I think it is 4 NL and you both played it terribly.

I don't either.

Beyond that, even our own personal stats are painfully hard to figure.

-What's my % fold to C bet?
-How many times have I been dealt pocket AA/KK?
-What's my win rate from the SB... BB?
-What is my overall win rate, and win rate this session?

On and on...

If there's nothing to hide, why in the world wouldn't you make ALL of these stats easily available to players for their own study/fun?

Again I go back to fantasy sports. In this era, people demand stats. Even free Yahoo leagues offer more stats than even the most hardcore player could possibly have time to dig into. CBS leagues change your stats for you in real time, practically.

It's not a manpower issue, these are simple things to calculate and store.

So why make it so hard to know what's going on with the cards?

Again... it's a bad look, whether from a pure gaming perspective... or a deeper view.

Doing this in such a way as to create more rake would require incorporating information about each player's skill level, tendencies, playing history, etc. Also, even with players not having easy access to all of their hand histories, one would still need to be careful of not making any manipulation obvious.

You think this would be phenomenally easy? LOL.

What are your tendencies when you flop a set?

What are your tendencies when your opponent hits the case K in a 2-handed pot and you had no clue?


Please. It's not that hard.

I have to agree with sound poker here. It's not that hard to have predetermined cooler hands set up. You don't need to know anybody's tendencies to know a boat is gonna get it in against a straight flush. Again I'm not saying that's what global is doing, just saying it's not as unrealistic as people try to make it seem.

It's easy even without hand histories. State exactly the way (or one way) in which you believe it's nonrandom. To use a concrete example, let's say you believe AA vs. KK happens more often than it should. In a 6-player game, when you have either AA or KK, the probability of a player having the other one is ~2.6%. Keep track of the number of times you get AA/KK, and the number of times that it runs into the other one. Let's say you see AA/KK 100 times in your sample. If it happens 15 of those times, you can pretty safely conclude that something fishy is going on. (You can do this more formally with actual statistics methods, but the general idea is not complicated.) The larger you make the sample, the easier it'll be to detect the shady behavior.

Whatever the way is that you think it's not random, it's the same idea. State exactly what it is. Compute the relevant frequencies. Observe and keep track of what happens, and test whether the difference you observed from what "should" happen is significant. This is Stats 101 stuff. But the key is that you have to specify the events BEFORE you test them. There are a bazillion weird events that could happen; weird events happen all the time everywhere. A vague sense that things seem off is never going to convince a person who disagrees.

Sounds to me like you're both proving that it's not as easy as you think, as you seem to believe that you want players to get all their money in more often. I thought the objective was to increase the rake, not decrease it.

Actually I never said that. While increasing rake may be a big part of it, if you were going to influence card flow, you would have more than just one goal... and likely, the biggest would be to increase deposits. Remember, Full Tilt went down because they eventually were running a ponzi scheme. Deposits became everything. So, there's more than just rake to consider, and more than just one way to influence how money moves around.

Again, we've all got 40 apps on our phones that execute more difficult algorithms.

This doesn't mean they are doing anything remotely like this. But for the sake of discourse, I don't think they would be hard to implement.

You disagree, and that's cool.

Well, that's a completely different discussion then. Adjusting an RNG to simply get everyone to shove their money in more often could potentially help a site bring in more money in the short term - but only in the short term, as the winners are going to be cashing out those same funds. But it would generate less rake, not more, so it would have to be done with the goal to bring in a lot of money over a very short term, while delaying withdrawals as long as possible, before shutting down and fleeing with everyone's funds. And I agree that would be a much simpler RNG change to make. It would also be much easier to detect, but if it's all for a short-term windfall, I suppose the site wouldn't care about that.

So I guess those who believe that this is something that is likely should be watching for a high frequency of coolers in conjunction with payouts stopping or slowing to a trickle.

Personally, I think there are very few poker sites that have gone into business with the intent of simply taking everyone's money. I believe all the high-profile cases we know of, where the sites were operating for years, wouldn't have been running with that idea from the beginning. Instead they got themselves into trouble, or saw trouble coming, and then decided to screw everyone.

Understood that you are just spit-balling. I just think you are underestimating the complexity of a rig that is designed to generate more rake. The best way to generate more rake by monkeying with the RNG would be to even play out as much as possible. Smaller pots are fine, and probably best, churning players funds at a high frequency, generating more rake. But that also requires tracking players' win and loss rates, and incorporating it into whatever algorithm you use to alter the deal. Far from simple IMO.

Yeah, I'm not expecting that we're going to come to 100% agreement on this, since it's impossible for either of us to prove our theories - but I feel that common sense and logic is backing me up.

Hey Bobo, what's the big idea introducing common sense and logic into an internet forum discussion?

This points to the argument I have had to the "there are lots of coolers to generate rake" people. If I was a crooked site that wanted to generate rake, I would be making lots of split pots. That way everyone's money stays on the site, while I siphon it off. I also would have uncapped rake if bigger pots helped me more.

Based on my logic I assume that most people who think 'x' site is rigged are most likely losing players.

And believe that almost all of them will deny they are losing players. They will back up their argument by saying their AA got beat on the river 3 x in one game.

It's interesting, some argued to the final day that Full Flush was legit and some of them will say X network isn't. Riggies are fun

I think this statement overuses the words "most" and "likely".

