Personally I think it may be slightly skewed, but only to the degree of 2-4 percetage points off, and it's not on purpose, just bad software writing, and that 2-4 percentage points can swing either way, for against the drawing player.

Thread conclusion: It's not rigged, you just SUCK.

Fail

So, for the record, are you for or against the rigged theory?



If you are for the rigged theory: How much did you lose?

Im going to say that the theory that the sites are skewing hands by 2-4 percentage points is wrong.

Concluding that a site that DID do this is not rigged is also very wrong, there is no way software "accidentally" makes the deal off by 3%.

Can you provide proof?

j/k

So you think they write the software so that it is within 1% accuracy? 2-4% is still a pretty fair game, btw, and I wasn't saying they were doing it on purpose, but by accident.

This is one of my favorite quotes: "If you are dumb enough to think online poker is rigged, then you are not intelligent enough to ever become a winning poker player."

this is my favorite quote :


If your dumb enough to write bst in this thread than you are rigged.

No, they don't "aim" for any particular "accuracy". If they did, it would be a rigged game. What they do is randomly arrange the virtual cards in a virtual deck and then deal them out to the players. The "accuracy" is a natural result of this.

It is very, very easy to shuffle a virtual deck, and that is all that is needed to guarantee a fair game (other than the obvious things like making sure the pot goes to the right guy, etc.). If a site ever does start causing flushes to hit significantly more for its losing players (or whatever rigged theory is being investigated), it won't be by accident.

You seem to be talking about two different things. He's talking about the percentage of players seeing the turn and river. You appear to be talking about the percentage of hands in which the turn and river occur.

We can easily get that number too. But then what would it be compared to? And what would it mean?

True, but this thread is about rigging the deck, not other forms of cheating.

I have no idea what it would mean. My personal experience is the opposite of what he quoted. I see tighter play online than live, although I really don't have much experience live.

yes, this is truth.

i even stated in the OPENING LINE OF MY FIRST POST ON THIS FORUM, that i am a moderator on a competing poker forum.

but nice discovery nonetheless.

refer to above post.

i guess you didnt see the keywords used in their little pitch. words like "control" and "entertainment". after all, this is what online poker is all about - to simulate the 45 minute segments of WSOP broadcasts.

i appreciate the solidarity.

though i figured that on an online poker forum, i would find mostly online poker players.

i think his point in bringing that up was that the groups YOU trust to regulate these sites went obviously out of their way to ignore and then cover-up the investigation.

the online poker companies and the regulatory systems are too closely interwoven for any kind of objective critique.

of course. if you could make 1 dollar an hour by doing the right thing, or 3 dollars an hour by doing the wrong thing, why wouldnt you do the wrong thing? thats just business. thats just capitalism.

in fact, throughout this country, and the world, there are hundreds of checks and balances and systems and regulations to prevent business from exploiting consumers.
it just so happens that these online poker companies fall into a void of accountability. they are intentionally housed in areas where there is little-to-no corporate law.

what would it mean?????

did you even read what i wrote?

i type three pages of single line text about how the cards are fixed for big action and you come out with some stupid ass question like this?

im guessing the reading comprehension part of your S.A.T. was a particularly hard section.

What you haven't done is shown how such a scheme would make more money for the site. Think about that carefully before you respond, it has been discussed a lot here. Simply saying larger average pots means more rake is not necessarily true, and it absolutely isn't true at medium and high stakes ($2/4 NL and up). And there are other reasons why boards skewed for action would probably hurt the rake at low stakes too. Aside from that, I'm fairly certain that at comparable stakes more players see turns and rivers in live games than online.

twoplustwo and your "competing" site are not quite in the same category.

What you have is a blog.



No, that's a badly made " dark futuristic" movie plot. The market forces of capitalism do quite a bit more than you comprehend. Your vision would have companies being able to do anything to anybody without anyone caring or complaining. That is not how it works in the real free market system, regardless of the regulations.

This is even ignoring the fact that nearly all rigged theories including yours would not actually make the site any extra money so what you should be saying is the following

"of course. if you could make 1 dollar an hour by doing the right thing, or 1 dollar an hour by doing the wrong thing, why wouldnt you do the wrong thing? thats just business. thats just capitalism"



Also, as I have said before - all of your stuff is really old. Add a few new things to your manifesto/blog/"competing poker site"

i think it should be obvious, but maybe i give you too much credit.

more action = more excitement = more players playing more often = more hands = more rake = more yachts the profiteers can purchase

who the hell wants to sit at a casino poker table and fold 10 4 off and 9 3 off for 2 hours when they could just sit at home and KNOW that if they wait long enough, a decent hand will come their way (and in a lot less time than 2 hours) even if they dont end up winning the hand.

if you feed a player a lot of nice starting hands, he will most certainly consider it "more exciting" than sitting at a live game during a dry run.

