Hello Mike the Mod.

I have about the same amount of statistical evidence that you could produce to convince me that the deal is fair. None. But then, I haven't been discussing that, so your question isn't relevant to anything.

Check out the last couple of posts from Dewd for example. He makes some very good points, which are easy to agree with in terms of site security etc. I don't agree with some of the other stuff but that's ok, we can debate that.

I doubt that the screechy types make up even 10% of the customer base. They also tend to be relatively low value customers that create a lot of noise (at the tables and via emails), but generate minimal rake.

In theory the screechers may have by luck an idea of potential value, but usually they are devoid of awareness of how the industry works, instead being narrowly focused on their whatever individual need (that will never be satisfied). It really comes down to is a change worth it, and nearly 100% of suggestions made by riggies would be expensive, would make the games clunkier to run, and would offer no benefit of value to 99%+ of the customer base. Riggies tend to be synonymous with bad business, and the irony is even if a site like Pokerstars listened to this latest riggie and made the exact change requested - that would change nothing. This dude has no money and he would still not play there. If he did (even with his whatever changes) he still would think it is rigged, because the sites would be lying about it or insert new conditions. Its standard riggie whack-a-mole, so given the riggies have no value, the thing is do any of their ideas have any potential value, and as can be seen - riggies do not care about the viability of any of their concerns in that regard. That is not their agenda.

Yeah those numbers I'm sure are quite high. The reality is that X% leans riggie and if everything was clearly explained it would quickly become X*.9% riggie.

FYP

According to this thread, "riggies' are somewhere between 35% and 45% of the population. So 10%-20% is on the ultra low end, unless you have a better source for "riggie" concerns.

Imagine being able to increase your player base by that amount. Maybe that's what sites should be focusing on, instead of adding more throwables or DNeg faces.

Seems like you're struggling with the concept of what a question actually is. A very familiar pattern around here it seems.

So let me ask you, why do you think that the major poker sites bother to verify their RNG and shuffle algorithms but not the dealing algorithm. NOTE: I'm asking for your thoughts on that. I'm not claiming that every site is rigged. Can you tell the difference? If so, let's move on with the debate. If not, well I can't be any more clear so you'll have to figure it out for yourself.

So you think the site shuffles the cards correctly, deals the hole cards cards correctly, and then digs through the remaining shuffled deck for specific cards to deal to particular players, remaining on the different streets, in a particular order. And you don't think that one single player out of millions has noticed this and provided such evidence.

With what aims are they rigging the deal in this way?

face it juiceman, you just do not have the juice no' mo'

Mike the Mod, so many questions, so few answers.

How about you answer the question I asked, then we’ll get to yours.

You asked why I think that the major poker sites bother to verify their RNG and shuffle algorithms but not the dealing algorithm.

I agree with you that the major sites which verify their RNG and shuffle algorithms shuffle the cards correctly and deal the hole cards correctly. Furthermore, nothing I have seen makes me think that they then dig through the remaining shuffled deck for specific cards to deal to particular players, remaining on the different streets, in a particular order. Not one player in millions has provided any statistical evidence that the street cards are not also dealt correctly, from the shuffled deck.

Therefore, it seems logical to me that they do deal correctly from the shuffled deck, and therefore I see no need for them to verify anything more than they already do. As far as I can tell, no one but you thinks it would be a worthwhile exercise, in any case.

Now, please answer my question: with what aims do you think they may be rigging the deal in that manner?

We all know that's utter rubbish. If you break down the thread title and most of the concerns, they boil down to whether the deal is fair or not. In order words, 35%-45% of the player base thinks the deal is off. They disagree with your assessment Mike. How can you not understand that, having read this thread for years?

There's hardly anybody complaining about other aspects of the game. When people ask, is online poker rigged what else do you think they mean? I'll let the Fair Poker team answer:

You can find that on the front page of their website https://fair.poker/ I guess that makes them a bunch of riggies in your book?

So do you still think it's just me?

You likely do because logic and explanation has no place here, just as trust has no place in a decentralized future. I'll answer your questions anyway. There are many reasons why a site would cheat, here's a few that I'm sure you already know and have heard many times:

- To favor one player over another for any reason. Could be to give new players a "better" experience of poker and lure them in. Could be to give weaker players a better chance and have them lose their money more slowly (Party Poker seating fiasco comes to mind). Could be to give house players an advantage.
- To not lose money on tournaments with massive overrounds.
- To steal millions simply because they can. Here's an excellent documentary about the Ultimate Bet scandal https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IT2KzfoEJf0. We can talk about how players did a good job of catching this but it happened and millions was stolen with virtually no consequences. And if the crooks had been just a tiny bit more subtle, chances are they would never have been caught. If that's not an incentive, I don't know what is.

