I believe the aposite expression is: 'w00t!'.

(I wonder for how long.)

Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzt.

WRONG!

Determining just how often you would expect a rare event to happen is one of the fundamental purposes of probability maths.

really long.

Without reading through this entire thread, can someone tell me if there are many graphs posted? I'd like to see some hand history graphs of 500k plus hands from those who insist there's nothing at all wrong. Surely, we should be able to gather up well over a few million hands from winning players that show a +bb/100.

I've probably played over a million hands myself and I'm sure I'm on the right side of zero, but I stupidly didn't save my hands when I bought a new computer and again when I switched to HEM.

I don't doubt you can beat the games, but it's just my opinion that PokerStars is more of a rake racket than anything else. I truly don't think I'm up what I should be and I don't know many people who are. I'm willing to concede that the games are tough and edge is small. But if the games are as clean as many here claim they are, I would think we'd be able to just post a bunch of graphs and end the debate once and for all. I also understand that this is far from conclusive, since graphs can be doctored. But I trust people like qpw and spadebidder. A few graphs showing a +.8bb/100 win rate through 500k hands would ease my mind to the point where I won't waste my time wondering anymore. I doubt I'm over +.5bb/100 when 4+ tabling. Two or more tables, I think I'm very close to being just shy of 1bb/100. So about it.. Can we get some graphs posted?

I'm on vacation and not at my home computer so I can't post them now, but if you remind me in a week I can post some lifetime graphs that show my winrate in BBs. I've only played like 500K hands lifetime, but my winrate is about 10bb/100 (5PTBB/100).

Tx. That would be great. But please tell me you're a NL player with that win rate!

Also, and more importantly, Spadebidder has posted some preliminary data in his huge billion hand study of some general card distribution that comes out according to expectation.

The general card distribution, I believe, is more important than any one person's graph in determining whether the RNG is rigged.

Hahahaha, yes of course, although I started out at nano and micro stakes LHE. I think my winrate was really high there too, but it was a limited sample size. Regardless, it was on the Crypto network pre-UIGEA, which PT3 STILL doesn't support hands from. So those won't be included. The last 80K hands have been PLO too, mostly HU.

limit poker in 2004 you have a set and play against 3,x people
limit poker in 2009 you have a set and play against 1,x people

you should loose in 2004 2-3 times more than in 2009....but you loose them close the same....

So I open for 3xbb's (450) from MP in a MTT today with K J

Guy beside me to my left makes it 800, everyone else folds.

He had just raised over 1-2 limpers OTB, checked the flop (in position) and folded to a smallish bet on turn, so I think he's likely to do the same.

Flop comes K 7 3

I check, he bets 450 into a 2025 pot. I call. Pot is now 2925

Turn = T

I check, planning to raise if he bets, which he does - 600

I pop it up to 1800 and he calls. Pot is up to 6525

River comes 9 and I bet 2100

He calls and my Kings are better than his pocket Jacks.

at this result he states, "Figures you'd hit your 3-outer."

Those wacky Lizard People always doin' people dirty!

I don't think card distribution tells the whole story. No one is doubting that AA gets dealt the statistically appropriate number of times, or that flush draws don't hit what they are theoretically supposed to (at least I don't doubt this). What DOES still nag at me is whether these draws are hitting the appropriate number of times in significant pots against certain players.

For instance, if my hand has an 80% chance of holding up heads-up against a 20% hand, I have no doubt that it wins right around 80% of the time overall. But I'm not convinced that it wins 80% in ALL pots. I seriously suspect that the worse a player is and the more significant the pot size, the more this 80% drops to some lesser figure.

Now I'm the first to admit that this is nothing more than an intuitive 'feeling' I have. Intuition is very often wrong and I certainly don't claim it's conclusive. But it would make sense to me if PS is looking to generate maximum rake and keep the losing players in action just a little while longer than they have a right to.

So in the end, the 80%er still wins right around 80%. You're still up on these situations. I just wonder if I'm up what I should be in these situations. Like I said in an earlier post. It's not what seems like an improbable number of 2-outers and runner-runners sucking out that bothers me. It's where this money goes when they DON'T hit that I don't understand. And/or why it's so difficult to beat players who are getting their money in that bad.

Again, it could just be my own lack of understanding as to what's going on. Maybe I'm giving it away somewhere else, like getting bluffed too often, etc. There easily could be a perfectly good explanation. I just don't know what it is yet and I've been playing online for years now. It bugs me when I don't understand something. I've worked hard on my game and have managed to improve my results by quite a bit for these last few years online. It turns out there were legitimate reasons why I didn't do well before and maybe there's a legitimate reason why I can't do even better now. I'm just looking for some answers is all. I thought by people posting their graphs, it might prove useful in enabling skeptics like me to concentrate on something more productive.

We should have an over/under on percentage of rigtards in this thread who would've said or thought the same thing, and who would've played the jacks the same way.

EDIT: Unfortunately, many people doubt it. You sound more like a skeptic than a rigtard, which is good. I'm a skeptic too.

If the equities were changed in bigger pots, then that would show up in the EV tools (running good in small pots but bad in big pots). If worse players had a unfair advantage created by rigging, then the best players would consistently be running way below equity. FWIW, the simplest way a rigged poker site software would do this would be to change all equities in a hand so that they are closer (e.g. an 80/20 will really run at 65/35), which you said yourself that you don't think they do this.

Is it possible?

How is it going the 1 billion hands analisys?


BTW the Superbot theory is flawless!!! So it must be happening.

