Don't stoop to that level.

Wow, where did THAT come from?

There used to be another site like these called Poker Conduct. They reported on fraudulant poker sites. I think someone probably paid them to go away. They disappeared one day never to be seen or heard from again...

This.

Also, there's a profanity filter for a reason. If you want to say **** you, then just type **** you. Circumventing the filter can get you infractions.

Edit to add, I guess that should be mentioned for this post too.

I think he misunderstood you.

Unreal. Amazing comment here. I thought the same thing when I found out their was a forum for players who wanted to cheat honest competitors out of money.

Can Bob Smith tell us who this company is that he worked for? Can it be proven that he wrote the programming for Fulltilt? If he is really that mad, can he be talked into turning this company into the authorities so that the owners of the company that wrote the programming and all of the owners and employees at Fulltilt could be arrested?

Never thought I'd say this about something TK wrote but:

Owned

(let's not get back into the Indiana/TK feud, just thought credit was due for a good zinger!)

Yeah, you're right, tk1133. Just gets me riled up to be called something I'm not.

Really? Please don't act like you're surprised I would be upset with you. You called me a rigtard for no reason. I don't believe the games are rigged, nor have I ever implied that they are.

Sorry, Bobo, he pushed the right buttons and I reacted the wrong way.

Ok, I must be the slowest mofo on the earth. Please accept my apologies, Arouet. I totally misunderstood your original post. Ugh... I'm having a bad day.

No I didn't. I made a general comment picking up off your comment that someone with stats knowledge would have to tell us if it was possible to rig the RNG in a way that could increase rake while also being undetectable. Read it again.

Again, please accept my apologies. I think I need a nap or something.

For some reason I LOLed. I've made posts where I thought this about myself afterwards too.

Sorry, was typing my response while you were typing yours. No worries, happens to the best of us!

OK, after spending a little bit of time in a 9/11 thread (you think riggedologists are creative...) I decided I may as well now ask the math guys how viable my rigged theory would be (though I did post this concept months ago it seems a bit more of a theoretical point in the chat here now)


The main concepts are naturally:

- Few people involved as possible
- Minimal ability to get caught


The first is obvious and is pretty much one of the biggest flaw of all rigged theories as it requires lots of humans to never babble, and that is what humans tend to do. Mine cannot fully escape it, but if perhaps the changes were very specific and limited then maybe very few would know.

Point two seems obvious though most rigged theories greatly fail in this when they talk about action hands, AA vs KK, quads hitting too much etc. All of that would be the worst way possible to rig a deal. Targeting players as well would be utterly insane as that would add another way for it to get caught.

It has to be about money, not Orwellian black ops projects to screw a guy whining about a bad beat for his $5.

So how about this theory:

Once every 30-50 hands or so you have dealt a predetermined non action hand.


The qualities of these hands include the following:

- Very straight forward to play for almost all skill levels.
- Random in terms of when they happen so no specific player is targeted.

An example of this type of hand would be the following

5/10 fixed limit 9 handed

First 5 people get dealt utter trash like 84o 103o etc. Next person gets dealt an opening hand like AKs , everyone else up to the BB gets dealt utter trash. Then the BB gets dealt 67d so likely will call the raise.

Flop KJ2 rainbow (none of 76suited suit). Check bet fold. Rake earned very quick compared to a normal hand. If it goes check check then toss in another total brick like a 3 on the turn.

The concept behind this would be it would be a faster than average hand and thus the rake generated per minute would be a bit higher. Multiple that by the volume of tables 24/7 and in theory it adds up. Sure, extreme donks may mess this up once in a while by playing their 103o, but it is about volume so even if 90% of the hands get played as expected that is fine.

The fact that it is random (as to who gets what hand) and infrequent would in theory make discovering it difficult, but I will leave that up to the math guys to figure out.

Figure 2 non action hands per table per hour at appropriate stakes generating say on average 2 cents more per hand based on time saved, that is 4 cents per table per hour multiplied by hundreds or thousands of tables.

Small amounts for each one but in theory it should add up. Say 500 tables at 4 cents per table is $20 per hour. $500ish per day. over $150,000 - 200,000 per year.


Do I think it is worth it or any sites do it? Well, no, but if any did this would seem to be a construct to rig it that makes a ton more sense compared to any of the conventional rigged theories being tossed about.

Curious what the other `shills`think of this.

That's not how probability works. While the number of people who've lost 20 80/20s in a row and who've won 20 80/20s in a row is probably close, it's not because they have to "balance out", it's because they have the same likeliness of happening and should happen about as often as each other. Wrong. That's pretty much what happened with potripper, only he was too stupid to keep it at least semi-realistic.

Using a bot to skim some money from the prize pool is a pretty stupid way for a site to try to get some extra cash, especially since they probably make more in rake than even first place pays, so at best they're going to try to steal a mincash or something, putting entirely too much effort into making basically nothing. Not every possibility is actually realistic. There are plenty of ways sites could rig deals to get an extra dollar an hour, but any site greedy enough to get involved with rigging isn't going to waste their time getting a buck.

Just spitballing.

I would think you'd still be shifting starting hands enough that it would show up in an ultra large sample. You might also test for top pair hitting on the flop and test for 76ish type hands missing the flop too.

This may be way out there, but would it be possible to explore whether there is some "undetectable" way that sites are effecting the rake by doing a Monte Carlo type simulation?

That is, conceptually, could we model the player characteristics of a particular level/site, simulate the game with a fair deal and known rake structure, then compare the rake generated from the simulation with the actual rake generated? If the actual rake generated was much different than the rake from our modeled simulation, that might provide evidence something was askew even if we weren't sure exactly what that something was.

