Quote:
Originally Posted by Pyromantha
There is no adjustment that is possible that would not show up in an analysis of sufficient hand histories. There doesn't exist a magic number where if you tweak it less than this you can't ever detect it. There will exist a 'small enough adjustment' that we can't detect it in, say, 200 billion hand histories, which may as well be 'never' for these purposes.
This isn't directly relevant to the thread though. People are not claiming poker is rigged because there is some rigging on the order of 1 part in 100,000, or whatever. That would be the equivalent of going to McDonalds and claiming that your quarter-pounder actually only weighed 3.999998 ounces. The benefit for the poker site and mcdonalds would be minimal. They are claiming it is rigged because there is some pattern that they have recognised by simple observation - if there was, it would show up in a relatively small number of hand histories.
I am obviously not a math guy, but that shouldnt stop me from being able to see that if some adjustments were made from a lot of different angles in small amounts, and in a very random fashion, you are not going to see much difference in the numbers. A river beat here, a couple of missed draws there, AA vs KK here, AA cracked a few times more often there, a run of crap cards for a stretch artificially simulating card dead there, on and on. I am just saying that these could be randomized so that testing to look for abnormalities and anomalies are much more difficult.
It has been stated in this thread that this kind of rigging would show up in the hand histories. This very well may be true if you can get your hands on a big enough sample. Lets just hope you are getting a big enough slice to see what you need to see conclusively though.
Until someone does a comprehensive study on tournaments with a big enough sample, there is always going to be a small amount of doubt in my mind about the programming. I would like to see the regulatory groups get much more comprehensive with their audits. That is just me. I do have a tendancy to believe that the big sites are legit, but I would be much more willing to deposit larger amount online if regulation was approached with a bit more scrutiny.