Thanks for sharing the link.
Contrary to what Polk says in the article, I can envision no scenario at all where this situation is "probably okay."
No amount of semantics or mental gymnastics about the seating algorithm being the same for everyone justifies some players receiving too many blinds and other players too few. None.

It is still appalling. And Party looking into this and determining that they are okay with this is horrendous, and even more appalling, and I agree "criminal" (as mentioned in a recent post). I don't say that lightly. But this lack of fairness in their own games that they are now aware of is criminal.

It is one thing for some sort of glitch to be causing this that they were unaware of. That does relate to their overall competence in programming their site to be fair but at least it wasn't intentional. But if they immediately went about fixing it and also refunding the affected players then all is well and a valuable lesson on paying attention to making sure various aspects are TRULY random is learned.

But now they are completely aware that it is happening, probably know why, still aren't speaking publicly about it or warning their players, and are still not taking any steps to fix it.
They are knowingly dealing an unfair game. That is really the only conclusion.

If the FF algorithm somehow affected the cards themselves so that multi tables received more 72o and fewer AA and KK then that would be the exact same as what this situation is with the uneven distribution of positions at the table. Exactly the same.

I encourage any Party officials reading this thread to please reconsider the position that some players receiving more Cut Off hands is somehow appropriate or correct. I know there have to be SOME employees at Party who see this situation for what it is and know that it is 100% wrong. Please speak up. Fix your site.

I am still not convinced about this.

You need to play on other sites then, and get 100k hands or so for a good sample.

That is the problem, there is probably not a huge prevalence of people getting extra Cut off hands. The glitch is as I described (people leaving and entering the pool is not a static scenario). There would be no way to figure what is fair compensation, per the current program they have, no one has an advantage over others.

Losing players showed up with less CO hands earlier in the thread. Both winning and losing players showed up with more CO hands in the thread. And it is not just CO, there are discrepancies across sites from PS, GG, Ignition, ACR where there is too much BU, too much SB, etc. (I have seen these on twitch streamers, where we laugh about it).

Most long term players take it in hand. But to make this a federal case, when there is no one to take the money from, and determine the exact amounts that should have been won with non existent hands (they could have had the 72o for 2k hands, as in your example above, do they get money for imaginary AA?), no flops, or maybe they just win the blinds if they open every hand they missed.

As you can see, there is no way to compensate. If they don't redo the programs (other sites have not been targeted - since everyone wants to focus here) and other sites aren't redoing the programs, then it is what it is. If you have better sites to play on, then do.

Would be nice if they admitted these problems, but they don't. I don't know where Party publicly stated this was an issue. I believe it is anecdotal evidence.

Partypoker finally issues an official statement. Sort of:

https://www.poker.org/partypoker-res...ayers-furious/

Better written article, though still missing in details (more specifically, both sides). However, their first statement aligns with what I said, that it was spread among all players. And again, compensation (such as if I were to bring the bug up with Ignition/Bovada, how do they calculate over years) is very hard to compute, and if all players were affected, then how is it based?

Players Furious = some players furious. Quotes are needed from players that don't think it is such a big deal. Using social media for news research is the beginning. You need reliable sources, such as programmers, other sites, and the perspective of all players (this would be commented on in any main stream news article, such as WaPo and NY Times, article is slanted).

Are you still stuck on this? The extra CO hands necessarily exist, and the people getting them are clearly the ones with an advantage over others. Your reasoning about people entering/leaving makes no sense to anybody else.

You're right there's no one to take the money from. Party needs to eat the loss. As for determining compensation it's probably not that hard to do it in a way most people would accept. The simplest way I can think of would be to take the EV of the CO for the player pool multiplied by the delta between expected and actual CO's dealt for each stake. Winning players would still get shafted but it seems like a reasonable solution to me.

The developer has told Danske Spil that the error has been corrected. At the same time they told Danske Spil that there never was an error to begin with. What. Hence, no compensation will be offered, obviously. Anyways, it might be worth checking if the error still occurs. I for one fully expect that it does.

LOL, WTF are you talking about? When there is a complaint against a company, people will be interested in the facts - the complainant(s) side of the story, and the company's. Nobody wants to hear from a bunch of people who haven't been affected; it adds nothing to the story. Either there is a problem here, or there isn't - whether people think it's a big deal or not isn't especially relevant to an article. You read the story to form your own opinion, and if you feel like telling everyone it isn't a big deal, you can comment on the article or come to a forum and share your opinion.

As an example - earlier this year there was an incident where Walmart sent out emails containing the n-word. Here's an article about it:

https://www.wxyz.com/news/detroiter-...ing-the-n-word

The article includes the complainant's side of the story, as well as Walmart's. You know what it doesn't included? Opinions of other people who didn't think it was a big deal. Do you think that makes the article biased? Hint: It doesn't.

I'm a guy who often takes issue with people who start threads slamming poker sites if I don't think they're well-founded, and am even sometimes accused of sticking up for sites because of it. While it does wander into opinion in a few spots, the poker.org article looks perfectly fine to me in terms of bias (or a lack thereof) with regard to the information included and the people chosen for interviews.

We are missing the why. You know, the who what when where why? Programmers can answer the why. As stated in the NVG thread about pokerstars, the programs haven't really been updated since 2012.

A bit of science doesn't hurt here. In other news, one could develop a better program, and sell it to sites (as was suggested in the Pokerstars thread).

We will need to agree to disagree here. I would like to see some form of proof, rather than just social media posts. The problem exists on other sites as well, the rng is discussed in the Pokerstars thread https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/2...games-1796486/, and I believe this needs a bit more research. Dissenters are often quoted in news articles, so as not to bias the report.

