Ah, but that relationship is always there, and since hole cards and community cards come from the same deck, altering any part of that relationship changes the distribution of all parts. If we can show conclusively that the board is random and has a correct distribution, and that the patterns on the board that relate to poker hands all match expectation, then we also know that the aggregate hole cards are random since they came out of the complement. What we won't know is if the random set of dealt hole cards are distributed randomly to each player, and not swapped around to favor anyone. Only individual players can determine that from their own hole card records.

If you go down the road of shifting a card from player A to player B on this hand, and we'll keep up with that and put it back later to make it invisible and make everybody come out right, that scheme is incredibly complex if you actually examine it. I believe it's actually impossible to pull off, it's trying to manage chaos due to the incredible number of combinations to manage. It borders on tin hat stuff, really. The number of things to keep up with would likely be beyond the capability of computers.

Well, that's kind of the problem in a way. You have your areas of concerns, others have all sorts of areas of concerns including

- When a person deposits/withdraws money
- "Timing"
- Stack sizes
- Entropy effects
- Superbots at work
- Results based on attempting to clear a bonus
- Player location

And some more creative stuff like bad beats based on being on a laptop or the day of the week or whether mouse clicks based on ADD people get used against them

You are more of an "action flop" kind of guy which is a bit more mainstream in the riggie community, but even if somehow spadebidder conclusively demonstrated that action flops do not statistically exist (ignoring the previous long discussions on the financial pointlessness of them), all that would happen is that a bunch of other "what if" theories would fill the void.

So while the search for the "truth" sounds good in concept, eventually we reach a point where we have as much common sense and statistical truth is needed to make a proper decision and the rest is just a whole bunch of creative "what ifs" based on paranoia.

I spent years milking online casinos and poker rooms because they had some utterly flawed "patterns" in how they handled their promotions. Check out the good old days thread for examples.

If "patterns" exist - they can be exploited for a ton of money. As of yet, not a single riggie has any $$$$ to show for all of the patterns they "see."

Know what might be interesting proof od it being rigged? A riggie actually making money based on exploiting the rigged software. SHow me a winner among the riggie crowd in this thread.

When we have a board that comes out 682K4, have we gotten closer to proving the board is random or that it is NOT random? I contend it has no real relevance without hole card information. Maybe it's AK vs. 64s... maybe it's 66 vs. 88... maybe it's K8 vs. 86s vs. 44... or maybe it's just something like AQ vs. JJ or AT vs. 33.

I'm trying to follow you on the logic of if the community cards are effectively random in and of themselves, that that means anything with regards to the hole cards, but I guess I'm just not understanding. I'm thinking the community cards can follow a seemingly random sequence while being aligned with the hole cards.

Everyone knows that riggies are the most moral and upstanding citizens in the online poker world, and thus would never exploit these awful systems against their fellow players.

I thought they claimed that if anyone had the ability to cheat that they would? i.e. 'why wouldn't a pokerroom rig the deal?'

Let's play a game where I deal several piles of faceup cards on the table. I have 9 piles of 2 cards each, one pile of 3 cards, and another pile of 31 cards. Your objective is to modify one or more of the 2-card piles, and then we repeat this exercise many many times. Here are your options:

1. Swap some cards between the 2-card piles and leave the others alone. Over time this changes the frequency of how 2-card combinations appear in each pile, and we can measure that change.

2. Swap cards between a 2-card pile and the 3-card pile. Over time this changes the distribution of what appears in the 3 card pile AND the 2-card pile swapped with. We can measure that change in both sets.

3. Swap cards between a 2-card pile and the 31 card pile. After you've done that we will randomly pull two cards from the 31 card pile and put them in a new pile called turnriver. Over time your swaps alter the distribution of the turnriver pile AND of the 2-card pile swapped with. We can measure both of those changes.

So you are back to trying to use some sort of logistically impossible tracking system to keep up with all these swaps and even them out.

That's only evil, soulless corporations and the people that run them. They've always claimed to be upstanding citizens, hence all the warnings about online poker being rigged.

i recently have dinner with this math genius friend and spoke on this topic.
he pretty much say it's mission impossible.
if poker site rigged 0.1% off the math, it will be acceptable range. since even if you flip a coin 100 000 times, math say 50% but true number will have more then 0.1% gap. if you play 100 000 hands, and 0.1% mean 100 rigged hand and cost you 10 000bb, and that can turn a 10bb/100 winner into breakeven players.
even it's rigged. it's gonna be less then 0.1% since majority of winning players does not beat poker by 10bb/100.
so proof of rigged will actually be the proof of unrigged.
moral of the story: play only at site you trust.

