Well, spadebidder certainly has in this thread (you can search for it), and has announced that he will have a much bigger analysis shortly. His early analysis showed nothing amiss. I expect his results will be illuminating. This has been posted about many times in this thread. It did not seem to impress ANY of the rigtards however. At least not the regular ones who post here.

So in 6 months, he'll be Stephen Meares? Then in 1 year, he will make his own Poker Site....

Well considering Spadebidder KNEW with out evidence, online poker wasn't rigged, and trolled this thread for how long like he knew something all of us didn't, I suspect nobody gives a **** about his cherry picked HH's(Except the CEO's of certain Poker sites.......If he found it to be rigged, from his attitude and has false perception on reality he will not be able to swallow his pride and share the results....Perhaps his best friend IndianaV8 could help him.....errr....

Q1- I am not a usual subscriber to the Urban Dictionary, but there are a few words worth tossing around occasionally. I like that one.

Q2- Because I have come here for help and no one is able to give any other advice outside of their opinion or that I should run my stats but, oh by the way, they mean nothing because the sample size is too small. So what does running a study on my little 60,000+ hand history on the site that I am concerned about do except prove that I am running bad or that something might be up? So what did anyone's advice do except leave me hanging?

Is the request for some very intelligent people to post a few studies on some large asking too much? If so, then this has all been an exercise in futility.

I am not trying to be smart about this, I just want whatever answers I can find on this subject. All I am finding here at 2+2 is a war of words between Riggedologists and Those who's opinion based on circumstantial evidence say that the sites are not rigged. If this is where it ends, then I have to live with the results and decide if I continue online or just play in the brick and mortar. Right now, for safety reasons, I am limiting my buy in online because I am not sure if it is safe to deposit more. I am feeling better about the big sites after talking to you guys, but from here, I guess I am just going to have to take a leap of faith or quit online if there is no other info available.

Wow, cherry-picking through, what a million hands? Must have taken him a real long time.

Oh, and to hear you talk about cherry-picking, I have only this to add:

I look forward to the results on this study and will probably have some questions about who Spadebidder is. Even if it isnt conclusive, at least I can use the information to put this to rest in my mind.

How much longer, How much longer? Are we there yet? lol!

You are right that a 60,000 won't prove if a RNG is rigged or not. But you believe you have been running below expectation so if the results show that you are actually running fairly normal, you will be able to at least see that human memory is very fallible and will often cherry pick (seems like the term of the day) its memories (ie, big events, big losses etc). This could at least give you a little more confidence that the deal is fair.

Now, Now, don't mistake me w/ K13....I haven't came out and claimed online poker is rigged since my first 10 posts. I don't like the explanations so I voice my opinion. I don't understand how, even if it's possible to be rigged, certain people claim we're paranoid and delusional. There's something funny with online poker, and I blame it more on hackers and botters now, but there needs to be a solution....

I'm still working on the code and the testing. We only recently got 600 million hands in a ready state to run reports on (in a special database that is a manageable size and runs fast).

To give you an idea of the scale and the logistical issues to analyse a sample of this size, checking for and analysing only 2-way preflop all-in hands (which happen at about 1/135 at full ring cash) takes a decent personal computer about 24 hours per ~200 million hands, or three days continuous 100% CPU computer time to do the whole thing. I even had to set up special cooling apparatus for my computer to do it. Obviously I do my troubleshooting on smaller sets, but it takes many hours of computer time. So before doing the full run I need to be sure it is correct. And that's just one of the analyses I'm working on. And I have a real job too that won't let me work on fun poker stuff all the time.

I'll have something in the next few weeks.

Somebody said that the rng just deals 52 cards? So who's/what is responsible for showing the cards; determining the winner of the hand; and managing where the chips/money goes from the dealt heand?

Thanks Spade, totally understand. Anything you could do would be helpful and good conversation here.

No, you just make vague statements and post the occasional hand or two that you think looks suspicious.
The site's software. How would you use a random number generator to determine winning hands or move the chips around?

Very True!
+1
(not sure what +1 means since I am new here. I am sure that it is good though lol!)

Here's an EXPERIMENT.

1. Take N hands where exactly two players went all-in pre-flop, and exactly one player won (so exclude ties).

2. For each hand calculate FLOP equity, conditioned on no tie, for both players (will show how to do conditioning if needed, but very easy)

3. For each hand, keep only the equity that is >= 0.50 (if 0.50 pick whatever)

4. For each hand, note whether the player with equity >= 0.50 was the ultimate winner or not.

5. Now, consider equity intervals

[0.505,0.515) , [0.515,0.525) , ... , [0.985,0.995)

6. For each equity interval:

a. count the number of hands that fall in the interval (denote the count by TRIALS).
b. count the number of instances where the player ultimately won (denote the count by SUCCESSES)

7. For each equity interval, let MID denote its midpoint.

8. For each equity interval, calculate the quantity

EXPECTED SUCCESSES := MID * TRIALS

9. For each equity interval, calculate the quantity

DIFFERENCE := SUCCESSES - EXPECTED SUCCESSES

10. For each equity interval, calculate the quantity

STANDARD DEVIATION := sqrt( TRIALS * MID * [1 - MID] )

11. For each equity interval, calculate the quantity

OBSERVED DEVIATION := DIFFERENCE / STANDARD DEVIATION

12. Construct the following table: TABLE 1 (some hypothetical numbers inserted to facilitate description)


MID | OBSERVED DEVIATION
----------------------------------
0.51 | -0.3
0.52 | 1.2
0.53 | 0.1
...... | .....
...... | .....
...... | .....
0.99 | 1.2
----------------------------------


13. Plot TABLE 1. Call the result PLOT 1.

Now, PLOT 1 will be interesting in and by itself. But i'd like to take this a step further. Specifically:

Repeat EXPERIMENT but with the five community cards permuted.

