The person to whom I was responding is clearly just a gimmick account acting the fool.

When someone posts telling another poster to go and die in a fire all bets are off.

It just struck me as an amusing way to deal with a gimmick account that had no intention of debating in a sensible manner. i.e. there was no real 'point' to it.

F Just for amusement.

does spadebidder think its rigged or not?

Thats good enough for me. Since you're a winning player your theory and proof that sites protect bad players must have some creditability.

You have a point here. Oddly enough, I was just trying to quote and respond to his post and it got moderated before I could. I did see it, however, and that can't be moderated.

Let's just stick to the topic and stop the mud slinging.

If you have a personal bone to pick then swap emails and go at it.

I would like to be the first to admit that my posts are mainly based on opinion and personal experiences which can make my arguments sound rather weak.

But using methods such as these make an argument even weaker (and I know I am guilty of doing this as well):

1) Facts are this... and if you do not believe this you're and idiot.
2) You cannot prove Aliens do not exist, so therefore they do.
3) Sites might be rigged... but only Americans think this because sites are not in America so Americans have a problem. (what happened to discussion about sites being rigged?)
4) One poker site is rigged and since it is online gambling, all online gambling is rigged.

I would just like to really hear some feedback from the guy who shot these 50+ PokerStars videos on YouTube instead of reading personal attacks that just stray from the topic.

And once again, I am not claiming this guy has legitimate footage or that I believe that all online poker is rigged or that even PokerStars is rigged.

I am merely interested in these videos as they have very close to the same frequency of bad beats that I was experiencing on FullTilt over the course of about 60k+ hands.

Here is a link to the first video again.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SEvv...eature=related

AGAIN LETS TRY AND KEEP THIS DISCUSSION ON A POSITIVE NOTE

Here is a question to the people who feel strongly that Pokerstars RNG is totally random.

What else would the guy shooting the videos need to have in his videos to make you feel at least a little suspicious that his Pokerstars account was not getting the short end of the stick?

I personally do not think every account is effected in the same way as his is or mine is on FullTilt.

The RNG is rigged for me, so the RNG is rigged for everyone... I AM NOT SAYING THIS.

I am not even convinced that any of the RNG are rigged but I wan to know what it would take for some of the people here to even become suspicious that it could be a POSSIBILITY, however unlikely.

I am baffled why you cling to this guy as some sort of beacon of useful information. He is basically doing a funny blog via youtube, not much more and all of his information is what he chooses and how he chooses to present it.

Seriously, if you take stuff like that at face value you are a guy who will be conned into all sorts of things. He is putting on a show and using youtube to become a bit of a online personality. Some do that showing their cute puppies, he is doing it with a different approach.


And yet you keep mentioning how important his videos are and how much you would love to hear from him.

Stop fence sitting - either convert to full blown riggie beliefs or leave them behind and work on your game in a rational practical manner. All of your posts are looking for some reason why you lose, make up your mind and decide

1) Variance and my play - then work on the latter

2) Mystical conspiracies to bad beat you - then no need to work on game, be a riggie

You guys who try to play both sides are even more annoying than the full blown riggies or even the gimmicks who may or may not be real riggies as at least they have a set of beliefs they follow.



It is time for you to positively make a choice. Are you going to be a riggie or not. The bad beats are either TIlt targeting you for mystical reasons or it is an element of your game that you can analyze and work on. Make up your mind.

I would like to know if spadebidder thinks full tilt and or pokerstars are rigged?

I guess I take longer than you to commit to a belief as the truth or not the truth.

There seems to be a lot of gray area in here that makes it hard for me to just say a site is rigged or not.

1) My play variance.
2) My poor play which of course there is.
3) May or may not be rigged for entire playerbase.
4) May or may not be rigged all the time.
5) There may be conditions that need to be met for the RNG to not deal randomly.

You seem to be able to blindly go in one direction on this topic without ever even considering that you could be wrong. Your "fence sitting" to me is called keeping an open mind.

"beacon of useful information" - his videos are the first (assumingly for the sake of conversation) live footage that I have seen to have captured how bad I have ran on FullTilt. Yeah it is even harder for me to believe this thing could be happening to two major sites but I cannot deny my experiences.

I agree his video are very entertaining but once I got to about the 7th video and realized there were 0ver 45 more to still watch of his beats day in and day out, I could not help but wonder what was going on.

"Are you going to be a riggie or not" - I am positively a "site could possibly be rigged" believer and I think that is good enough.

I just cannot help but wonder why you feel the need to experss so much animosity in your posts. You continue to belittle many people in this thread and now seem to have a huge problem with people like me who believe rigged sites are possible.

I think it's a pretty fair guess that he doesn't.

If he had found any evidence they were I have a feeling he would have mentioned it.

Like I mentioned before, this guy with the videos... he is a WINNING player. Look him up on SharkScope. He doesn't play high stakes, but his ROI is 11% for over 3000 games. He even has started doing "Tips" videos while still complaining about the riggedness. I don't know what to make of him or his videos.

If you're making money, why complain through these videos? Maybe Monteroy is right and he's just trying to get a little fame out of it.

