs these days, what kind of opportunity would that present Bovada? If you, as a player, had that advantage, how frequently do you think you would make final tables – or win tournaments outright? The answer, of course, is that you could literally do it every time. How much of the prize pool would Bovada be able to retain for itself by pursuing this course of action?

Hey… at the end of the day, I realize this is pure speculation. I have no evidence demonstrating that Bovada is engaging in any illicit activity. But when I see recurring patterns like the ones I’ve described above, and I’m given no means of further investigating whatever suspicions I may have (due to the inability to download hand histories or identify my opponents), I feel I have legitimate cause for concern.

Beware the Bovada Rabbit Cam code.

*

Edit/MH: Post copied to Rigged thread for responses.

Also really quick: I googled "rakeback on bovada" last night and came across this link: http://topinternetpoker.info/online-...oker-rakeback/

This is just a level right? Can anyone confirm this site's claim is legitimate?

I have rakeback there from Rakeback.org (poker.org). But I set up the account through them over a year ago (almost two). I don't think there's any way to get rakeback now, on an existing or a new account. That link says they do, but the date of publication is 2010 (looks like they just changed the name of the site in the title recently), but perhaps they still have a way in.

It's tough to judge the action you mention. I remember seeing someone shove all in with 7-5 offsuit for $100 into my KK on Sportsbook.com 5 years ago and flopping a straight - but I never played there again.

I also got an eerie feeling playing on Carbon way back, but I was also getting 85% dealt rakeback so it didn't matter too much.

I do think there's a lot of hands that don't get seen on sites where the players are tight. I've seen the same differences in live play - from the tighter games where someone folds QQ on a king high board to a flop raise in a limit game, to a game at the Bike where someone open shoved under the gun for $200 with 7-3 offsuit, got called by my JJ, then flopped the boat.

The only way to prove anything would be to screenshot/take notes on enough hands to notice a deviation, but of course that would never happen on such a small site.

I'm suspecting a level.Did you read this at the end of offer? "Want some more options? Why don’t you take a look at Rush Poker from Full Tilt."

Btw anyone use the free $10 bet for the playoffs this week?

I lost $1205 in 30mins though bovada.com today and this is not the 10th time this has happened. I'm thinking this site is frikkin rigged. Has anyone else used this site?

My other lines are all doing well besides this site btw.

Unlucky, what limit? Oober downswings happen to you at all sites eventually.

Bovada still allows only 4 tables at a time, right? Seriously, what stakes were you playing? If you say $50 NL, I would have to say seriously rigged!

what do you mean by lines? Are you even talking about poker?

GET BETTER!

I am new to the forum and not sure the rules and how exactly everything works so please bear with me as I'm learning and figuring the rules of the forum

Well I like most poker player's from the US that played on Fulltilt and other sites that have yet to send us money feel highly uncomftable depositing money on another poker site. But the thing is I like the fast action and playing up to 4 tables at a time and obviously playing at a casino or underground private games the action is just not the same I even went as far as offering the pit boss of the poker room at Foxwoods $2,000 to allow me to play 2 tables that are right next to each other but unfortunantly before he even gave me a answer all the players at the table said no...

Well I been reading up on some reviews that are still excepting US players and there are several including Bovado the old Bodog and from what I been reading the only complaints are ones that I can live with such as cant pick the seat you want there software at times is slow things like that,

I have yet to hear or read anything negative about there cashout options and deposit options infact most review sites say there withdraw's and deposit's are easy and smooth.. But I would like to hear opions from people that actually play on the site and see if they are trusted or not?
Thank you and I look forward hearing all replies.

Is this you?

Bovada loves sports bettors not poker players. With that in mind and also considering the language used in OP, which one do you think he is?

I want to respond sincerely - but to be honest as soon as I read anything about the RNG or "action boards" it almost instantly invalidates your post - probably why no one has answered you yet. I will skip the RNG thing, as you can post that in the rigged thread. For reference: Before the switch I had over 700K hands on Bodog, nothing indicating anything out of the ordinary when compared with my FT and stars hands.

Regarding your rabbit cam thing - I am confused. I was under the impression the rabbit cam shows what card WOULD have been dealt AFTER the hand is over. I have never seen it show the card before the hand is over, so I don't get the connection your trying to make.

And if your point is that a programmer and/or poker site has the means to cheat its players - then duh. Obviously this is always possible on any site - especially non publicly traded companies.

You did bring up a great point, and that is w/o hand histories you can't prove or disprove cheating. Solution: STOP PLAYING ON BODOG / BOVADA THEN. That is what I did. To play on a site anonymously w/o hand histories you need to have some faith in the site. Which clearly you don't. My suggestion is to just withdraw every penny you have as even if your not being cheated as it is obviously bothering you enough to write this post, so safe yourself the mental anguish and only play on sites with HH.

What buyin level do you play?

Take a business writing course man. Submit crap like this in the corporate world and you'll be looking for a job.

wow thanks for the essay Jeff....there are tissues in the lobby...dry your tears

For me I ran super hot in December thusfar in Jan it hasn't been too great but mostly from a combo of runbad/playing poorly

I'm still playing bodog after the update. Strictly cash games.

I will be honest for the first 3 weeks I was break even slightly losing with the new format. I found myself getting more tilted due to the timing out of other players, an increased level of short stackers, and just overall much crappier gaming experience. I gotta stick with Bovada though since the cashouts are legit.

I've finally pulled myself back together and winning again. I did however notice that gutters are getting hit on the turn very frequently. Turned set over set comes out a lot more it seems. It appears that Turned set to complete a gutter comes out more frequently causing both players to get it in. It just seems like I see a lot more coolers. I don't think the site is rigged towards one type of player over another as i have been on the good side of the coolers and the bad about the same amount of times.

It just seems like there are way more coolers than before. This can also be due to the fact that anonymous tables are skewing my perception and also I do not have a HUD to really go over hand histories and review my sessions. Just something I've noticed.

I will give bodog credit though. I've been playing poker on there for years and cashing out. With the anonymous tables change I found myself lurking in the sports betting section and donking away some of my poker roll..... LOL..... ****ers.

^^^ I've noticed a lot of coolers too. I just play SNGs but think some players are playing above the buy in they should and getting lucky at times. It evens out more than likely because the style some players play is not profitable over a long period. I play 6max and it seems like people will put their chips in with bottom pair and turn or river a set. It make the SNGs easier when folks do it over and over because luck runs out.

Maybe luck does run out. But some people are luckier than others. I think that is why some people win lotteries multiple times. Then again it is hard to determine if it is luck or if some people are just blessed.

A couple of things I like about Bovada:

- legit payouts
- very solid bonuses
- unique SNG options
- anonymitity feature

Things I don't like:

- absolutely terrible software
- limited multi-tabling
- no way to "chop" on a final table
- high "lag" time
- backwards player action feature
- tournament lobbies don't say how many players remaining
- selecting "fold" or "check/fold" option is hardly functional