How about if we have 2 piles with 2 cards each, 1 pile of 3 cards, and 1 pile of 45 cards? Say we deal these piles out over and over, and every 5th deal or so, I swap 1 or more of the cards from the 3 card pile with the 45 card pile. Are you saying this would definitely be measurable vs. me not swapping any cards? I just don't see how it could be unless I was doing a very methodical type of swap (say, putting an extra Ace in the 3 card pile), but since my particular swap will have more to do with matching up against 2 random piles, my swap itself will appear to be random in and of itself, but not when compared to the random piles.

If he came out and said without question everything you ask about is measurable, would your reaction be "cool, I am good now" or "hmm, wait a minute, what about if they actually deal 7 piles with 4 cards and..."


Anyone seriously think that endless detailed studies that show as many facets as possible will ever do anything to adjust the thinking of guys like this? I mean come on - look at how this guy thinks and communicates. He is literally at the max of his reasoning capabilities as is, nothing more to squeeze out of that.

That's kind of where we are now. Spadebidder has done a study that is insanely intensive. People have database programs with how they can analyze their hands (many here have given step by step how to do that).

If anything it is good the thread helped produce that piece of work, but moving forward all we really have now are more creative fantasy theories (impossible to disprove) to discuss. I say let's have some fun with it, and realize that's about how far it can go.

Of course maybe this post is all an elaborate shill based coverup operation. Fortunately, spade cannot test for that just yet...

Muhahaha (oops meant to think that, not say that)




All the best.

I'm not convinced I'm a riggie, but maybe I am. I exploit the patterns I see and I profit from them (so far). I'm not 100% convinced in my ideas of these patterns, so I'm unwilling to put much money on the line, thus not a millionaire.

A genuine comment - props to you if you are actually trying to exploit systems based on your riggie perceptions of them. Realistically, you are likely spewing equity, but if it makes the game more interactive and causes you to focus in a way then you know what - not really all that bad.

Understand where I come from - thousands of tournaments a month and I can assure you despite some crazy variance at times the money flows from the donks to the better players in the long term.

If you really want to see that effect in the extreme, open up the Omaha DoNs (10-20s that run) and sharkscope all the players. The top regs are a consistent 15% ROI over thousands of games. The marginal regs are 5% or so. The dead money people are deep losers. The categories are extremely distinct.

Know why the better players win more in the end? Because they are better.

Yes. If you did it only once every 5000 deals it would show up like a big giant Rigged sign in a large sample of say, 50 million hands. It doesn't matter at all what your rules are for the swap, as long as there are some rules. If you just swap randomly, obviously that changes nothing and would not be detectable. But rules means non-randomness, which is very easy to detect.

After your transparency post, I looked you up (as most did, I'm sure). Your record speaks for itself. I even watched a few of your SnG's. I respect your play, and I think anyone would if they were to examine it instead of just looking for easy insults. I'm not much of a tourney player, but I'd be looking to match your results, if I were.

This is something I just cannot fathom.

4999 hands dealt normally
1 hand, swap a K for a 2
4999 hands dealt normally
1 hand, swap an 8 of spades for an 8 of clubs
4999 hands dealt normally
1 hand, swap out any non-heart card in the 3-card pile for a random heart
...

Each time the rule itself could/would be different in what was changed and why. How on earth could you detect this? The distribution pool is so large, subtle changes would simply not matter as they could be attributed to variance. Who's to say the 2 shouldn't have come out instead of the K? It could have easily gone that way on that hand. Now if I replaced EVERY K with a 2 on every 5000th hand, that MIGHT show up. Even that seems unlikely.

I'm not a statistics guru, so I won't argue any further as I'm starting to feel foolish already. I just can't wrap my head around what you're saying.

I can't fathom it, nor will I ever really. You can't nor will you ever really (not an insult). Spadebidder can, and he has made it clear that it would be detectable.

For you to continue to believe in this line of rigged beliefs you now have to believe either

1) spadebidder is lying about it being detectable

or

2) spadebidder is lying about knowing what he is talking about


This is not an easy choice for a riggie to make, it relies on trusting someone else who has expertise in an area, and riggies in general are not shall we say "trusting."

This is a variation of a "where do we go from here" scenario. Superbots.

You have to remember that as the frequency of interferences went up the number of samples required to be confident of any conclusion will go up at an even faster rate and you would need a truly enormous sample to detect a one in 5000 interference in a sample that is a dramatically affected by normal variance as a poker hand.

As to the problem with changing the rule for the interference, this is where the design of your statistical 'experiment' comes in.

In some instances you might want to examine some aspect of card distribution within hands whereas in others you would want to examine a more derivative quantity such as, say, the number of times a certain hand improved in a certain way on the river for a break even player compared to the number of times the same hand improved for a strong winner or a big loser.