None of that is new nor groundbreaking but it is all valid. You can of course choose to hand wave it all away with your reasoning of "I believe what I'm told" or "I don't think they need to do anything more". That hasn't worked in this thread for years and it's never going to work either. You should have picked up on that by now. It's also naive in the extreme. Let's go back to the Fair Poker team:

I'm firmly in the "Trust but verify" camp and none of the major poker sites are willing to verify. Hence my question. Can you explain why that approach is such an issue for you?

Ultimately, you can't provide any evidence to me that the game is fair, so I have no more reason to believe you than you have to accept my arguments. We're at different ends of the spectrum but I don't have a vested interest, in contrast to many of the other posters here.

Let's try this yet one more time:

WHAT EXACTLY AND SPECIFICALLY WOULD A POKER SITE HAVE TO LITERALLY SHOW YOU THAT WOULD BE PROOF IN YOUR MIND THAT THEIR DEAL IS FAIR?

Helps if you preface questions to riggies with "I know there is zero chance you will directly answer this." I find that helps define the predictable role they play better. I mean - you do not ask that expecting an actual answer, do you?

Riggies are a completely irrelevant part of the industry. Their numbers are small (getting smaller as time passes) and they are really low value customers on top of that. Even in a thread specifically for riggies they cannot get above 35% voting it is rigged, and this thread is as artificially concentrated with riggies as it gets (many created multiple accounts as well). Riggie stuff gets ignored in actual industry or strategy threads. Riggies are like pro wrestling - essentially fake and for amusement only.

TheoryJuice

I'm not sure why you feel you have to spike your response to a simple question with personal insults.

It is not a normal nor a reasonable way to debate and until you change your ways by giving objective comment and answers in a sensible manner, I regret to say that I do not feel inclined to discuss your own concerns with you, any further.

Good luck with persuading any notable sites to try to lure you back to playing, but venting about your worries in this particular thread, instead of making intelligent presentations to the sites themselves, is not the way to go. People may perceive you as a troll and dismiss everything you write, even if some of it might actually be worth reading.

Where is the personal insult in my response? I asked you direct questions for the most part. Pointed? Maybe. But definitely not personal insults.

I stand by the statement that your opinion on sites not having to do more is naive. The question is not why would they cheat, it’s why did they cheat? We know 100% for a fact that players have been cheated out of millions in the past.

If you’re not up for that debate, fair enough but don’t play the victim.

The issues, and they are actually real, are collusion, betting, RTA users, and scummy operators/agents. Virtually all the stolen money has come from those four categories. Questionable RNG/deal isn't on the radar, in the list of actual problems.

Virtually every site has not the ability to hire living staff for their CS dept and you think they have some mega super servers that can specifically deal out cards to new or weak players?!?!?

Here is how sites handle weak players. They give them extra rewards to get them to continue to play longer and they do not give very much to winning players. On the apps and private clubs, winning players with near or pro level stats get restricted or even banned.

There is at least 100% chance someone will say fair.poker is rigged. That is very easy to prove using math. Pokio has had some people claim rigged because Sahamies and Blom play there so they must be house players. There was a Kings Club thread that was open for a minute. Some less than mensa level thinkers thought it was off, da feelz waz real... Kings, and its HS brother Crash, is self policing and the only real issue anyone has had is the occasional grimer/grifter void of table etiquette.

One of the main reasons they created this thread was that genuine industry issues (plenty of those) would get bogged down by silly riggies whining about new player boomswitches and other nonsense. I remember any attempt to interact with the morons that ran Lock Poker about how they did not process any cashouts for a year would get lost as riggies whined about too many flush draws. Shane from Lock would then take the time to give those riggies some instant bankroll or bonus (worth literally $0 in real world dollars) and they were thrilled and then those riggies yelled at people like me for causing problems with a site that was actually listening to them. I ended up losing $0 with Lock Poker as it was clear they were dirty, but those riggies kept playing there until they could no longer open the software.

Riggies as a species ignore genuine issues and obsess about non issues. Its similar to how most of their beliefs would make the sites no money and would be trivially easy to catch if they existed. There is zero reason to discuss genuine issues in a real manner with them, as they have no interest and lack the knowledge and experience to have that type of conversation. They believe what they see with their eyes and what their buddies tell them, and their only value now is if they are entertaining. The $50,000 GG jackpot winner was kind of entertaining in a car crash way, but otherwise the few active new and repeat riggies are complete zeros in that regard, so they have no value.

