Originally Posted by GabryRox
Many interesting points here, but certainly a lot of conjecture based on assumptions or feelings, which in itself, doesn’t prove anything. Also, there are many things that would constitute being rigged, so I will address them all separately. However, first I will start with some background… I’ve been playing about 6-7 years online, specializing in Omaha Hi-Lo (at least 95% of my games). I used to play extensively on PS and FTP before both were removed from the US market. Usually I was multi-tabling low-mid stakes O8 cash games (.10/.25 PL & NL, up to $3/$6 FL). Didn’t play many tourney on PS but starting getting into O8 MTT’s on FTP. Overall, did pretty well in cash games, but even better in MTT’s, running about 50% ROI. Since those 2 sites got shut down for US players, I’ve mostly been playing on the Merge network. All of this has added up to me playing somewhere north of 10 million hands of O8, so while I certainly don’t claim to be one of the biggest winners, I have seen quite enough to make a fair assessment on this issue. OK, now to the fun stuff…
Shills (someone who works for or with the site in order to increase the site’s profits, or reduce their losses) – this one is probably the hardest to prove because without actually getting first-hand info from someone involved in this and being able to confirm it. The two big problems here? Why would either party ever admit to this? But, that said, this is what I have observed to make me believe it is very highly likely this is prevalent. I’ve observed countless idiots playing O8 MTT’s on both FTP & Merge. Especially the rebuy variations of these bring out seemingly every clueless moron on the site. When you look up the vast majority of these guys on SharkScope, they are huge losers with negative ROI’s that make you wonder how they can afford to lose that kind of money. However, every once in a while, I look up a horrible player and they come back with some ridiculous ROI… like over 100%. I usually mark these guys to watch to make sure they are just not on tilt or something. Sure enough, they almost always continue to play like a moron… and I’m talking about PFR max every hand, going all in with low pair and no low draw, completely clueless kind of donkeys here… a player who in reality would stand no chance of even breaking even, much less pulling a 100% ROI. I’ve seen first-hand, these idiots continually hit suckout after suckout to stay alive and a good portion of the time end up winning the MTT. Now certainly, even the biggest idiot on the planet can get lucky enough to win 1 or 2 of these but not to the extent that these guys do… not even close! So, the only logical conclusion is that they have an agreement with the site to play, be artificially awarded victories and high place finishes, but have to split the winnings with the site. Because oh, btw, this usually happens when the guaranteed payout pool is not met by the total buy-inns, meaning the site would lose money on the tourney. Both parties win here… the donkey get some money that he would have otherwise not even sniffed, and the site covers what they would have lost due to the shortfall of buy-inns.Bots – I know for a fact that these exist, although I haven’t noticed any lately. Have contacted the site a couple of times about them with no apparent action, but to be honest, most of them were totally exploitable and easier to beat than your average player once you figure out what their parameters, so I stopped reporting them because I didn’t feel they were hurting my ROI.Super-users & colluders – this doesn’t seem to be a huge issue, at least in O8, but collusion almost certaily exists at the higher stakes, which is one big reason I won’t play at that level. I mean let’s face it, for anyone with any kind of tech savvy, it’s easy to get around the “protections” built in by the site and even be sitting in the same room with your friend(s) playing the same ring game against unsuspecting other players.Rigged RNG’s – OK, so this is the big one, right? I’ve read several posts stating how people have selective memory; forget when they sucked out, etc, etc. And, while there is certainly some validity to this argument, it does not account for what is obvious manipulation of the RNGs on all 4-5 sites that I have played on. Look, why wouldn’t the sites do this? When a simple tweak that would go un-noticed and be unprovable by most resulted in millions extra in revenue for your site… and oh btw, there’s essentially zero chance of getting caught (or at least of having it publicized)… how could they pass up that money? For those that don’t quite understand the incentive here, I will explain it. First, you’ve got to realize that donkeys/maniacs/plain old clueless morons drive a TON of profits for these sites. Just talking about ring games alone, which are based on rake to make profits, how much $ do you think the sites would get with a bunch of super-tight players who only play premium hands? So, based on this knowledge, how can you best take care of the donkeys to ensure they play as much as possible? Why, provide them with artificial winnings of course! This is the crux of this entire issue and it absolutely occurs… at least on all of the sites that I have played so far. When I first started noticing this, I began doing some modest tracking (aside from collecting every hand in poker tracker). Essentially, every time someone needed a 4 outer or worse to beat me in a hand, I would note it. In Omaha-8, if you flop needing a 4-outer to win, you have about a 16-17% chance of hitting. Well, after about 3-4 months of tracking this, it turned out that people were hitting 4 outers against me at a clip of about 20-21%. That might not seem like much but in reality, it means they are hitting miracle suckouts 25% more of the time than they should. Now sure, I know what you doubters are gonna say… your sample size was too low or you forgot to track certain hands… ok, I might agree somewhat on the sample size, but this led me to perform a much larger analysis. This time, I used a sample of over 7 million hands from my own personal poker tracker records. I started by isolating every hand where I flopped top hand then broke down further by number of outs the opponent had to beat me. My lowest tolerance was 1 out (obviously) and highest was 11 (didn’t see much point in going higher than that as 11 outs equates to ~44% chance of hitting after flop, so many more than that and it’s a race). What I found was astonishing but confirmed my suspicions beyond any sense of doubt. In every single category, from 1 out to 11, the hit rate was higher than it should be based solely on real odds. In a couple of cases (high end like 10 or 11 outs) it was closer to even but still over what it should be. From here, I drilled down into individual outs categories for further clarification of what was going on. Again, the results were disturbing but quite uniform. I was specifically looking at quality of player in this split. I eliminated all players with too low of a sample size and then categorized as either good player or bad player. I eliminated anyone with a -15 to +15% ROI since I considered those players to be middle-ground and therefore not truly classifiable as either good or bad. When looking at the good player pool, they hit suckouts against me very close to true odds… sure, some were slightly lower, some a bit higher but overall it was within acceptable tolerances. However, when I plotted the bad players this way, there suckout rate exceeded real odds excessively… ranging between ~25% more on the low suckout end to around 15% more on the high end. Truly astounding results and I’ll be honest, even worse than I expected based on unbiased observation. Since then, I’ve only did 1 other analysis… on MTT’s since that’s mostly what I play now. While I only had about 2 million HH to deal with this time, the results mirrored the those of the first analysis to a great extent. This literally proves 2 things… yes, these sites are most certainly tweaking their RNG’s AND, they are doing so to favor the worst players on the sites! Now I don’t think they really have to capability of deciphering between just bad players and bad players who are also maniacs and drive more profits for them because that would involve too many variables. But certainly it remains in their best interest to keep these players funded as long as possible so they will keep driving those profit margins.I think the REAL question here is… how does the site’s favoring of donkeys truly affect your long-term winnings capability? On the surface, you would certainly think that it hurts it right? In my case, I run about 70% ROI on O8 MTT’s. I did a quick calculation that showed that I would be in the 90%+ range if other players only hit suckouts at a rate of true odds, not the ones created by these site’s tweaked RNG’s. However, what this doesn’t account for is the likelihood that at least a portion of these donkeys would go broke if not for the preferential treatment, and therefore would not be throwing their money into the prize pool, leading to at least a slight reduction in winnings. So, given that there is no way to tell how many of these donkeys would stop playing if not for their artificial gift winnings from the sites, it’s impossible to really tell what impact this has on a decent player’s ROI. My opinion is that only a relatively small % of them would stop playing… many of them have already lost multiple thousands and most likely just have money to burn… so I would say that this aspect of site cheating may take 5-10% off your run-of-the-mill good to very good player.