How many unknown players you see at the tables are just new poker players in that room or just players that went up in level, or down. How many of them are just Superbots that are there not to make anyone lose in the long run, but just to get more rake to the site, so they can have extra profit?


How would you be able to detect a superbot?

Oh yeah and here's an easy way to test the theory of big stacks winning more than their share in tournaments: play a HU SnG with your testing partner, have one of you be the designated big stack and the other the designated short stack, have the short stack raise/fold first hand so stacks are uneven, then on the second hand have both of you go all-in. Rinse and repeat until you have a legitimate sample size, test how each person is running using some EV software.

While I may not know the answer to this question, I do know that it has nothing to do with rigging the RNG. There are other threads discussing botting or make a new thread to discuss this potential problem.

How could you know this without knowing opponent's hole cards that were folded when they didn't draw out? So for instance, you have data that shows an opponent hitting a 2-outer 300 times over 50k hands. This means nothing if you don't also know the number of times he missed his two outer and folded the river. My point is, you need to know when he missed as well has hit, no? Or am I missing something?

This would only be true for the TOP dog, since even the best players often have opponents who play better than they do (at least at times). Again, if we have software that can profile players, you can bet the sites do too. So for example: I have an edge on player 'B' and he wins slightly more than his fair share against me. But you have an edge on me, so I win slightly more than my fair share against you, and so on. In the end, my equity looks about right and so does yours, but we each still could be missing some.


It could be far more subtle than this. Instead of 80/20 it could be 75/25. Even a 5% increase over time would enable a poorer player to hang in there just a little longer than he should, and gaining a little more rake from everyone. It wouldn't have to be anything drastic. The sites could simply tweak the equity ranges to the point where (I wonder) if it would be noticeable at all. That's my question... Could this be found out? There seem to be enough math gurus here that could explain to me once and for all whether this would even be possible. If not, I can forget about it immediately.

None of the sites rigg a way that is easy to detect. I dont really care if poker is random in 2009 with todays RAKE and average playersbase poker is worthless for me. I played alot in the years that you get great bonusoffers...today any offer is a joke in relation to 2004.

But the few hands i still play for fun its easy to see that the sites create action for max RAKE. Added poker is crime here, cheating is usual, closing accounts, hacking accounts.

To play for fun backgammon is my prefered game, poker without winning 10-20$ / hour boring like hell.

Right, its not about rigging the RNG but it is about rigged room and the thread is about Rigged Poker in general.

By definition (my own) a superbot is a bot that is indeed a fake player the room put in the table to take the money to themselves, as the bot is working from inside the poker room algorithm it is easy for him to know when he will win or not in the SD.

From the outside we are going to see just a lucky donk winning.

With the superbots working the RNG can still work right, and every analisys will show the RNG is working fine in all situations.

The superbots are undetectable because we from outside cannot know if the unknown player sitting in our table is a bot, a cat, a superbot, or even a illusion (in the case we happen to have a brain tumor).

So you are going to ask the clever question: "if they are undetectable how can you say they exist?"


Indeed thats a 12 years < question, but Im going to answer it right now to save me time.

What I´m doing is to present a possible and theoretical way the poker rooms could manipulate the flow of money and rake generation and yet not be detected in any way by its users.

I dont know if that is happening but if it can happen we are facing a big security problem.

Go to a local live cardroom and ask around if people think online pokers are rigged.
Most of them will answer "Yes"

You can't know except for in pots that went to showdown, pots all-in before the river being the easiest to calculate.
Each limit has its own best couple of regs. And I bet they'd all be complaining about running way below expectation if that theory were true, because they have a big edge against the majority of players they play against.
This is contradictory. If it's so subtle it's not noticeable at all, then it's too subtle to profit from.
That is unfortunate. I hate the fact that so many people choose to be ignorant rather than educate themselves.

Spadebidder or QPW will have to clarify, but if I correctly understand what he's posted in the past, then if the sites are altering, not just hole card distribution but "action hands" etc. this will also show up in the stats over a big sample. That is: the wrong number of straights, flushes, two pairs, etc. will reveal themselves. With a fair distribution, all three streets will have a certain distribution. If rigging is going on, this will be revealed over a large sample.

You can't rig any part of the deal without it affecting every other part of the deal. The hole cards, the flop cards, the turn cards, and the river cards, all have to follow their expected distributions. The theory of "action flops" would actually be the easiest to detect by far, as the community cards are all known and never hidden, and their distribution can be tested many ways.

It would be extremely difficult to manipulate the deal and make it undetectable and at the same time affect outcomes enough to profit from it. All they could do is keep the skew under some statistical confidence level, but then there is no profit for the site. It takes some really significant skewing to alter the outcomes enough that the site increases money circulation enough to keep more players seated on a 24/7 average basis, thus increasing rake (that's the only way to increase total rake). I've gone over my reasons for this claim before.

With the collected brainpower of most cardrooms you could toast a piece of bread. Lightly.

In fact, their opinion about what "people think" is a fairly reliable barometer of what the population able to tie their own shoes and turn on computers aren't thinking.

This proposed experiment is the equivalent of going to a Hannah Montana concert and asking the fans whether they think people like Miley Cyrus or not.

And most of them will be idiots and degenerate gamblers, which is why the games are generally so soft live in the first place.

I like your approach to this argument. Find a group of people who have a bias. Don't worry about the fact that they have no concrete reason to believe what they do, and present it as evidence that something is wrong with online RNGs.

Nice.

By the way, while I have definitely come across such people when playing live, I'd still be willing to bet that if you walked into a large poker room in Vegas and polled the room, the majority would still come out saying the games are on the level.