Another fun debate would be between

and

after the latter basically realized he was just emotionally venting.

I mean Bucket took everything you said prior at absolute face value without any doubt. Now what?

Bucket is a moron, he'll just ignore this one and then look for the next crackpot rigged post and take the one at absolute face value without any doubt.

I know, but I am just mixing up my annoy riggedologists game with the new "I'd like to see a debate between xxx and yyy" routine until it gets stale (which granted might have already happened).

I never expect anything in terms of progress when talking toward riggedologists, I leave that naive hope for guys like spadebidder.

timing.

No it means you're unlucky. I don't know what to think about people who think 100 or 200 thousands hand samples are going to eliminate all outliers on the planet (let alone those who think 10000 is enough), you're always gonna have a small proportion of unlucky people regardless of the sample size although I agree the numbers will decrease as samples get larger.

I can't entirely conceive bad luck after 1 million hand!!

I prefer 1 billion hands for a more accurate assessment. 1 million can still be skewed a little too much by variance, so can 1 billion, but less likely, obviously.

Your scam site still not up and running yet? Why?

you forgot:

entropy effect
mafia

edit: is that a nipple in blunders avatar?

edit2: not that I mind nipples

It is a fact, that some online poker sites can take screen shots of what you have up and running on your computer for the security of other players. But what stops or prevents (individual)hackers from doing the same thing to me? Perhaps, what if I downloaded a program that could be hidden in some sort of unsuspecting folder that allowed access to take screen shots of my hole cards. Is this an impossible scenario? Any feedback appreciated...

Yes you could use some sort of spyware to view an opponents hole cards, as long as you find a way to install it on their computer first.

Essentially this is matter of computer security on a personal level though, and not about riggedness or site security.

A thought experiment just for fun.

Here's how I'd rig the deal to increase rake in a way that is very unlikely to be detected. This is just a brainstorm without working out some of the details.

First, I don't mess with the deal. Use a proper RNG and deal the cards randomly, with one catch that I'll describe. Next, I keep a simple profile of players to know who at the table has been losing too fast lately. I need to slow down his losing a bit so that he can stay in the game longer and generate more rake before he goes broke. The worst players will lose the fastest, on average. My goal is to tilt the odds slightly back in their favor just often enough that they win a few good pots and are able to play a few more hands before going broke. This will also increase the chance that they redeposit after going broke, because they were closer to being a winning player.

I'm going to make up some numbers just to illustrate the idea. Remember that losing players probably don't know bankroll management or how many buy-ins they need to play a certain stake. If a player loses their $500 deposit after participating in (puts money in the pot) 200 hands at .50/1 with a 5% rake, and the average pot size for hands he plays is 12BB, and on average he is in the pot with 1.5 opponents, then his rake contribution should be about $48 (1 * 12 * .05 * 200 / 2.5). But if I can make him last 250 hands before going broke, then his rake contribution goes up to $60. That's a 25% increase in rake from all the targeted players who would be losing too fast. Let's say my profiling algorithm puts 25% of all players in that category. So I've increased total rake by about 6% if I can just get them to last an extra 50 hands per 500BB deposit. It would only take a few large pots won to accomplish this.

So how do we do it? After creating all the hole cards randomly, but before showing them to the players, I find my targeted player at that table. I then swap the best set of hole cards to him, and then play the hand without further intervention. He gets a chance to win a few pots, making him go broke more slowly. I place limits on how often this intervention takes place, and don't repeat it to the same player within certain intervals calculated to just accomplish the goal.

Losing players still lose, winning players still win, and the deal to the whole table is completely random. The only skew is that some players will get a few more good cards than they are supposed to. They are losing players, and they are the least likely to play enough tracked hands (or to track at all) to ever see that they get a few too many good hole cards. If I shifted 3 good hands to him for every 1000 hands dealt (he has VPIP 25%), he would need a large sample size to even notice that he got AA 2 SD more than expected, or AKs 3 SD more than expected. The skew would be balanced between being within the normal tails of the hand distribution, while giving him just enough boost to accomplish the goal of making him last a little longer before going broke. And the players who get the short end of the hand swap are diluted by 1/8 at a full table, so they are so close to normal that nothing would be noticed by them.


