So now that we have established that you actually don't know what you're talking about with respect to superuser scandals (which obviously was no impediment to you spouting off endlessly) what do you think the chances are you're equally uninformed with respect to everything else you've posted in this thread?

Really, this is just an excuse for posting my favorite link:

Dunning–Kruger effect

If only this was House and there was a simple cure for this obvious diagnosis.

You're right, and everybody knew they were being risky playing on a shady site with no clear legal jurisdiction run out of a crooked Mohawk reservation with a history of criminal activity. But even with that, the company paid a big fine, lost a lot of business, and then ultimately closed. And their scandals certainly had a lot to do with the actions take soon after by the U.S. DOJ. And as far as I know the main ex-owners are still in exile in parts unknown, afraid to show up in the U.S. again because they are wanted by the FBI and DOJ.

But more to the point, if something like that happened today with Poker Stars (IoM based) or Party Gaming (UK based) or one of the other public company gambling sites, somebody WOULD go to jail. And the Full Tilt guys are still negotiating to keep their asses out of jail too, and that wasn't even for a crooked deal.

The poker tables / poker economy tend to provide a long term cure of sorts when one thinks about it.

Not when they won't accept responsibilty for results but have a boogieman to blame instead.

Along with all the questions in this thread, you seem to have missed:

Who cares about their emotional state, I was just talking about the natural flow of money in the industry.

Well okay , I might not know all the facts about UB/AP scandal like some veterans here do.
Let me clear some things here ....
I started playing poker since I was 16 years old (now I'm 40) , playing live for more than 20 years, started playing online maybe 2-3 years ago and to be honest not that much. Played only on 2 sites, I'm up combined on both of them around 4k.
Okay, so maybe I'm suspicious because online poker is operating in "gray area" and that I'm coming from the live poker scene, being able to see the cards being shuffled and to look at the actual live players that I'm playing with.
Now, did I noticed something different between online and live poker in regards to some "weird moves" ? Yes, I did. But that means nothing, okay I can understand all the arguments for those "moves".
Were there scandals before in online poker ? Yes they were.
Do I believe that something "shady" is still going on ? Yes I do believe that.
Can I prove it ? No I can't.

Is online poker properly regulated ? No, I don't think it is.
Do I have the right to be suspicious ? I believe I can.

So, basically that's all there is to it.

Your blatantlytroll posts are becoming more and more obvious.

At least try to amuse the audience.

Good post. All I'd suggest is to try to be a little more analytical of what's been going on with your own play. If you were to have a really good study of your hand histories, I suspect you'd find that a lot of your fears and suspicions would be put to rest.

That said, I can understand how past online poker history (Cereus, for example) concerns you - it's best to always be alert to potential problems. Just don't let vigilance turn into paranoia.

Entirely justified. I don't blame you one bit for being suspicious.

good

Agreed, and there likely will be again.

There is a difference between saying: I just don't trust these guys - I'm suspicious that they might be up to something AND I just don't trust these guys, therefore I believe THIS SPECIFIC THING is going on.

Do you see the difference? If all the riggies said was the former, and spent their efforts looking for evidence of what was up, they'd get mostly support from the 2+2 community. Frankly, the players should be on guard for rigging and check for it.

Where people get mocked is when they write things like "If they wont/cant see it , then you know, fk it ... " and "There's nothing more to say here , if you can't see it then you're blind.[/quote] when they can't provide a shred of reliable evidence to back it up.

Yes, you have the right to be suspicious, but its not all there is to it. Well, it is if your conclusion is: I don't trust them so I won't play there. That is a very reasonable position to take. But if you want to figure out what SPECIFICALLY is going on, or confirm whether your suspicions are correct, then its not all there is to it at all.

About the analysis done by LA I linked to yesterday; I did not claim that was evidence for rigging. You seem to misread everything I say as being that. What I claimed was that it is possible for the pokersites to rig it in such a way without being detected. Do you not agree with that? If no, how would they get caught?

How much have you earned the past couple of days to make riggies look stupid?

sorry, seemed implied.

If they rigged only a small number of hands then sure. But then how would it affect player behaviour. riggies claim the rigging is obvious and enough to affect profits. For it to be worth it it would have to be done to an extent that affected player playing psychology, right? And if its enough that people perceive it then it certainly would be detectable.

