Quote:
Originally Posted by Rob Easy
I think an easy way to see if online poker is realistic is to get on stars and count how many monotone flops you see.
I'm assuming you mean a flop that contains one suit only, not just one color. I would guess this number should be reasonably close to theoretical. This wouldn't make much difference if the people remaining in the hand didn't hold even one card of that suit, though.
The idea of "rigging" would be to have 2 or more hands hit the flop strongly and improve or be strong enough to begin with to see large bets all the way to the river.
For example, maybe 3 spades hitting the flop happens with the correct frequency, but the real issue is that there is an inordinate amount of people holding spades in their hand when this occurs, say:
Flop 6sTs8s
Seat #1: AsKh
Seat #2: QsJs
Seat #3: 9s7s
Seat #4: AhKs
All of these hands are very playable regardless of position even facing a preflop raise, so I'd imagine this situation could occur. Seat #1 is drawing to the nut flush. Seat #2 is drawing to the nut straight flush (or so they think). Seat #3 has the nut straight flush. Seat #4 is drawing to the second nut flush.
If you were in this particular hand and lost your stack, would you think the hand was rigged? It would certainly feel unlucky to be cold decked in this situation, but one hand can't ever prove anything.
Could this occur? Of course, and it probably has happened somewhere in the world of poker. But how do we go from "it can happen" to "it is happening too frequently"? I don't know. In most cases we wouldn't have the knowledge of the other hole cards even. Say the 4th spade never came. We'd likely only know about the QsJs and the 9s7s and never know about the folded big slicks. Our information is so limited it's hard to really form a strong enough database to support any theory.