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Originally Posted by Burnin&Lootin
The geniuses who write these poker clients get around this problem by getting their seeds based on user interaction. For example, the seed might be the time (in milliseconds) when the player clicks the Call button, thus prompting another card to be dealt. This kind of code would be pretty hard to manipulate through user action. It's just too specific and the game happens too quickly.
I'm sure foul play happens by superusers and what-not (see UltimateBet Scandal sticky), but I don't think the reputable sites have any issues with their RNGs. If sites are abused, it is done by unscrupulous people, not by game-play glitches.
I am a computer programmer too btw. Let's do a thought experiment just to put our minds at ease. What if, just for the sake of argument, Stars had a perfectly good RNG, but chose to either shuffle multiple decks and pick the one they want at any given moment, or just keep running the RNG until they got a deck favorable to what they want?
I forget does Stars say they shuffle the whole deck ahead of time? If so this would be a little more comforting as it would be kind of hard to reshuffle the deck after the flop and hide that from any programmer who ever saw the system. Hard but maybe not impossible.
My biggest concern is that with normal operation they reshuffle what's left after the flop, then deal that. It wouldn't seem that hard to just keep reshuffling the deck until you got what you want. This would seem a much more likely way to rig since it would be very complicated to stack the deck from the get-go, as you don't know what bad players are going to do most of the time, and constantly coolering people with KK vs. AA would certainly show up on statistical tracking.
So how would they decide who to favor in the rigging? Well let's say, just for the sake of argument again, they would like to see people playing > 10 tables run bad, Europeans run good, new players run good, people who just came back from a long hiatus run good, people who have recently won a lot run bad, etc. etc. etc. PS could assign a score, say from -10 to +10 to each player, based on these factors. A brand new European one-tabler would have something like the highest score. 12-tabling US veteran Nit would get a pretty low score.
So it's not like the Euros would win all the time. But they could slant the bias just enough that they really have say 70% EV on a 60% EV flop allin. That would be enough to help foster the weaker players and keep them involved, while presumably robbing some from the big winners w/o actually killing them.
In theory, this kind of riggage would never show up on an aggregate card distribution layout would it? I dunno maybe suckouts favor certain cards, and new/bad players would need to suckout more often. But that could be offset when the good player doesn't suckout.
Now having said all that. Honestly I don't believe it would be possible to program a riggage system this complicated and hide it from most of the programmers. So pretty much all the main programmers at PS would have to be in on it. And you'd think someone would rat somewhere along the line. But man, it wouldn't totally blow my mind if some big scandal came out that PS was favoring certain players in their all ins. I can think of about 50 poker buddies that would get an I TOLD YOU SOMETHING WAS GOING ON email.
I'd really really really like to be 100% convinced it's not happening (so that I can go back to thinking God just hates me) either by aggregate card distributions or some other argument. I consider myself a reasonable person who can be convinced by sound logic. Josem?