If it's enough to matter, i.e. if it makes a real difference in their bottom line, then it would be detectable. And since there would be no motivation to make a trivial rig that doesn't help the site, we can rule that out.

Almost as a tautology, if the site can tell the difference in the rake, then the hand histories will show the difference in the deal. DUCY?

I'd even go further than that and say that the degree of relative change in the deal has to be greater than the resulting degree of relative change in the rake. DUCY?

I honestly don't mate. I think such would not be an easy thing to do.
As been mentioned before, there are far more easier ways to scam people (and that has been done, and probably is still the case with some rooms, ie. the so called chip dumping accusations where people just don't stand a chance if they decided it was and lose all their funds).

For the record, i do not trust many pokerrooms. But not because of the theory of a rigged deal.

How silly of us to interpret a riggie saying "Zomg, there's only a 3% chance of this happening normally!" (which was wrong) as you considering it evidence of a rig, especially considering in the thread you linked to you posted:
Can't imagine why we'd "misread" what you said there. Of course it's possible, but it's not probable. It would take an incredible amount of effort to rig the games as subtly as that, and since it would be such a subtle rig, it wouldn't increase their income in a dramatic way. If they only help fish out occasionally, they're going to all that effort to make $3 or $6 in extra rake at best, since rake is capped and eventually a fish is going to get all in behind and not get saved. You'd have to be a moron to go to all that trouble to make a few extra dollars when you could instead just be incredibly lazy and make millions of dollars a day doing nothing but shuffling and dealing cards. Card distributions, for one. Unless the site used a super sophisticated rig that not only kept track of who had benefited from who (so that one fish wouldn't win too often from one reg, etc.) but also kept track of which cards appeared on flops, turns, and rivers that those players saw, someone would eventually have evidence of too many 3s on the turn, or something silly like that.

That's the real problem with the idea of a rig that's "within variance", it has to account for who's at what tables, what cards they've been dealt, what cards have been on the board, all that jazz. It seems like a simple theory at first, but there are sooooooooo many factors it would have to keep track of, there's almost no way the site would actually make extra money off of it.

In before blatantlyrigged is amazed that people reply to posts on a message board.

"look at all the shills trying to repare the damage, we're onto something here! +1 million"

Sure, but lets talk about this analysis exclusively and forget what riggies say.

I will quote from wykh who wrote in that thread:

About 400 hands in 60k could be changed to favor underdog.

Is he not right here? I didnt see he got any reply on this. But rigging it this way to this extend would not be noticed, right? And for a site who deals millions of hands everyday the profit made would not be that small either.

Why don't you bump the thread? This is where the stats guys have to duke it out. if the consensus is that something is off base and requires further investigation, I'd go with that. You are right thought to focus on this kind of high level statistics discussion. If there is rigging going on, that's where the evidence will be.

From what I understand, once you get to 4SD it starts getting worth really strongly looking into.

What needs to be done is 1) determine that the correct statistical methodology is being applied then 2) replicate the study a few times to see if the effect that is being considered suspicious continues. By replication I don't mean redoing the calculations but starting afresh with a prospective study and see if the results hold up.

Good job on selective quoting and a poor attempt to make an insult. Have fun with your endeavours to make yourself and the riggies look stupid though.

wykh is one of the few riggies I remember by name because he was also an actual stats guy. All the theories he tried to uncover he eventually acknowledged some errors in the calculations (usually in the probablility forum) and he never finished his holy grail quest, and I can only imagine the conflicting forces that must have worked inside his head between his math side and his paranoid side.

Looks like he vanished after a good number of failed attempts of uncovering a rig.

He generally ignored all the other riggies (and trust me I tried to get a lot to contact him ).

No idea who this Easy guy is, but he does look kind of fun, reminds me of the guy who posted all of his various crazy ipoker threads (no idea who that was either, but he was really nuts ).

....... Don't you spend all your time saying online poker is rigged? What is your agenda?

blatantlytroll ??? This is the behavior of a 2+2 moderator. I need to refer this to administrator a fair and balanced forum is poorly represented by you!

Moderators insulting chatters this a first for 2+2 and hopefully the last of this type of behavior for a forum Moderator.