Your example is not what is generally included in top news, such as WaPo (Washington Post) and NY Times. They sometimes call that click bait.

Again, we will just have to agree to disagree.

As an addendum, I noticed from the beginning of month (a little over 1.1k hands) on Ignition, 173 CO, 170 EP, other positions range from 195 to 204.

The fact it is happening on other sites (unless playing 6 hours straight maybe?) is what I mean by let's do some reporting.

I'd love to see data for other sites but that's not a meaningful sample size. A gap of ~30 between the least and most common positions seems pretty normal for 1100 hands.

https://imgur.com/uqZbIAS
https://imgur.com/eSsGLcF

Math doesn't count as proof to you? One person's data alone was shown ITT to be worse than a 1 in 10^100 occurrence.

The thing is, I'm not even a real programmer but even I could code a fair seating algo in about 30 seconds. The fact that the "bug" targets multi-tablers makes incompetence even harder to believe.

But motive isn't important to establish when there's already proof that it happened. The "why would I do that" defense doesn't work when you're already on video doing it. Intentional or not, these games are/were unfair. I don't need to see a line of code with, "if player==crusher then DOOM()" to know that.

Thank you for sharing these.
These are a lot more "normal" but are also interesting.

EP is lower and BB is higher on your ACR sample. Not as massive a difference as the Party situation. But still moreso that it is supposed to be. The EP thing maybe related to hands with 5 players? That is really low for that sample.

500 more for the BB than SB or Button is maybe a little bit more than would be expected via true randomization but isn't completely alarming and could still be realistic within the sample size and is not off by thousands or anything too crazy.

Here are the results of an online randomizer for a 6-sided die rolled 150k times:
25189
24784
24991
24853
25164
25019

The greatest difference from high to low is 405. I did it again and the largest gap was 339.
Obviously that is only a sample of two trials of 150k dice rolls but clearly that is what SHOULD be more typical for a 6-sided randomization situation.

Did you filter for #of players dealt in? Looks like your numbers are roughly ascending from EP->BB, which indicates maybe you didn't filter.

Help me out regarding the zoom/FF format.

It will deal hands to less than 6 players?
I thought with 50+ players in a pool it would just bounce you around endless 6-handed tables. Is that wrong?
Sorry for the basic question.

http://prntscr.com/1vfmb4h
From: 01.09.2021.
When i played shortet tables, i played less tables from 9 dropped to 6.
Most of distance played like 9 FF.

This sorry affair seems to be reaching some sort of conclusion. Cliffs: the bug is apparently fixed, and partypoker has no intention of compensating impacted players:

https://www.poker.org/partypoker-fas...ck-at-critics/

I have played many hands at nl100 Fast Forward format at Party Poker 2017-2018 and these are my stats, all hands 6-handed.
I was a losing player at that limit pre-rakeback.

---> Party Poker --> https://imgur.com/a/wFODyND

Edit : and this is how the distribution for my Pokerstars ZOOM hands looks like (most of the hands played between 2013-2015):

--> Pokerstars --> https://imgur.com/a/BNsezUO


Party Poker algo has been at fault since inception.

Some sites reward players who play only 1 table, others sites reward players who keep the games going the longest (ie, notice how Pokerstars gave me less big blinds overall, this was because I put into long sessions giving me an edge over new players entering the field and paying the bb by force)

Hey guys, I have a good guess as to what is happening. Note: I don't play on Party Poker, I play on WPN but have noticed a similar inequity of hands dealt.

My HM3 sample from Blitz on WPN:

My theory is each fast fold table you play on runs multiple "sessions". Let's just pick 6 as a maximum arbitrary number of "sessions". In reality this could be higher or lower, but the idea is to have enough sessions running concurrently that you (and every other player) will always be able to get dealt in to a new hand the instant you press fold.

Let's say you play for an hour and then decide you want to take a break, so you hit 'sit out next bb on all tables' which should mean the maximum number of sessions (6 in this case) are now running.

Now let's picture what position you were in for the last hand you were dealt in each session.

Session 1: EP
Session 2: BTN
Session 3: CO
Session 4: SB
Session 5: BB
Session 6: MP

Let's say you're currently in session 6 and that session 1 happens to be the next available session after your hand from session 6 ends. You are now in the BB on session 1 so you get sat out and miss the following hands ... Session 2 (EP through CO), Session 3 (EP and MP), Session 4 (EP through BTN), Session 5 (EP through SB), Session 6 (EP).

All together that would be 14 hands you did not get dealt in to that were not the blinds and 1 SB hand in session 5.

This could even be more complicated if the sessions you are active in are able to switch between other tables you are playing on - but I believe this theory would explain the variations people are seeing.

The solution is that instead of "sit out next bb" the poker sites should have an additional option "sit out at the end of all sessions" - so that you can choose the option that fits your situation.

Needing to end a session quickly or temporarily? Sit out next BB and you will immediately sit out the next time you're dealt to the BB. Just want to end your session but still get the hands you paid for? Sit out end of all sessions.

Resuming your table(s) if you sat out in the BB should remember the positions from each of your session when you resume, deal you in to a new session that matches your next position for the respective session, and allow you to use the sit out all sessions option later so that you get all the hands you paid for even if you need a break.

If there are sites with fast fold this is not happening on, my guess would be those sites have enough volume to not need multiple sessions - or there is a delay of some sort between hands to keep everyone in a single session - or they could have just implemented the solution I mentioned (alternatively maybe sit out all bb just deals you in until you play EP for each session, then sits you out)

this blew over like its nothing. Just goes to show how " regulated " those sites actually are.

Anyways bug is fixed now

It was the same for all, so no compensation.