Bottom line is this: He doesn't show any of the normal hands (except by accident), so he is choosing the sample we see. As the sample itself is chosen, it can't be assumed to be a random sampling of his hands. If I made a video of all the hands I've sucked out on, you'd think i was some kind of major luckbot set up to rob people of their money and that I must be some kind of gazillionaire.

I'm not sure at whom that comment is directed but a lot of us do not consider we are 'fence sitting' at all.

We adopt the view that there is plenty of data available and not a scrap of evidence that any rigging is going on.

Therefore we feel it reasonable to adopt the view that the sites are probably not rigged.

If there were to be any evidence for rigging I'm sure a lot of us would quickly 'jump over the fence'.

I believe that all the evidence ever shown on poker forums and web sites shows that the two big sites for US players, FT and Stars, have a random and fair deal. I've never seen any credible evidence to show that they do not.

I also believe that if a crooked site wanted to increase their profits dishonestly it would not be done by manipulating the deal, there are better and easier ways. And I'm positive that any manipulation on a scale that would add significant revenue to the site (the only reason to do it) would absolutely be detectable. There are many huge accumulations of hand histories floating around, one of which I have access to. As I have time I continue to run tests on that database, and I've looked at many things that are not published on my web site yet just because I haven't made time to get them ready. I have findings that will be very interesting to the community when published, that show some things never before known about Hold'em poker afaik, but they don't show evidence of a rigged deal.

Just like my finding that paired flops happen more often than a calculated expectation due entirely to player behavior with a random deal (not all flops are seen), I also have discovered things about all-in hands that cause the outcomes to differ from calculated equity in a small but predictable way, but consistent with a random deal. I'm just not ready to publish it yet and I only work on the study when I have time.

Monteroy,

To tell you the truth, I was a full believer such as yourself about 6 months ago and it irritated me when I would hear similar complaints about online poker.

I think my reasoning was the fact that I liked playing online poker so much, I really did not want there to even be a remote chance of any of this being a scam.

I LOVE TO PLAY ONLINE POKER.

So much that even when I have suspicions there is a chance of it being rigged, I still play. I have been doing some studying of my own play (more than normal) and routine hand analysis in my strive to take the "bad player" option out of the reasoning for feeling a site might be rigged.

Many of your posts use ridicule to promote your perspective. I think you would be more effective in changing how I and many others view this topic if you did not use this method to build an argument.

Why are you so concerned about people making up their mind? Without all the information, deciding that it is rigged or not is just "belief", not truth. So are you saying you "believe" the cards are random? Some of us reserve the right to say "I don't know".

Does this mean we don't work on our game and just give up? Hell no. I've been working my ass off lately on 9-man SnG's and have made huge strides in my results.

Monteroy and many others have answered questions from those who feel there is a possibility that online poker might be rigged politely and in great detail many, many, times over the course of this thread.

Some people are still answered in that manner but after a while it gets to the point where certain posters are so completely lacking in any sort of basic common sense and so out of touch with reality that ridicule is the only viable response.

People who are ridiculed are more than welcome to look back through the thread to points where their concerns have been addressed in great detail but it is unrealistic to expect a few people to continually do the same work over and over again because the latest rigtard cannot be bothered to address the wealth of material already present.

The original post was aimed at Monteroy as he felt I was the most annoying type of person which just seemed a little over the top. Monteroy - "You guys who try to play both sides are even more annoying than the full blown riggies"

It seems that since this game has such a large element of luck and randomness involved, there is never going to be a smoking gun found.

What would a scrap of evidence look like to you if most unlikely events as far as hand rank winning percentages and cards dealt percentages can so quickly be explained as variance.

I like that at least you use the term "probably not rigged".

"ridicule is the only viable response" - I do not buy this at all. I think not even responding to their messages is by far a better option.

I just did a quick search to kinda review what you said about Monteroy's posts.

In the first half a dozen posts I have read by him, they mainly consist of content of him calling others names, conflicts with other people he is having that are very negative in nature.

This is the last I will direct any of my posts at Monteroy as I do not have any personal issues with him and do not want to get off the topic any more than I have.

You can only explain things with variance to a certain point.

e.g. If you toss a coin 10 times and it comes up heads each time then you can say: "I cannot say for certain that the coin is not fair because I would expect to see that result around one time in 1024 that such an experiment is undertaken".

If, however, you tossed it 100 times and it came up heads each time you would be quite justified in saying the coin is not fair because you would not expect to see that result if you spent your entire life tossing fair coins.

If the deal was rigged it would show up in a bias in some results and after doing a statistical analysis you would be able to say that you have a certain confidence that said rigging had taken place based on sound mathematical principles.

Indeed.

Saying that it is certainly not rigged is as stupid as saying that it certainly is.

Possibly more so because it would imply you had proven a negative.

So it seems the issue of finding a "shred of evidence" seems to revolve around the fact that someone has to prove very unlikely events to have occurred in their data set.

Yes this would be very easy to spot and I would very much assume if someone worked on a system to "rig" the deal, this would be very obvious to them as well.

