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Originally Posted by Phulhouze
Wow, why is this discussion devolving into insults?
It devolved to that the day it was started.
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Why bother posting unless you are trying to have a meaningful discussion.
It increases your post count.
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I understand people have done statistical analyses of hand histories, but I'm not quite sure what the analysis can or should prove. Are we simply measuring whether the way hands play out conform to the kind of statistics you would find on PokerStove?
Essentially. I think Laughing Assassin tested all-ins to see if the best hand won as often as it should (it did), and spadebidder tested a billion flops to see if cards came as often as they should (they did).
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I think my concern is whether a statistical analyses can even show you something like this.
It's fairly straightforward, and yes, they can.
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On Bovada, you don't even know who the other players are, so you could theoretically be sitting at a table with all Bovada bots.
Which is why everyone on here was annoyed if not outraged when Bodog switched to all anonymous tables. Well, not house bots so much, but the fact that if two colluders managed to end up on a table with each other, you're hosed.
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The system could be set up so that all of their hands look normal, but when you (the one real player) is in a hand, the deck will be skewed to favor the bots - maybe not 100% of the time, but just enough so that when your stack is involved, they are making sure the bot wins.
Sure, that's possible, but all you'd have to do is compare hands with others until you could prove or disprove it.
Luckily Bodog is a horribly run joke of a company that doesn't actually anonymize players, and simple software can match Player 7 or whoever to their actual login ID, making tracking still somewhat possible.
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Or there could be a player who can see your cards.
Sure, but it's not very likely.
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I'm not saying that this IS what is happening, but I don't know how statistics would bring such scams to light.
Well, in the case of Superusers, statistics would bring them to light the same way they did in the Cereus scandal.
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If the statistical analyses are so clear that anyone w stat 101 can understand them, then don't you think there are people out there who know a lot more statistics and can find a way to cover their tracks?
Sure. The problem arises when you're not just rigging one table, or a few tables, but thousands of hands an hour. PokerStars deals something like 1,900,000 hands an hour, and that's just cash games. To rig those hands, you'd have to not only keep track of whatever magic rig you're running on each player, but also who they're playing with and those people's rigs. And you have to do this in a way that increases rake enough to pay for all the rigging/covering up, PLUS makes extra money.
So far nobody's come up with an even theoretical way this could work.
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I've seen a lot of mention of Pokerstars in this forum - are people referring specifically to PS or to online poker in general?
Pokerstars refers specifically to PS. They're the go to example site though, mostly because they're the biggest.