You should really give it a break. The hardcore shills that live in this thread have spewed these same lies and diversions many times over. No, the RNG isnt rigged, but a software program is what ultimately puts the cards on the table and in the players hand so the site gets the results needed. You probably already know this anyway.

So when you first started posting, you claimed that you didn't want to believe it, and you seemed interested in finding out how to analyze your hand history. So did you do said analysis, or did you just get lazy and say "screw it, I'm telling everyone it's rigged"?

Also, if you have this all figured out and know how to use this alleged rig to win more money, why would you be on the forums telling everybody about it? Obviously it isn't to warn other players, because if that was the case, you'd be making an effort to provide some evidence, so I'm quite puzzled at why you'd want to reveal your money-making secrets for free.

Poker sites (no hyphen required) run tournaments with different structures all the time. Some of those structures make for much faster tournaments. Why go to all the trouble of rigging games when they could just do this?

I'm not sure why you keep bothering to make this distinction, as no one would know the difference. If the RNG isn't rigged but different cards are dealt, this rigging would have the same result and there would still be evidence of it, so who cares where you think it's happening? Until you provide some evidence, you're not going to change anyone's mind. Of course you don't have any and thus will continue to blather on, but just know it doesn't matter whether your blathering is about the RNG or the software process afterwards.

You make a good point.

Just got donked again by a Russian on PokerSCAM. I have pocket 7's, raise from EP, flop is A76, I bet the flop, Russian goes all in with A8, I call it off of course. What comes on the turn and river? A 9 and a T, giving the donk a straight.

The lesson is, when a Russian goes all in, unless you're getting like 20/1 on a call, you need to fold, because PokerSCAM hugely favours the Russians in all-in situations like this.

Do you see any problem with your sample size?

I've heard that fish is brain food, I just never heard it from a fish before.

Yes, I do not want it to be this way, but what I want is truly irrelevant and does not change anything.

I have tried to analyze the small hand history I got from Microgames. I downloaded two different poker programs. Non of them could/would read the txt-file. I also doubt, after taking a look at them, that these programs are able to find the kind of patterns I am looking for. If they can, please tell me how.

Who said that you would profit from it? If this nonsense is a product of rigging, then it is not designed to make profit for the players.

We seem like puppets that play poker with the illusion that our choices and skills make a difference. I do not think the software gives a damn who wins. I think the software only does what it is supposed to do; make the game look random on the surface and pull the strings to make rake underneath.

Making the game look random is a joke when even the most ridiculous outcomes, that we see all the time online, are explained with "variance" and "bad beats". There seems to be no end to the nonsense that online players keep up with. I would take every penny I could take out of their pockets if these morons played my poker software. They would never see the scam and even if they did, what could they do? Try to be heard in threads like this? Provide "proof" that would only be discarded as "variance" or "bad beats"? They had to have access to the software, but they would never get inside my Isle of Man-mansion. The law is not within reach of me and everyone that made claims of rigging would have to provide proof first, which they obviously could not get. I would laugh all the way to the bank while these "paranoid" players were silenced by people like you.

How can you make profit on a rigged game that is not rigged in favor of the players? If the software babysits the largest stacks in tourneys, then you can only try to get ahead early in the game, but who says that you actually will? A lot of players bet like crazy in the beginning and there is no way of telling who will pull the longest straw when donk bets are all over the place.

Like I said, you can use it to your advantage if you know about it, but I do not think you can profit much from it in the long run. The only ones that profit from it is the poker industry. You can not get ahead as chip leader in every tournament and the bad beats in between can cost you a lot of money.

Because not all players want to play hyper turbo. This is self explaining. Providing only fast structures is a terrible solution and most players would not stay very long in such a place. They have to have all kinds of structures and provide a product that attracts all kinds of players. Get as many players as you can to the tables and make sure that they win/lose fast so they will sign up for new tourneys, or rebuy, as much as possible. Rake, rake, rake...

If every tournament played as long as it usually would, then the poker industry would lose a lot of money. How much money do you think iPoker will make from ending every tournament only one hour or 30 minutes earlier? We are talking countless millions each year.

Go through all this trouble? What trouble? They can make World of Warcraft. Do you really think a slightly rigged poker game is hard to make? Please...

Why do you not ask the poker industry for proof of their claim that this is random, but you ask players for proof over and over when they do not believe this claim?

You seem to trust these companies for no reason, but you are very critical of players that don't share your trust. Why is that?