We're sort of at the edge of the memory of my ten year old stats training though, and I think at first glance this would be a massive undertaking compared to even what spadebidder is currently doing so I dont know if its realistic...but the thought suddenly sprung to mind and I wanted to throw it out there.

Well, I can give you some better figures and math that comes closer to the real return I think. But before that, you're talking about altering around 3% of the hands to be no action, by adding 2 hands/hour to an average of say, 70 hands per hour. You would need to be very careful about how those 3% of hands were actually dealt for it to not be an obvious skew in the card distribution. On the other hand, with my numbers we could do just a half percent of hands to arrive at your revenue figure. I'm going to use 1 extra hand per hour.

Let's split the difference of the two top sites, and say we run a 24/7 average of 20,000 cash players. The average table size is 6.8 players, giving us ~2900 tables. One thing you didn't realize is that 90% of those tables are NL, so we'll go with that. And the average stake played is .50/1.00 (take all 2900 table stakes and average them it comes close to this). You can verify these figures yourself, they are real and they are available several places.

So we are cruising along with these tables, with an average pot size of 12 BB, so $12, and an average of 70 hands per hour, and a 5% rake on that $12. Add that up and the rake is $121,800 per hour, or just over $1 Billion a year. That's about right according to industry estimates. Close enough for this exercise.

Now, let's add in 1 extra hand per hour using your scheme, assume for now that they all get to the flop, so $0.10 rake on a $2 pot. The times we don't get to flop will probably be made up by some larger pots. With 2900 tables 24/7, that's $290 per hour or another $2.5 million per year. Maybe attractive, maybe not. Risk/reward.

So the math works, but the big problem remains. You can't just deal 7 trash hands, one good hand, and one hand that entices a call, and expect that to come anywhere near a proper card distribution. Even at 1 hand per hour we're talking about 1.5% of all hands being altered. Starting hands in fact. It will take some thought to figure out how this affects the card distribution, but it won't be pretty. 1 / 6.7 (tbl avg 6.7) of those will be an extra AK, another 1/6.7 will be an extra suited connector, and the other 4.7/6.7 will be non-random trash hands. So we're adding about a quarter percent to the expected frequency of AK, but it's the hands we take away that worry me more. Can you expand on that part?

Once we get this all figured out we should open a poker site. After we spend 10 years to build a billion dollar company, then we can rig it to make an extra quarter of a percent in rake, before expenses. Yeehah. If we had a little million dollar site, this scheme would make us $2500 a year. And that's with altering at least 1.5% of the hands to be non-random, which might get detected.

Monteroy - nevertheless, this is best effort I've seen in this thread, and from a non-believer at that!

Sounds good to me let's open a site and do this that extra .25% sounds like it's worth the risk to me

Well, I am the first to realize none of this would ever be worth the actual risk, but if it would be done then it should be done in the proper manner. No idea why people are so hung up about flush draws, AA against KK and other insanely easy things for people to notice.

Now, I totally agree that the database with my scheme (with your adjustments) would indeed mess up the card distribution, but wouldn`t that only be seen if one could look at all of the hole cards of all of the hands? I would think that it would not alter any player`s particular database so much as to be noticed.

I assume this all fails once it is audited in that manner or someone who is not in on it does a study with the data while working for the site, but in theory it would seem to be able to at least pass the few early tests of

- Few people involved
- Few ways to attract attention
- Difficult for individual players to detect in databases (whether their own or from observed hands)


Again, I stress that I do not see this working either in a practical sense (ie: it would be caught) or a worth the risk sense in terms of income, but if rigging is to be done then it should definitely be small, non-targeted and as hidden as possible (ie: not freaking AA vs KK hands).

I think I would actually have some respect for any riggedologist that actually considered or acknowledged those issues even if they eventually settle on superbots pouncing on ADD people in the end.

Valid point, it probably wouldn't.

Why would it not any more than any of the other theories, over a sufficient sample. In a 100,000 hands this wouldn't be a noticeable skew? If you did an analysis similar to your examining the pre-flop, flop, turn, river distributions? Or are you just saying that the attention would be focussed elsewhere (ie: action hands) so it would slip under the radar?

He's talking about only altering starting hands, and no showdown. Individual databases wouldn't show much skew. Sure it could be noticed in large individual databases, but probably overlooked at this level. How close is your AK frequency to 16/1326? Change that by 1.5%/N where N is average table size.

I had another thought, for the extra $290/hour before expenses why not just fire the 2-3 guys that thought up this scheme and make the same amount with no risk?

Are you asserting that this thread has a purpose?!?

I don't know if they rig the money tables. But it makes profitable sense to rig the play tables. Play tables don't add money to the kitty. BUT, if you can make a bunch of wankers think they can play poker, they can be lured to the dark side. Fresh meat. Makes no sense to shuffle around a little kitty between a bunch of seasoned players.

You also can't let pros win all the play money tables, or the wankers won't buy in.

Then, you hire someone to figure out the most effective strategies to convert those players... and voila.. profitable venture. THAT'S WHY THEY'RE HIRING SOMEONE for that position.

I mean, it makes sense, unless you've got your head up your ass. It's too hard for some to admit, because they like resting in the thought that they *really can* play poker and start a forum site bashing the unbelievers.

If one says "rigged" then ok, maybe. When hundreds, even thousands, all over the internet, with absolutely nothing to gain by doing so and no relation between them, start posting, you're either an asshat or have your head buried firmly in your arse to completely disregard and even mock it.