So now instead of action boards, your theory has changed to the starting hands being manipulated? Even though that is the easiest thing for every player to check statistically and it has been checked thousands of times by players with hundreds of thousands of hands?

Rockart: have you read the whole thread yet? I'm serious that there is a lot of good information in there, especially about how hard it would be to rig the deck in a profitable manner and not get caught. Skim over the filler you want and focus on the substantive debate. It really is interesting and people like Spadebidder (who you've chosen to attack) have done some incredible statistical analysis on a large scale that suggests the major sites are not rigging the deck.

No-one here believes it is impossible that rigging is not going on on the major sites, just that it is unlikely and outside of theories and potential motives, there is very little evidence out there that rigging is going on.

As the pitbull thread indicates (should still be on the first page in this forum), when something nefarious is going on, the combined weight and research of the poker playing community can find problems pretty efficiently. To date, none of that has happened re: rigging. Not to say there aren't other major problems out there, which are properly the subject of other threads.

Even if we assume that the site could skew things enough to profit while keeping it below the detection threshold (very hard to do nowadays with the availability of huge public hand databases) I'm still waiting for someone, anyone, to show mathematically how their pet scheme increases the site's profit. Rockart may be up to the challenge I've issued before on this topic. Let me look it up and paste it here....

Here we go:
I'll even give you some help. There are only two ways the site makes more rake, and these two factors are what some of them actually use to make financial projections. The first is the average stake being played. Obviously card rigging isn't going to change that, it is accomplished by game structure, marketing, training aids, average tenure, etc. The other, and only real way, is to have more players sitting in seats on a 24/7 averaged basis. The product of those two factors is directly proportional to the site's rake over time. Average pot size isn't even a direct factor, the site will get the rake as long as the money is churning and until a player goes broke and chooses not to redeposit. Getting the most rake out of a particular player faster doesn't really matter if he then leaves and doesn't put in more money. Consider that max rake is achieved when all players break even all the time, and the money churns until the site gets it all. Making players broke quicker doesn't help.

So there's some tips. Free money for a convincing scheme backed by math.

Thinking about what I wrote above, I've had a flash of inspiration and a novel theory of my own. It would take a pretty complex simulation to prove with all the interacting variables, but if I have time I may attempt it. My epiphany is this: I think it's actually likely that maximum rake over time might be achieved by a fair game. Imagine that!

I'm not even factoring in the chance of getting caught and losing business. I'm just thinking about the interplay of factors, and this may actually be true. Show me I'm wrong.

I'm always interested to hear what you have to say. But to be intellectually honest, given that now you are putting forth the positive assertion, you shouldn't just throw out: show me I'm wrong.

Can't wait to hear more about your hypothesis though!

Well, I can show you one case where you're wrong.

If player A has decided that he will spend a windfall by putting his money on a poker site and playing it but no more and engages in a marathon heads up match with player B who is vastly better player then player B will quickly (in some relative sense) take all player A's money and no further rake will be generated.

If the site even things up by giving Player A better hands (remember we are ignoring the possibility of being caught) then it will take player B more hands to win all A's money and more rake will be generated.

The same logic, mutatis mutandis, applies where more players are involved over more hands.

I don't know from whence this 'epiphany' came but it's hard to see how increasing the length of time it takes for good players to win the money of bad players could possibly not make the site more rake.

Obviously there would come a point where the really good players got sick of being cheated and left but, by the same token, bad players would take a lot longer to get fed up and go.

From a poker site's perspective what they would ideally like are a larger group of very evenly matched players who are prepared to top up their bank rolls from time to time.

I dont really expect you people to:
1) provide solid proof of your accusations.
2) provide complete hand history to show something might be wrong.
3) come up with solid theory of how the rigging would work.
4) calculate how much it would generate for the sites.
5) have answers for all the counter arguments as to why sites wouldn't risk it.
6) make well written posts without stupid annecdotes and outright lies

but what really riles me is that in over 9000 posts in this thread I dont believe any of you rigtards has even bothered to put your hands into PT/HEM and post a suspicous looking stat. I've obviously given up on expecting full disclosure on an unbiased sample that might actually indicate something is wrong but you can't even be bothered to cherry pick something to try and convince everyone? REALLY?

ROCKART, the latest addition to the rigtard revolution, turns up and posts a 3000 word essay complete with topic headers and screenshots and it turns out part of his theory is simply that people are dealt more "nice starting hands" than they should be. How many times could you have checked this outright lie in the time it took you to write it? In fact, forget about writing it. It took you longer to copy and paste it form your "competing forum" than it would take to fire up PT/HEM and just check.

WTF is wrong with you people?

1) They are ******ed.
2) Erm, that's it ...