Can you imagine any other way a card dealing system could be rigged so that it adjusted the results of players so that it could not be detectable by heavily skewed data?

I know my results can very greatly for a session over the results of only a few hands.

I feel if any of these sites are rigged, it is in a matter that is more complicated than most of the "Riggies" have even assumed up to this point.

I'm pretty much in the same boat as you, as are many, I suspect. I LOVE TO PLAY ONLINE POKER! God help me if they take it away forever.

I do NOT want to find out that Full Tilt is rigged, or PokerStars (even though I don't play there much at all). But I refuse to blindly say they're legit.

I play on them, I have a modicum of trust in that I'm being treated fairly. I do not trust them implicitly, nor should anyone.

People like to throw around the phrase "Innocent until proven guilty", so I'll throw out another chestnut "Let the buyer beware".

You don't even have to find unlikely events. You can find that regular ordinary events aren't happening at the expected frequencies, and are far enough off to give a high confidence that they didn't happen that way randomly. That can be calculated using basic statistics. Then you have a theory with some evidence.

There are similar paranoid complaints about every major industry that exists. I have posted links in this thread to similar conspiracy theories about McDonalds, Sesame Street, Microsoft etc.

You are running a bit bad and looking for something to believe in, and using rather minimal reasoning skills with regard to what to trust.

Stop using simplistic terms like "full believer." A ton of crime exists in the online poker world. Fraud, collusion, bots, small sites that close down and steal players money etc. We need people to be vigilant about issues like this more than whether a billion dollar company is creating a conspiracy to screw you in $2 pots.


Your posts show you have a love for the game and I mean this seriously - I respect that. Most riggies are just whiny losing players who do not even care about the game, they just think they are good when in reality they are way worse than they imagine.

You like the game and you want to get better at the game, but you are at a critical point in how you treat the game. Your choices are:

1) Drop all the rigged nonsense

in which case you

- Stop worrying about what random losing players say on bad beats.
- Stop worrying about conspiracies against YOU when you lose 5 bucks

Start working on your game by

- Joining a coaching site
- Become addicted to the appropriate forums for the games you play
- Read blogs from players who actually play and grow as players


You are looking for some sort of middle ground here when none exists, and if you need emotional support get a hug from a family member or a pet and then get serious about your game.



Worrying about boogie men will distract you and cripple you from improving your game as these boogie men can be used to explain any time you lose.

Look at the riggie stuff in this thread. People believe they lose because:

- They cashed out earlier in the week
- They had a smaller stack in a MTT
- They had a larger stack in a MTT
- They play on a laptop
- Their account is cursed
- Superbots
- Lizard People


If you want to join that club then just commit to it already. You will never improve as a player, but then your emotional needs will be better met as riggies will blindly support other riggies even if they are saying the exact opposite things.



With all due respect, my posts are probably one of the best things you will ever receive, but I am not going to have a meaningless debate about whether a multi-billion dollar company is picking you to lose $2 pots. If I want that type of fun I will argue a conspiracy nut on the street about 9/11 or the Amero.

You want good advice - here it is:

- Stop whining
- Accept variance as a part of the game
- Forget conspiracies
- Get coaching help
- Read appropriate forums
- Continue to enjoy the game, and trust me as you work on your game you will love it even more.


That's it, I am not wasting a ton of time like I did with Donko when he did this "well, I am not sure" routine (hint, that is why guys like you are the most frustrating). Either be a player or be a riggie. Good luck with whichever you choose.

All the best.

LMAO its so freakin sick how obv some of you make it that your representitives for the sites. Are you guys actually trying to hide it? Its so freakin shady that there is a containment thread where they allow you to shoot down anyone who come forth like fish in a barrel. Its sick how you guys jump on each person like ur bully'n them into thinking theyre just seein things.

I hope everyone that comes to this thread sees whats going on here. This is the sites working with 2+2 to contain this issue. They couldnt just ban every thread about the rng because that would be too obvious so they send everything here where these people team up and constantly fire the standard industry rebuttles at anyone who challenges. They say things like "dont worry youre +ev" or call people riggtards and try to make them appear as fools to others. All designed to keep the wool over whats really going on here.

Why else would you have the same people everyday so passionatly defending the rng all throughout this thread. What would be the motive for a player to lobby so hard everyday for the poker sites that arent paying them to do it? Wake up my friends. We are arguing with people that know whats going on and are just trying to do damage control.

This is really where an 'Occam's Razor' approach is sensible.

IF I owned a site and wanted to make more money than I could by legitimate means there are several ploys I can think of that would bring in some bunce with a lot less risk than rigging the deal.

Just as an example, one thing that you could do is develop a good system for detecting robots and then just sit back and watch them build up their BR before confiscating their money.

Or, you could develop a basic robot that was good enough to be be just better than break even (easy enough since you're getting any rake it pays back) and just let it loose mopping up money from the poorer players. After all, there is nothing to stop a site generating as many accounts as it likes so even if someone does get suspicious they can just junk the account and start a new one.

These would be far easier andfar less open to detection than doing something brainless like rigging the deal with tens of thousands of players watching what's going on.