Jungmit, if I can give you some practical advice:
Contact support on the pokersites you play on and check if they are using pre or post 2009 rng’s on their site. Ask them to check both their cash and mtt rng’s. one site who will remain nameless was running a pre GTO rng on their cash games and the GTO adjusted one on their MTT rng. Utterly reckless.
Ask for digital copies of their benchmark certificates across all their flop abstractions. You want the number in the Nash Distance column to be below 0.025% - anything above is not a fair deal. Pokerstars has a Nash Distance of 0.0015% for comparison. You may need to escalate the call to someone in game security as most customer service reps on poker sites can only deal with cashier, disconnections etc etc.
For live games you can also improve the fairness of the deal. Live suffers from human inability to generate a fair nash distribution across the whole deck. This is due to two main reasons:
1 dealers do not perform enough shuffles.
2 the way the muck distributes cards.
People tend to muck low cards first. Then middling and high cards go to the flop. The Ace and Kings tend to bet and people fold missed draws. Then the high cards are mucked. So the muck is stratified into low-mid-high layers. This wouldn’t be a problem if dealers shuffled enough times
Research shows no less than SEVEN shuffles are required to randomise a deck. This has been known for years. Here is an extract from a 1990 paper on the subject
Quote:
The usual shuffling produces a card order that ''is far from random,'' Dr. Diaconis said. ''Most people shuffle cards three or four times. Five times is considered excessive.''
The realization that most shuffled decks are not actually random allows gamblers to improve their odds of winning. ''There are people who go to casinos and make money on this,'' Dr. Diaconis said. ''I know people who are out there doing that now.''
How Casinos Do It
In Las Vegas, cards are shuffled from four to seven times, at the discretion of the casino owners, said Richard Ingram, a Las Vegas enforcement agent for the state gambling control board. Dr. Diaconis said he almost never sees a dealer shuffle seven times.
He said his research also shows that when dealers shuffle several decks at once, they need to shuffle more. Two decks should be shuffled nine times, he said, and six decks should be shuffled 12 times, which is unheard of in the casinos.
People have started to exploit this by tracking tens through the deck. Casinos now view Ten Tracking the same way they view card counting at blackjack. Three suspected Ten Trackers were declined entry to this years WSOP.
Here’s how you can achieve a fair deal live:
+ Request seven riffle shuffles before each hand is dealt. Casinos are really taking an interest in the nash distance of their deals and almost all will accommodate this request. If they do not accomodate you, refuse to ante-up until a fair deal is offered.
+ I also insist that all the tens are removed from the deck for the first two riffle shuffles and then introduced one at a time over the subsequent four riffle shuffles before a final riffle is applied to fully randomise the deck and prevent ten tracking. The so called 2-4-1 riffle shuffle is now standard in casinos in the major cities of the Scandinavian countries where ten tracking originated.
+ Again as a paying customer you are entitled to a fair deal – literally. So don’t be afraid of insisting. I am happy for you to screen shot my posts if you come up against an old fashioned or difficult card room manager.
+ this shouldnt take more than an extra minute each hand. again if regs complain i am happy for you to show them my posts
Finally there are at least two live GTO dealers who use the 2-4-1 technique in the live poker forumon this site. I’m sure they’d be happy to advise which casinos in your area try to emulate online’s more accurate card distribution
Last edited by teddybloat; 08-24-2017 at 02:54 PM.
