Donko are you only looking at hands where you lose as a favourite, or are you also looking at hands where you win as a dog?

Question for you? Which B&M casino do you work for?

I am a Housing Counselor for a HUD Certified Agency.

I am just looking at critical areas like, all in for your tournament life because my theory is that you could skim a player and/or bust a tournament down more quickly by making some adjustments in the programming. I am just curious to see if what I am feeling is what is actually going on. If you are playing well, you will have a whole lot less situations where you are the underdog. I am not claiming to be a great player at this point in my development, but I believe that I should be doing better. This could either be a nasty swing or a nasty programming rig. IMO

Not the expert, just curious and having fun with this...

FYP.

Big difference in tournaments.

I hope you play a LOT of tournaments if you're only looking at when your tournament life is on the line. How often does that occur in an average tournament? I'm not a tourney player but is it more than 5/10/15? sometimes 1? You would need a lot of tournies to get anything remotely conclusive. Why not start with looking at your hands in an aggregate, and work your way from there. At least you'd be looking at a much bigger sample!

I would think that that would be more useful too, since I imagine how you got to the poiint where your tournament life is on the line is perhaps more important than those few all-in hands where you can be knocked out.

I'm open to tourney players corrected some or all of the above...

It isn't unreasonable that many players are usually knocked out of a tournament when they have the best preflop hand. To win a tournament you usually have to get it all in several times. If you get all in with an average 70% favorite 4 times in a tournament, your chance to win all four is only 24%. And it's always the last one that eliminates you.

Plus, you are by definition the short stack in the hand you get eliminated, which means you probably get called by weaker hands most of the time, perhaps multiple ones.

I'm pretty sure I'm usually (more than half) eliminated with the best hand when the money goes in. It's common, and doesn't imply a rigged deal.

That is a good point. If I am coming up way short of that 24%, should I be concerned? The question would also be how short would that number need to be for it to be outside of the statistical norm? Of course sample size is a big consideration here right? I think that I have 60,000+ hands from one site to sift through.

Using an assumption of a normal distribution (fine if the hand sample is large enough), when you test a sample against the population mean (expectation), if your sample is random then 68% of the time the sample mean will fall within 1 standard deviation of the population mean. 95% of the time, within 2 standard deviations, 99% of the time within 3 standard deviations, and 99.9% of the time within 4. To illustrate this, the standard deviation is the body of the bell curve, that is the area between two vertical lines drawn through both sides of the curve at the point where it changes from convex to concave. Half that width is 1 standard deviation (because it goes both ways). Multiple standard deviations fall in the tails.

You then need to figure the significance of your standard deviation using something like a T Test or a Z test (you can look up tables for this). This will relate your result to the sample size, which basically means the larger the sample the closer you should be to the expectation.

You can calculate the standard deviation from the sample size, the sample mean, and the population mean.

I wrote this off the top of my head while eating, so someone feel free to correct any error.

Edit: here's some java code to do the std dev and a T Test, and then you have to look it up in a table for the significance of the result.
This result tells you how many standard deviations your sample mean differs from the population mean.

If a poker site wanted to make a tournament finish faster, why wouldn't they just change the blind structure?

Tournaments finish pretty predictably when there's about 15bb still in play (sooner if there are antes). A tournament director can use this info to determine how long a tournament will last, whether live or online.

I've even made a simple google docs spreadsheet that does all this stuff automatically. It's not rocket surgery.

What

I dont know about anyone else, but I look for good structures so that I am not chased down by the levels and the blinds while I am trying to find some cards and figure out the players on my table. So if sites sped them up, and only offered turbo tournaments, they may lose some business. IMO

Thanks Spade. I appologize for not being more math worthy. So what you are saying is the further my sample falls away from the center of the population mean, the more likely something is wrong correct?

Yes, but you need to do this math to figure out how much "further away" really is. You might look and say "I only won 12%, not 24%, wow that's half as often", but if the sample size is small it might really mean nothing.

Almost. You have to measure "the further my sample falls" relative to the sample size, using units of standard deviation. You can either calculate that exactly as the square root of the sum of the squares of the variances, or use something like a T test that estimates from the sample mean and assumes a normal distribution for the sample.

Sounds fascinating.

I make all my money playing a video game.

I particularly enjoy taking money from fish who continue to play on sites even though they believe they're rigged.

Wow! Amazing that online poker has been around all these years and yet you're the first to think of this.

I don't know how we'll ever thank you for saving us from this scam. I can't believe we've all been fooled for so long.

LOL!

Who said that I was the first to think of this?

I am not trying to save anyone from a scam.

I AM following up on a very long and nasty run of cards on one site in particular. I am doing some research, making sure that I know exactly where my money is going. That also includes taking a hard look at the holes in my game.

I am assuming that there are some bright and talented people on this site. So I am here asking questions.

Surely you have more to contribute to this discussion than that. Especially since you have more posts than most people here...

You seem to be under the mistaken impression that this is a serious thread.

Check the Pitbull Poker or Eurolinx threads if you don't understand the difference between real problems and imaginary ones or how these forums react to them.

What what?

Please ask your questions so that we can help you. I must have missed them.

So, you're saying that if poker sites sped up tournaments, they'd lose business?

Isn't that the opposite of your previous claim?

This. Unfortunately rigtards (and any poker player who says they continually run bad) only pay attention to their tourney bust outs when they got their money in good. They don't remember all the other 70/30's they won during the tourney.

More business than if someone proved that they were rigging their tourneys?

Yes, but under Donko's current theory, those hands don't matter, since it's only at the late stages of a tourney that this rigging is going on in order to "speed it up". What Donko is saying is that he runs continuously bad in the late stages of a tourney, around the time he gets knocked out.

That sounds a lot like a tautology to me.