You see this is your major problem.

Like endless posters in this thread before you, you have identified a rig purely from your own observation of play. It is 'obvious', so you must have a well defined expectation of what play should look like, and you have seen how it deviates from this. This evidence that you have seen does not evaporate in some way when it is collated later, so if you really saw it, and it really means what you think it means, then you are on your way.

The proof of your hypothesis is simple: you write down what should happen. e.g. That big stacks, of a defined size, early on in an MTT have an expectation of making the money that is a defined percentage greater than stacks that are below average, or below half of average, or whatever. Or that in AIPF confrontations the big stacks win the hand more often than they should.

Then you go to the record of what actually happened, and you show the difference. You calculate the possibility that the anomalous results you show could have happened by pure chance.

You post your evidence and are hailed as a hero, the crooked games are cleaned up, the criminals running this racket and their collaborating regulators are thrown in jail, the world is a better place.

It really is up to you to do this. No-one in this thread has implicit trust in any of the poker sites, and no-one has ever said that the games are definitely not rigged. What is said, over and over, is that the rigs that are proposed here would, for the most part, be trivial to prove. The fact that none of the proposers has ever been able to demonstrate the existence of their favourite rig leaves the ball firmly in the court of those, like you, who claim that the rig does or may exist.

That is impossible to prove. On the other hand proving nonrandomness is not that hard. It's a well developed science with standardized and well accepted testing methods.

The idea that a rig can be identified through a number of players looking at their database is absurd, since only some accounts are rigged, others get the normal RNG treatment.

For instance, if I never played any Russian players, the RNG would be completely normal for me. The rig only kicks in to help the Russians sat at the table. So some guy checking his holdem manager database and saying 'everything looks normal' is really just proof he hasn't played against enough Russian players to notice anything.

Just load up some tables on Stars in whatever format of poker you like, and try getting all in preflop against Russian players. Look at your all-in EV compared to what you actually won. It's a huge difference against these babysat accounts.

It can't be identified through one persons hand histories but you've identified it through your hand histories and refuse to post them.

Yawn

Hand histories don't identify a players country. You can only see the rig through observation while playing. But even a blind, deaf and dumb monkey could understand the Russians are heavily favoured on PokerSCAM.

a) If the Russians are that heavily favoured and you play a lot of Russians then your hand history as a whole will be skewed. Not as much as if you looked at hands against Russians only but you won't know how skewed until you check it.

b)What you could you do is filter your database to players who you've played a minimum x thousand hands with and sort by how much EV you've been scammed out of. You could then manually check these players and illustrate that all of the luckiest ones are Russian and none of those you have been luckiest against are Russian. It wouldn't be proof but it would at least help and give people reason to investigate further.



Or just keep making stuff up

So which is dumber:

a) believing that poker sites are rigged, endangering a successful business by opening themselves up to massive lawsuits in any possible jurisdiction

or


a) believing that poker sites are rigged, endangering a successful business by opening themselves up to massive lawsuits in any possible jurisdiction, and continuing to play there

There's no need to doubt without actually knowing; I already linked you to the thread where you could ask that question.

LOL, what????

The answer to this is so incredibly obvious that it's amazing you're asking the question.

People make claims about things they've observed while playing online poker that are very contrary to my own observations. Some of these different claims even contradict one another. Of course I'd like to see evidence of this; wouldn't you? If someone started posting here that they've noticed that small stacks are favoured over large ones, would you just believe them, or want to see some evidence of the claim? And given that these players are able to discover these alleged rigs through mere observation, it should be trivially easy to provide some evidence.

I've never said anything about trusting or not trusting any given online poker site, but if I did give one such trust, I assure you it wouldn't be "for no reason". The fact that I don't blindly believe any riggie's claims doesn't mean I give trust for no reason - it actually means the opposite. I need a reason to believe someone's claim, and if you can't understand why that is, I don't know what to tell you.

its very rare on stars that u will flop ur opponent dead, doesnt matter what my opponent has the community cards ALWAYS makes some unreal sweat, ex. AA vs 75 flop A-4-10 the turn is 100% gnna put a 6 or some bs. ALWAYS a sweat. That is variance?

last night in a spin and go i had 3 consecutive all ins at the same table and each all in ended a chop with a boat on the community cards (QQQ22) for example.

