and they say the games are dead

So, the insinuation is that this is impossible?

when that happens to me I turn my monitor upside down so there are less overcards to fold to after the flop.

Pretty conclusive proof if I ever saw it. I can see being dealt 'pockets' maybe 4 times in 20 minutes but certainly not 5. I'd pull my money out now.

OP, if you were going to rig a poker site would dealing the same cards repeatedly be the strategy?

If level, pls ignore this question

I had KQ 3 hands *IN A ROW* once, and posted about it in BBV.

It didn't go well.

I once got 30 hands in a row with no card higher than a Ten. I'd trade for the pairs.

Im reading everything and I am still goin over it. I have a ton I want to respond to and I dont wanna forget so here is a few. I will respond on the results last.

I didnt want to forget to respond to this. This is very important I think. I became a fulltime MTT player at the end of 2009. I will more than likely have anyother 300ish hands played by the end of 2010. I think it would extremely important to to the same anaylisis over that sample. i I woudl even be willing to moderately compensate spade and the KRystonesnsfE guy.

Also, you said I was 46% equity on AIPF situations. What was my actual equity here in terms of a percentage?

And I believe I said I didnt want to place any sides bets onthis so whoever thinks thewy owe me $20 doesnt need to pay me. I think I was going to bet but backed out before anything was confirmed. I wouldnt have paid you if the results were reversed so I wont accept.

No, that was before I filtered out multi-ways. It came up to 49.

The results are a few pages back, you'll spot the table.

Start on 16466.

OK, first a big thanks to spade for the excellent work and the time to explain.

I am going to be honest. I am having mixed feelings.

First off, I am much much much more on the side of it being legit than I was before. The fact that my actual equity was only .8% under my expected equity is very encouraging and that alone has given me some peace of mind. The only other thing that would concern me is the size of the pots I am winning vs. the size of the pots I am losing (in terms of BBs would be a good gage, not chip value bc obv as the blinds go up a bigger weight would be put on that hand). I think if an analysis was done and it showed that I was winning all the small pots and losing all the big ones, I would be much more swayed back to the rigged side. Can this kind of analysis be done?

The fact that I a running worse than 95% of players is a little disheartening, although I completely understand that it's possible. I would love to see this same analysis done over my next 300-350K hands. I currently play fulltime (started a few months ago) and I think Ill easily get close to another 300K hands by the end of 2010. I will gladly moderately compensate spade for the next 300K hand analysis if he is interested.

Yes. But it isn't without bias depending on your playing style. The amount you risk on all-in hands depends on your hand strength, what you think opponent has, his style, tourney stage, etc. So just looking at your +/-EV in big blinds for all-ins isn't an indicator of how fair the deal is or how your luck runs. The 0.8% is an unbiased indicator that only looks at the cards.

Think about what kind of comparison exactly you are looking for. It can be done.

Really? You don’t believe there’s an odds pendulum? Okay, then lets get an impartial computer program to flip a coin a trillion times. I’ll bet you any amount of money that after a trillion flips the result will always be 50%, plus or minus 3%. And you bet that the result will always be outside the plus or minus 3% of 50%. Since you don’t believe in an immutable flow of mathematical probabilities, this should look like a really great bet for you. I only want 6% of all probable outcomes, while you get a whopping 94% of all potential results. Using your logic, this is a big big advantage for you. Please borrow as much money as you can and let’s get started asap.

On the other hand, if the poker room you work for is the one providing our coin flip software, then I absolutely agree for you. There will be no normal expression of mathematical probabilities, or odds pendulum, during each trillion flip session. From what I’ve seen, it will probably end up in the neighborhood of 80% - 20%, or even 90% - 10%. In fact, I would be shocked if it didn’t, at least when you’re flipping against targeted players with software similar to your poker software.

When I first realized what was going on, it surprised me that online poker rooms would be willing to risk driving away some players: the ones who could recognize that the deal wasn’t fully random, who would then quit in disgust. (I still don’t understand why they make it so obvious. I guess they really think we’re stupid.) But like PT Barnum said, “there’s a sucker born every minute.” So I’m sure they weighed their options and decided that it was worth losing a certain percentage of players, because there would always be plenty of “fresh meat,” people who didn’t do their homework and could therefore be taken advantage of.

There is plenty of information out there, both in poker books and from other sources. So don’t be a sucker. Make damn sure you understand mathematical probabilities - before you risk your money - so you don’t get screwed. These are concepts even an eight year old can understand. And unless he’s a complete dullard, even the clown who posted the above moronic statement knows he’s full of BS. He’s being paid to help make sure you never do believe in the math behind games of chance - PARTICULARLY ONLINE POKER!

Like, say I get my money in as a 50-50 race 10 times. I win 5 and lose 5. That would be running normal. But what if the 5 pots I won were for 20 BBs each and the 5 I lost were for 70 BBs each. Obv I am exaggerating here just to my point across.

I understand. I'm just saying that lots of non-random factors are involved in that outcome, not just luck. I'm not sure how to normalize it so that it means anything. It might be a good question for the theory forum.

You are at a crossroads, but seriously if you are a full time player (which I believe) then it is time to put these paranoid beliefs away and realize that even though you were a bit unlucky, spade's work basically proved that you were not even close to running as badly as you thought you were running.

You probably thought you were losing many extra all ins a day than you should, when in reality is was about two a month.

I realize there is still a lot of uncertainty about which all ins you won and loss, and in fact you could have won better or worse in "important" all ins, but that is when you start getting into doomswitch based belief structures that you will spend your entire life trying to disprove for peace of mind.

Paying for this service again is not the worst idea in the world, but the odds are that you will again run relatively within expectation and then what?

You see the dry, boring power of real statistical analysis vs the "wah wah look at these 5 hands I got" riggie theories. Spade and others explaining the sheer power of these math tools recently were among the best posts in this silly thread.

Your job is poker, and if you start worrying like a riggie how will that ever benefit your full time job?

Pay for one more study, and then move on already and just win at poker and leave the real riggies behind with their cherry picked sample sizes of 10 or so whining about doomswitches. The sooner you leave this mental block behind the better for you, then visit this thread once in a while to chuckle at those that post 5 hands and think it means something.

You sir, do not understand it. This pendulum concept of yours is absolutely wrong. That isn't why or how the law of large numbers works. Didn't you get enough ridicule for this already?

I'll give you one clue to get you started. The absolute count difference between heads and tails, tends to get LARGER as the sample size gets larger. It does not "swing" back. And here's one more clue: gambler's fallacy.

How many 360K HH sample size streaks of running worse than 95% of people in a row would it take before you began to wonder?

Actually there arent any nonrandom factors. We are usaing the exact same hands only instead of seeing the percentage of total number pots won, we see how many total number of big blinds we won. This info is very relevant to the conversation here and would go a loooooong way in drawing some conclusions.

If my equity is 49%, then I should be winning 49% of the total number of big blind wagered. I think this evaluation would go even further

Here a bit of a brag... I am running worse than 95% of poeple, yet I am ranked in the top 99% of players in MTTs.

If they were not cherry picked samples, but were either from random players, or consecutive ones from the same player, then it would only take a few. I'd have to do the math (playing a tourney right now) but it would be less than 10 running that bad before it looked very abnormal.

That's wrong. Your decision to play an all-in hand is not random, and pot sizes are not randomly associated with any equity matchup.

You are only running in the bottom 5% (5.5 actually) on preflop headsup allin hands. That's all we checked, and those were about 3% of all your hands. Just for perspective.

no its not wrong.

I'll have to think about it some more. Again, it would be a great question to post in the poker theory forum.

then the anlysis you just did, all only all in hands, is irrelevant