For definiteness, let's say, repeat EXPERIMENT but with community cards reading in reverse order. This results in a graph, call it PLOT 2.

Note PLOT 1 and PLOT 2 should look pretty much the same, provided the sample is large enough (i.e. N is large enough)

I can explain further if needed.

Here are note on/rationale behind EXPERIMENT:

1. EXPERIMENT a basic summary statistics of sorts; so I think it has intrinsic value regardless of intentions behind it.

2. PLOT 1 is supposed to show whether people win as often as expected.

3. In EXPERIMENT, I take a shortcut in that I approximate each equity interval by its midpoint MID. I expect noise due to this to be minimal (one can easily obtain upper bounds on how much noise such an approximation produces, but it should be small).

4. Due to the finiteness considerations, the spectrum of flop equities will be discrete. So, one has to be a little careful about how equity intervals are chosen. In general though, I don't expect this to be an obstacle.

5. Due to finiteness considerations (also if N is not large enough), it's possible some equity intervals may not contain enough sample points in them. Should such a situation arise, one may drop the interval entirely (and then make the obvious modifications to PLOT 1).

But in general, one should observe pretty good convergence to the underlying Bernoulli distribution with as little as 100 trials. So, if for ridiculous simplicity we assume hands are pretty uniformly distributed among equity bins, then something like N = 10^4 all-in hands would suffice.

6. Comparing PLOT 1 and PLOT 2 should help reveal whether there's some structure to the order of community cards. Of course, since we're dealing with all in situations, such a structure does not impact final results, but, should it exist, it rises to proof-level that the deal is manipulated.

7. In step 1 of EXPERIMENT, I asked for hands to be all-in preflop. However, since EXPERIMENT only makes use of FLOP equities, hands going all-in on flop could also be included. But for the sake of uniformity/homogeneity in dataset, and also to allow for the production of PLOT 2, I'd like to exclude such hands.

/of notes.

One comment, the experiment is actually much easier to carry out than what may be suggested by its lengthy description/notes. One can do many variations on it. For example, one may restrict to all in situations where pot size is at least blah blah big blinds. One can look at different permutations of community cards, other than that of reverse order....etc.

Not necessarily true at all.

LOL, thanks for making my point Captain Obvious

I should have said "probably" won't. Of course there are cases (such as the AP scandal) where a smaller sample size can prove something isn't right. But I highly doubt that will be the case here.

What exactly was your point? toltec444 speculated that rooms could tweak their RNGs to make preflop and flop favorites lose more often. All I pointed out was that the RNG would have nothing to do with a cheating system like that.

I highly doubt a huge sample will show anything's off.

Relax...It's all about trust....

The question is: how would a limited time manipulation in the EV of the hands that cannot be detected be lucrative to the poker room.

The answer is: if you use combined actions to slow the flow of money from the bad hands to the favorite hands, the individual actions would not be detected but all of them together could make a differnce for the room.

An example: To use superbots, RNG manipulation, and change of the EV of hands for limited time and never together.

Thought: the closest the EV of the hands more profit the sites make in terms of rake.

Save the lizard people to another time, its not fun anymore lol

OK, forget Lizard People for now. Let's just play the game of "how many people know?"

To answer this you need to help us fill in some info on your thought experiment:

Do all rooms do this or just some? If only some, which ones and why? Keep in mind there are hundreds of rooms.

How many people at each room do you think would know? Please spare us the theory that it is the same magical 2 people programming it for every site, there is no way the rooms would allow that behavior to even happen.

How many managers would know? How about the owners? The major shareholders? On site software developers and maintenance people?

What about rooms that have shut down that had superbots? What happens to all the people who knew about it then?


Think of this as a similar exercise to 9/11 conspiracies that generally require thousands of people to be in on it which pretty much makes the whole concept utterly silly.


You certainly have a lot of imaginary what ifs going with your theory of ninja strike force superbots so just fill in these blanks. How many would know? I am talking a total figure for all rooms.

Another day we can play "how much would it even make?" because most of these creative theories would tend to make way less than the creators would suspect, whether it be "superbots" or "greed" or "action flop" theories (not that those that believe in them say more than "it would make some money and people are greedy for money" as a form of explanation).

I agree...

IndianaV8,

In response to your follow-up

below is one proposal.

@2p2member: I think spadebidder has done (with the DB) either that or something very similar to this. Would be best if he comments on this.