These statistical examinations are difficult and complex to design, particularly because we do not have complete information (except in the case where the site makes complete HH's available to a third party). As they become more specialised you need an ever greater number of hands to create an adequate sample.

You probably couldn't and that isn't what I meant. A one-time rule is no rule at all. But a system can't work that way, there would be rules that apply every time some particular circumstance appears randomly, and you alter it to the desired circumstance by a rule set. That is detectable, and in inverse proportion to the number of rules used (for the same frequency of alteration). If only a few rules cause an alteration every X hands, much easier to detect than if a large number of rules cause an alteration every same X number of hands.

What you are describing is a human intelligence watching and making a situational decision every so often to change a hand, so basically infinite rules. That would be much more difficult to detect. So if the wizard is sitting up there pushing the doom button he'll probably get away with it forever.

I'm simply going by the fact that random events must follow a normal distribution, and that can be measured. I don't claim to be a statistics expert and I'm not, but the basic things that I do are not difficult concepts. If you measure an event and it shows a 5-SD offset from the calculated expectation, there is about one chance in a million that it happened randomly.

In a sample of 98 million full ring flops I showed that paired flops happened 9-SD more than normal. There haven't been enough poker hands played in the history of the world for that to be random, and it isn't. So my hypothesis about pair bias caused by preflop player decisions, is essentially proven and not speculation. As far as I know, nobody quantified and proved that bias before me, although I'm sure people logically deduced it should exist. Similarly, other hypothesis can be tested for randomness. I've chosen to test about 40 different flop patterns that are relevant to poker hands, and I have another set coming for late streets. If I've been comprehensive enough, it would be hard for something not tested to slip through that net even if it isn't exactly the pattern I've chosen. Every possible pattern is a subset of one of the tests I've used.

That last statement made me chuckle.

The odds of direct human interference are probably nil (I hope). But I don't see much hassle in implementing a relatively large set of rules. I'm not saying they do that.

Using Binomial Distribution (about the only statistics I understand), I went ahead and decided to see how much difference there was in changing cards out over a very large sample. Please feel free to correct anything I messed up.

Assuming 50,000,000 3-card hands, we have 150,000,000 cards. Of those cards, roughly 1/13th should be Kings (~11,538,462). If we decide to change every 5000th King into a 2, that will impact roughly 2308 Kings. Now instead of seeing ~11,538,462 Kings, we'll see ~11,536,154. Running this through the Binomial Distribution it returns (accum) 0.2937...

Unless I'm getting it wrong, that means there's roughly 29.37% chance of seeing even fewer Kings in a random sample of this size, putting us well within 1 Std Dev of the mean. That's a very mechanical and deliberate modification and yet it falls well within normal expectations even over an enormous sample size.

Now, imagine if we had a reverse rule that changed a 2 into a K with roughly the same frequency. We're not seeing virtually any deviation from the expected values.

I think my mind is imploding!

Who knows why certain things happen in poker? Just last night my big hand of the evening was AQ of clubs. 3 low clubs came on the flop, an Ace of diamonds on the turn and a 5 of diamonds on the river. The flop made my nut flush and gave the BB a straight flush draw. The turn got the Button interested with his Aces up, and then the river completed a normal straight for the BB. I made about 60BB's in that hand, but only with the help of genius turn and river cards to keep the others interested. I guess I just got lucky. Luckily, I get lucky a lot.

That's right, but you've not modified every 5000 hands, you've only modifed every 5000*13 hands, or every 65,000. That wouldn't make a difference to the site or to any individual player. If you put together a combination of rules to modify a hand in every 5000, it still probably wouldn't help the site much, but it would absolutely be detectable. What you aren't considering is that they are not independent of each other, every modification like the one you described will affect numerous other things in the distribution. Presumably you've also done it in a way that changes the possible poker hands (or it would be useless), which changes one or more poker-relevant combinations on the flop and subsequent streets, and for completed hands if there is a showdown. So the intersections of your rule set would have a much greater effect than 1/65000.

When I get a chance I'll try to simulate exactly what you described and see how detectable it is by itself. I'm pretty sure there will be far reaching effects that we can't foresee. When I do the substitution of K for 2, what do you want to do with suits? We can't guarantee the same suit is available in the deck stub.

You're right, I messed that up from what we were originally talking about. What I originally proposed wouldn't work anyway, since every 5000 hands wouldn't necessarily have a King to change anyway.

I told you my mind imploded! Don't worry about trying to simulate this. I, along with others I'm sure, am more interested in your main project.

L O L

holy crap, it's spreading!

Is that what you meant to say?