Quote:
Originally Posted by ArtySmokes
To a paranoid person that has an over-inflated sense of their own skills, online poker is "obviously" rigged. To a rational, thinking person, that looks for leaks in their game, there's nothing obvious going on, other than the fact that the best players make the most money. If the rigging was "obvious", I think I'd notice it, seeing as I study my database more than is perhaps healthy. Hundreds of millions of online players would also spot this "obvious" rigging - it's, like, obvious! - and stop playing.
While studying my database, I'm actively looking for patterns; patterns that would show either a bizarre amount of bad beats, or leaks in my game that I could fix. Sometimes, I'd find a player that calls on the flop with no pair and gets runner-runner trips. Is he a bad player? Often, yes. The players that sucked out often had VPIPs in the 60s and 70s. Their winrates over 100 hands were ridiculously high, but 100 hands is a lolbad sample size, as you know. Was the game rigged in their favour? I doubt it. For every fish making money with a VPIP of 50%, there are 5 that are getting crushed. Just about no one with a VPIP of 50+ has made any money over a decent sample size. My conclusion: Bad players sometimes suck out in the short term, but generally lose in the long run.
You can do this with your own database of stats.
Go to the PLAYERS tab in HEM. Click the VPIP tab. Oh look, most of the players with high VPIP are losers. Shock horror! Bad players lose the most money. Look at the biggest winners by bb/100. Shock horror! The players with solid stats win the most money!
Now compare your own stats with the big winners. Find your leaks. Improve your game. If you're not winning in the long term, it's not because of rigging, it's because other players are better than you. Stop trying to blame your inadequacies on the poker site. Take some responsibility for yourself and quit with the paranoid blame game.
You might not like my use of the word "pathetic", but you're crying like a child.
"Mummy, mummy. I went and played a game with loads of other kids and I didn't win. The game is obviously rigged against ME. Waaah!!!!"
No mate, just no.
I don't cry when I lose. I learn from it. I play poker to win. End of. I use HEM to find leaks in my game, I've developed an incredbily efficient, low variance small ball strategy that works wonders in NL10 and NL20 games.
Of course bad players lose, who said they don't?
Do they lose as fast as they should, I'm not so sure, and you have no experience of variance, you've read about it, and played with your simulator, but you don't have any real experience of it until you've played a lot more hands.
I don't see myself as paranoid, I'm just open minded, the odds of some sites rigging their deal is extremely high, especially a site like FTP. Many players have commented that they couldn't beat FTP, I've asked people in this thread to post hand histories from FTP showing weak hands calling to showdown as the CC and no one can, because it never used to happen at FTP.
A seemingly standard situation of
TPTK beating TPWK in a non all in showdown hand- something you will see loads in live games and against fish online, these hands are extremely rare on the 'rigged' sites.
You didn't even get back to me on that subject when I asked you to look in HEM. As far as evidence goes that FTP was rigged, that is the area that convinces me, yet no one in this thread will even look at their HEM and prove me wrong. The answer being when they do look, they realise I might well be onto something and they just chose to ignore the point.