Also lately I've noticed a strange trend with players icons showing "disconnected" it becomes very suspicious for me when the SB isn't disconnected then when I bet all of a sudden he is disconnected then just moves all in. How am I not supposed to feel being setup lol.

By looking up what the words "cognitive bias" mean, probably.

oh yeah shoot forgot about cognitive bias my bad i retract my previous statement.

I don't need to do all of that because it's ****ing obvious what's going on. Just join some tables with lots of Russians on at Stars and you'll find you cannot win. Try that for a few hours and you'll understand where I'm coming from.

.

Why does Stars want Russians to win?

More generally, why do they want your opponents to win and not you?

I wonder what point of view your winning opponents have on all this.

So I've gone back and read dozens of pages of past posts in this thread and am looking for some discussion that's more analytical and a lot less emotional. My story is that I've played a relatively small sample size (228) of 3 max hyper turbo Spin N Go style tournaments totalling (5,622) hands. I've both been the beneficiary of some ridiculous suckouts and on the maddening flip side as well. It's felt like a disproportionate number of my lucky wins and heater streaks have come in spots that didn't decisively swing my tournament equity and/or more often when the tournament win value was the minimum. By the same token it's felt like a disproportionate number of the bad beats have come when a win would have either sealed the victory or made me the dominant stack and/or more often when the tournament win value was 4X, 6X or 8X the buyin.

But it doesn't matter what these hand results have "felt like" because I'm well aware that the psychological impact of pain is much greater and more lasting than the memory of success. Of course the bad beats are going to stand out much more, especially when a streak of a few in high leverage spots completely evaporate the winnings I've built up from making dozens and dozens of good decisions. I understand that and I don't want to be the guy who only complains because he's frustrated and therefore concludes that the game must be rigged.

So I've been working through my PokerTracker hand histories to try to isolate the hands where the result significantly swung my overall tournament equity vs. the great majority that didn't. Even if the aggregate stats didn't show any significant devition from EV, I wanted to test my "feel" that when the tournament was on the line or when the prize was big I was getting the shaft.

First the overall statistics:

Total net winnings are -5.5 buy-ins or -.02 per tournament.
Total net winnings adjusted for all-in equity are +2.5 buy-ins or +.01 per tournament.
Average all-in equity is 52.55.

I wasn't completely sure how to best isolate the situations I described above that I wanted to look at more closely so I'll describe the filter I created and would welcome anyone's feedback as to whether you would do it differently. The filter scans for hands where:

1) I was all-in, whether by raising or by calling and on any street
2) We went to showdown (to eliminate my all-ins that got folds)
3) The number of chips won or lost was between 20% and 50% of all available chips in the tournament

These three criteria were the best I could think of to pick out the spots where I felt confident enough to put my tournament on the line or challenge another player to risk their tournament, eliminating situations where one player was severely short stacked and therefore calling with any two, and where the end results were subject to the RNG because we went to showdown. This filter returned 342 hands (6% of all hands played) and the results were:

Total net winnings of 10.7 buy-ins or +.05 per tournament.
Total net winnings adjusted for all-in equity of 13.8 buy-ins or +.06 per tournament.
Average all-in equity of 53.79.

Conclusions:

I don't have a lot of experience yet interpreting database stats. For example, I don't have a good source of information for what a good average all-in equity number or range should be. But what I think I the numbers are telling me is that the high stakes hands are not where I'm losing. It would seem that the delta between my negative total net winnings and my positive net winnings in the filtered hands is telling me that I'm losing, not from bad beats, but in the 94% of hands that are not all-ins that go to showdown. In addition it also seems that the negative deltas between my actual net winnings and my all-in adjusted winnings both in total and in the high stakes hands indicate that I have experienced a bit more bad luck than would be expected.

Do you agree that the stats I've shared support these conclusions or are they saying something else? Are there additional stats I should be looking at? Would you approach the analysis differently? I'd really appreciate learning from any insights that those of you who have been serious about looking at your databases have gained.

nfsb,

You might find this forum a better place for your questions:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/25/probability/

Might want to look up a statistics forum too if you think 228 is a "relatively small sample size" and not a "useless sample size".

Even more if you run your already poor dataset through a filter set up to confirm your suspicions, and even then, not end up with a result of any significance.

If online poker is even half as rigged as your "research", we're all ****ed.

They want the Russians to win because of tax reasons. In many countries they have to pay additional taxes when other players win - not in Russia.

Can you name even one country where PokerStars has to pay additional taxes if a player from that country wins?