This guy maintained that Pokerstars was rigged (why he did not play there for years), but Lock Poker was fine, since he had a great run there (until he tried cashing anything out...)

Riggies create some weird worlds, but that is because they are the main character in their minds.

That is definitely my experience with GP, as well. In the three or so months that I've played casually on GP, always single tabling (so, it was probably 7,000 hands), I saw AT LEAST 20-30 quads. My understanding is quads should appear once every 7,000 hands or so? So I was seeing x20+ quads.

I mean... I know what I saw is definitely possible, but... just the way the cards run out feel different than other sites and/or live games. Like you say, the swings feel awkward or forced, definitely not like Pokerstars/ACR/live. And I've had HORRIBLE down swings on Pokerstars before, so I'm not complaining just because I've had downswings on GP.

Before coming to conclusions about rigging, it's probably best to have the slightest clue as to what odds even are. I'm not sure how those odds could even make sense to you.

Here's somewhere you could start:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poker_probability

Not exactly sure what you're criticizing here. My source is from: https://poker.stackexchange.com/ques...-statistically

If you're talking about the "x20" figure, yes, I know that's not the way you're supposed to look at probability. I was just simplifying things.

Also, thinking the RNG is broken is not the same as thinking the game is rigged.

Again, if it makes sense to you that you should only see 4 of a kind once in every 7,000 hands, then you probably shouldn't be trusting your judgement as to what seems or feels like strange results. That's not a criticism of you personally - most people don't have the greatest intuitive grasp on odds. But if that's the case, probably best to make sure one completely understands the odds before coming to conclusions.

So I assume you've based your assertion, rather than on the tables I gave you a link to, or on the wizardofodds tables linked to by the first person who responded in that other forum, on his grossly incorrect interpretation of said tables. It would appear he's taken the provided probabilities, and turned them into percentages, so his numbers are off by a factor of 100. The table "Texas Hold 'Em -- High Hand Probabilities -- 6 to 10 Players", shows that with 9 players, the probability of one player having quads is .013183 - or in 75.9 hands. Not 1 in 7,000 - 1 in 76. Now, if you instead meant that you personally have received quads 20 or 30 times, of course that happens less often - 1 in 595 I believe would be the correct number for that.

Of course the assumption is that no one folds, which won't be the case in real life, so the numbers in reality will be a different - but not 10-100x different.

If you read further on the same page, you'll see at least one other person provided the correct answer.

If what I'm saying to you about the table doesn't make sense, think of it this way. Every possible hand has been provided. If you add up all the probabilities in any one column, they should add up to 1. If they were percentages, as that poster suggested, that would be 1% - so what hands come up the other 99% of the time?

Alright, I guess I misread the site.

I did play pokerstars with play chips for a couple of years, and I didn't see quads all that often, so the 7,000 figure seemed accurate to me.

But thanks for correcting me on the numbers. 1 in 76 seems extremely low, but I can't argue with the data.

In your defense, you weren't the only one. The first (incorrect) reply is what sent you on the wrong track, and I don't think anyone directly contradicted him.

I'd agree with that. But if we keep in mind that it's based on 9 handed and no one folding, it seems a little more reasonable. If you play 6 max, it would be a higher, tables being short-handed would make it higher, and people folding hands that would have become quads will make it higher.

Interesting you feel you didn't seem them that often on Stars, when I would assume that play money would see people folding a lot less. Again, unless you mean getting them yourself, which would be the higher number of 1 in 595. Not that it matters now; just musing out loud.

I played at Stars/FTP for probably a year before I was a winning player back in the day. First for fun, then got some coaching - and finally was able to beat 25NL and play 50NL competently. I'm guessing I played a few hundred thousand hands. Maybe more.

I've only played 18K hands at GP, but I've seen more ridiculous cards dealt and sustained bizarre runs of cards than the prior sites combined. It's cartoonish.
Yes, quads are a daily occurrence as are goofy 3 out river defeats constantly.

And I'm not complaining because I'm losing. I'm up around 7-8x my deposit and was more at one point. I will say... it seemed to flip the switch about 2 weeks ago and every big pot is a cooler now. Where that's going I don't know.

Again, it's all anecdotal. People here will call those who ask questions bad players, and yet this could all be solved by offering some reasonable way to look at card-flow/long term stats.

But GP doesn't want you seeing that.

It's up to you to decide why that is.

LOL. 18k hands is a tiny sample size.

For those of us that are winning players, is the game rigged for us?

I have no direct relationship with Global at all and have played over 100k hands and am up over $8.5k. If you're a hardcore grinder quads are going to happen everyday.

Ever heard the term "daily quads"?

I don't know why having this discussion always reminds me of talking to my teenage daughter when she's hysterical.

I've stated over and over that it's anecdotal and not a huge sample size. I also compared it to a much larger size from other sites. Did you not read that part?

I'm "us," guy. I'm a winning player at GP and I was a winning player (at least in my later days) at FTP.

Did you miss that too?

Again, your word is anecdotal and based on your personal experience.

So is mine.

We both are winners at the games we play at GP. (You play more and higher stakes apparently.)

You feel there is no shady dealing going on, I'm not so sure.

Here's the bummer though man... neither of us can prove it.

Why? Because GP doesn't want you having that information.

Wonder why that is?

They do it so you can tell more anecdotal anecdotes and compare it to memories of other anecdotes in an anecdotal manner, speaking anecdotally that is. You can't prove otherwise.