Discuss.

well you'd end up with *all* winning players seeing less good hands then. I think it would be pretty easy for someone to spot this, post their stats, someone else notices the same, and the snowball is rolling.

Also I'm not certain the 6% figure is correct. Just because a player does not redeposit does not mean his (former) funds are not being raked back and forth across tables still. Obv you get some sort of increase when you have more players sitting at the tables and putting funds into pot that are being raked, but it isn't as straightforward as you are putting it, is it? Am I making any sense...?

It's way more complicated, but I'm ignoring the details just to put the idea out.

Alot of naive people that know nothing about computers or what certain hackers are capable of, can be easily misled by a first impression paranoid judgement call. Like I said before when you feel got cheated, the first place you point your finger is at the poker site. Which is why we have this thread....But if I'm in a hand w/ another player that has hacked the poker site some how and can see my hole cards or see's the flop turn and river before the images are "unlocked." Then it would certainly be assumed that the poker site gave the other player cards to keep him in the game when in reality you could of been just hacked.

@spade

ok fair enough. it would mean an increase in rake in the long term which is the whole point.

but I just don't see how this would be difficult to detect. the way I understand it *every* winning player will then be dealt less AA/KK/AKs etc than they should, and these are the players more likely to have large hand databases and who are much more likely to make any form of stats analysis.

It's a matter of degree. If the loser gets an additional 3/1000 good hands abnormally, that's 3/8000 taken from the other players at the table, on average. So instead of getting a top 5% hand 400 times per 8000 hands, they get one 397 hands per 8000 dealt. It takes a very large sample for this to be significant.

I think the perfect rigged effect would not be to rig the statistical outcome of the deals, but to assign something like 3 house bots to every human player. Basicly if I ran a poker website and it was my goal to be the biggest slime on earth. I would contract somebody like IV8 to act as an independent contractor and have him develop bots that can see hole cards, and all the cards that are to be dealt, flop, turn, river, ect...I would assign Iv8 to create the 3-1 ratio of these bots to actual players and let them run wild in my medium to low stake MTTs as well as cash games. High Stakes players are my most important customers and their legitimate rake keep pays the bills so we keep these games honest. Of course this would be just the start...After years of complaints and other sites getting busted I would evolve my master plan into something undetectable...My profits soared so high, I can afford to hire humans to play manually w/ these "bots" to keep bad players in the game and at the same time taking in 80% of the tournament prize pool. My quick 2 cents...

That is clearly hypothetical and the individual I referenced is clearly for theory's sake....

If I have 3 bots to every 1 human player, then my suspicous ROI and my BB/100 would be ratio'd out to stay under the radar.

@spade again

Perhaps you are right. I'll take your word for it, you being the math guy and me not.

In any case, any sort of rigging that would actually make the site an extra profit, AND be so subtle that it is practically impossible to detect/prove with a statistical analysis, is definitely not detectable to the human eye. i.e. even though the games *could* in fact be rigged, the rigtards have certainly not spotted it as they would "know" the game was rigged even if it's actually not.

Bingo. Any reasonably smart scheme would absolutely not be noticed by rigtard observation, making all their theories wrong by definition.

how would you keep this unknown to other people in the company though, or ensure that word does not get out outside of the company?

I branch and contract off my customer support agents to different locations totally independent from "my operations." When you call "Security" your gonna be calling me

On the other hand, no matter how smart and subtle the scheme, with millions of people playing in these games, there would be plenty of people who would "sense" that something isn't right, even if they couldn't explain how. A few of them would no doubt try to come up with explanations, most or all of which would be wrong, as you point out. This would result in the "Boy Who Cried Wolf" effect and make them all look like conspiracy nuts by association.

Coincidentally, we would see the same phenomenon if NO sites rigged their games, except that in this case, the complainers really would be conspiracy nuts.

It might impossible to tell the difference.

Well, using my example then the winning players (who are likely to track stats), and sticking to top 5% hands being taken from them at the rate of 3/8000, if my math is right then on a tracked database of a million hands they will only be short 1.7 standard deviations for getting top 5% hands. 2.5 SD with a 2 million hand sample.

Edit: On the other hand, the losing player who is given a boost, and who is less likely to track hands or have a large sample, would be off 8 times as many SDs. But he has nothing to complain about.