Perhaps the answer is, at least partially, in your question. The sites with provably fair algorithms (or whatever the correct terminology is) are, in your words, "obscure sites with barely any players". Why would, as you call them, "major poker sites", want to spend time and money changing to an algorithm that very few people appear to care about?

That's currently true. Things can and do change so there is hope for the future.

They went to the trouble of proving the RNG and shuffle algorithms. Why would they do that if very few people care about it? If the deal is just pulling the next number from the RNG, they basically get that verification for free. No extra time nor money needed. It's highly illogical to do 2 of the 3 and ignore the other one you're getting for free. Can you think of an explanation?

So, I'm really not sure where some of you get the idea that very few people seem to care about the game being fair. I've already answered that theory above in response to Mike but it's one of the fundamental questions underlying "Is Online Poker Rigged". Again, surprising that I have to spell that out yet again.

Here's another reason why it might make sense to verify the deal:

We are in agreement. There are many ways to scam players out of their money and all of the above have and are being used to good effect.

We'll have to disagree on this. I'll ask the question again, when people ask "Is Online Poker Rigged", what do you think they are referring to if it's not the dealing of the cards?

Sites do lots of player tracking already, correct? They have a number of metrics on each player, in order to calculate things like PVI which I'm sure you're well aware of. So they currently do track win/lose rates for each player. No need for extra super servers, this is all trivial stuff.

Agreed, that also happens.

There is an easier way to prove that fair.poker is not rigged and it can be done for FREE. Simply look at the source code https://github.com/fairpoker/mental-poker. This can be validated against what is running on the client. Case closed.

Thank the gods.

Best news I've heard from you, yet.

No need for you to post again.

Hi Mike the Mod,

I'm not sure why you feel you have to spike your response to a simple question with personal insults.

Just kidding, I'm not a pretentious wallflower who likes to play the victim.

I'm certain you would like to see the back of me. You haven't fared well in our exchanges, since the very first one when you accused me of being someone else that you were just about to uncover ... Whatever happened to that investigation?

That's it for the direct questions (for now). I know how you don't like them and fail to answer.

ps - if you want an example of a personal insult, here's one. Montesauraus is a coward. He likes to pretend he's ignoring me yet responds to every one of my posts indirectly. That's how sneaky, little, rat, cowards act.

**** YOU GO AWAY

Heh, I flipped him off ignore when I saw that type of reaction hoping that he actually said something with some actual zing and creativity, but was not really surprised when it was more of the same repetitive, boring routines and personal attacks.

Seems like he got a bit butt hurt by my earlier posts, but that is his issue as he is an inferior being. I admit that I did chuckle when I saw his "business sense," so at least he finally got a bit of a reaction. This thread had 35% vote it is rigged (with a lot of duplicate riggie accounts) and his business acumen leads him to interpret that the 35% rigged votes in this narrow thread (that nearly all non riggies ignore) is the same of all customers in the industry. What a newbie. Imagine if he spent a half hour in an NBA locker room - he would come out assuming all of humanity are males 20-40 years old with an average height of 6 and a half feet...

Add to that his strategic plan of insisting larger companies implement changes that a couple rando smaller ones have done that generated no meaningful traffic and as a bonus those changes also slow down the games (less rake) while making some popular versions unplayable. Gee, wonder why the sites have not rushed to make these changes that a handful of low value people talk about that will not even play on the sites that do them (and if they did they would think they were rigged anyways).

This is why I actually really enjoy competing with riggies and derps. They always get things wrong and inherently live in -EV territory. When they have money (like Trumpderps last year) it is great. Riggies like this donk who has a net worth measured in dozens of dollars has less value, hence the need for them to be entertaining. Hopefully 2022 will bring some more interesting riggies in that regard as 2021 was kind of a bland year for riggies, but then the riggie culture is nearly dead at this point.

Because their gaming license requires it.

You've lost me here. I was talking about the sites a dewd had mentioned, which use very different software to run their sites; I imagine it would require a substantial investment for one of the existing "major poker sites" to make that change.

What did you think my point was when comparing the two different types of sites? I didn't say that very few people seem to care about the game being fair, I said that very few people appear to care about changing to an algorithm like that of the provably fair sites, and I got that idea from your own assertion that they are "obscure sites with barely any players".

LOL, at you taking this condescending tone when your suggestion was that this thread shows:

No, that's not a sensible conclusion to derive from this thread. What we know is that of the people who saw this thread, were interested enough to click on it, and subsequently responded to the poll, almost 35% have responded that they believe online poker is rigged and just over 9% are undecided. Do you actually think this sample is in any way representative of the player base as a whole? I would suggest to you that the self-selection bias in such a poll would be very substantial.