He has a double gutshot, rigged? no.... you're just a dumbass shortstacking idiot

He had a good draw that can be completed over 33% of the times by the river, although I would not have played it like the villain, you lost and it wasn't even a bad beat, stop whining.

I'm fine with that (and always have been) with the adendum that no one claims that any game is rigged without solid, objective, testable, reasons to make such a claim.

So if I suspect my neighbor is a child-predator should I just avoid him and keep going about my day?

Are your suspions based on solid, objective, testible criteria, or because you're a paranoid freak? It matters.

no gratitude required

you honestly dont see ANY advantage to rigging the play money games???

the willful ignorance by you zealots is overwhelming....




so what percentage of play money players (regular players) are like skepticals friend; i.e. a person that does not have the ability to deposit money onto an online poker site?

im guessing its very low.

what is more likely is that the majority of play money players are people who do not trust online poker sites, and just use play money as a way of playing without any sort of consequence. they think that the system is fake, and that, over the long run, it will not be profitable.

so lets just pretend for a second that online poker can be fixed and has artificial action, what would be the advantage?

you have a player who doesnt trust online poker sites, but starts with their 1000 in play money and turns it into 48,000,000 in 3 months. would that make the player MORE or LESS likely to deposit real money onto the site?

In after merge.

Is it to make more fake rake?


Not sure, those fake millionaires tend to be a conservative bunch.


The fact that none of the normal riggedologists are offering you any support is not a good sign, since they support nearly any rigged theory at face value.

What of the 47,999 potential cash customers that were rigged against to lose their 1,000 pretend chips to give to this guy in the hopes that giving him all of these chips through unfair deals will make him into a real cash player?

Assuming no rake, it's still a zero sum game. (Given play rake it's a NEGATIVE sum game.) Rigging in one player's favor neccessarily means disadvantaging another player. If the purpose is to make the rigged play money player more likely to become a real money player then that would be offset by decreasing the likelihood of the ripped off player becoming a real money player. And there's no way apriori for the site to know which players would be more sensitive to this so they wouldn't know which one's to benifit and would have to do so randomly.

But sure, go on and believe that they've rigged the PLAY MONEY tables. Yeah.

Believe that they've rigged them in a subtle way that your brain, a type of analytic computing device (subject to all sorts of self-deception) can detect, but that a computer, a type of analytic computing device (not subject to all sorts of self-deception), cannot. Yeah.

As Aaron T. has already explained when one person wins at play money another loses. Did you think about that Rockart? Or does your theory involve superduper play money bots that are made to lose to play money players? I think the lizard people already have the patent for those though.

Is there a God?

Insane people think so but can't prove it.


Is online poker rigged?

Insane people think so but can't prove it.

I suppose if they wanted to rig play money they could without getting caught they could (since whose tracking play money hands?), but in addition to the comments above: what are they going to do: rig for more action hands? Aren't they ALL action hands in play money, regardless of the cards?

That would be the only explanation.

Yeah, I think I've detected a flaw in my secret plan to become a set-mining nit.

Sure it is possible if the site you are talking about is Evil and Criminal. Until you can hire an investigative team to infiltrate, we will just have to decide on faith. Just like all of those people who lost their 401k's in the last scheme, just like all of those people who go to church and give 10% or more of their income to some minister fondling their son in the back room after choir practice. Spin the wheel and decide if you want to take the chance.

Sort of a general question here from a layman: I know there are a number of distributions that "look" sort of normal but aren't quite. Suppose it were somehow demonstrated that the probability of flopping a set follows one of these non-normal distribution (due to card removal effects or whatever). Could it really make a big enough difference that players ought to change the way they calculate odds? All we really do is get a rough estimate, anyway. What might be important to a mathematician, it seems to me, can safely be ignored by poker players since other factors in a hand probably overwhelm what I think would turn out to be small differences.

What I'm wondering is, should we really be bothered about whether the underlying distribution of things like this are truly normal?

Or we could go on the evidence... Just an idea.

Work on your game and you will run less bad.

Seriously.

Weevil,

You have filtered out from your calculations all the hands where there was no flop, right?

Well, it's interesting to me. It's an effect I never imagined when I first started learning this game a couple of years ago. No matter how miniscule the effect, it's there. Thanks for doing all this. Looking forward to what else you can tease out of this gigantic data base.

No, I've filtered out all hands in which I myself did not see a flop. There were plenty of times I folded pocket pairs pre-flop and other people saw a flop. Actually, there were LOTS of times, as all of these hands are from tournaments and most are from DoNs where it is frequently correct to fold pairs pre-flop.

Do you think this affects the sample in some way? I tried to think of how this might corrupt the sample, but since I had no knowledge of what cards were coming on the flop and since my pre-flop action had no effect on the flop, it seemed to me that this was a legitimate and representative subset of all those times when I was dealt a pocket pair. What this represents, I guess, is all those times I "tried" to flop a set.

I'm certainly open to correction, though. I've been wrong plenty of times when thinking about probability and statistics.

There's actually a lot of small biases since we only see flops, turns, and rivers when players choose to continue based on their holdings. For this reason, board cards are not totally random and do not have a purely normal distribution. But my findings are that they are close enough that nobody ever plays enough hands to take advantage of the removal effects. We're talking small fractions of a percent. If you apply a 0.3% skew (such as the removal effect of Aces vs. deuces hitting the board) then at enormous sample sizes that might be 20 standard deviations. But that's because it is not random, so you're making a false comparison, measuring variance from the mean of a random distribution, when this is actually a different distribution.

I mean to ask whether you filtered out hands where you raised or put money into the pot preflop, but where everyone else folded and you didn't get to see a flop.

If I recall - and I may well be wrong - someone posted figures almost identical to yours months ago in this thread, and it was eventually deduced that it was because he was flopping sets as a percentage of all hands he was dealt in, not all hands where he actually saw a flop.

I suspect the same, as the ratio is about right. You can't filter out hands you folded preflop, instead you must filter IN all hands where you actually saw a flop (and had a pair).

When I first started learning this game, I had a common conceptual problem shared by many beginners. When someone would count the outs after a flop for, say, a flush draw, they would say something like, "Okay, you have 9 outs so your probability of hitting on the turn is 9/47," and I would always think, "Wait a minute! What about everybody ELSE'S cards? There are 8 other people at the table and they each have two cards, so there are only 31 cards left in the deck, not 47."

But every reference I found used 9/47 no matter how many people were at the table. It finally penetrated into my brain that it wasn't the remaining cards in the deck we cared about. What we really wanted to know was the probability that, of all the unknown cards, one of the ones I needed happened to be sitting on top of the remaining deck. Since the unknown cards included everybody else's hole cards, then it really didn't matter how many people were at the table. There could be so many people at the table that the deck only had 2 or 3 cards left, and the probability would still be 9/47, just like always.

Spadebidder seems to have discovered that there is a real, though extremely small, card removal effect for high cards. But I'm having a hard time seeing how that's related to the number of people at the table.

Well, you're plenty qualified in my book.

For which I am thankful. I would rather have my errors pointed out to me than to go on making erroneous conclusions because of them.