Actually, your online poker example actually backs up that "garbage" to a certain extent. Outside of the Cereus scandal, I've never seen any hard evidence of a site ripping off its players by rigging or cheating at the poker games. A good poker site knows it can bring in tonnes of money by simply offering a fair game. A greedy poker site charges more rake and makes more money that way. And corrupt sites just walk with everyone's money. It's certainly possible that some sites are rigging the games and haven't been found out yet, but why bother when they have much easier ways? Just like an online casino who wants to make more money can just increase their edge at the games by altering the rules - no need to cheat do it. That doesn't mean it will never happen (See: this thread and Cereus), but it doesn't seem very smart.

Also sadly very typical that a poster can comment on an article the poster can't be bothered to read, where it can be found (in the article and linked Casinomesiter thread) that they have refunded players and pulled the games in question.

Not that this makes anything that's happened nor many of their responses in any way acceptable, LDO.

Actually, it could be true, but rereading what I said, it probably didn't work exactly like that. If the software is set up to adapt, it *could* be made to offset every individual win immediately, thus making winning streaks impossible, but it seems unlikely they would manage it down to that level where it would be noticed much quicker. So yeah, I'm sure some small winning streaks would be possible.

My point was, lost in my imperfect wording, that the typical results of a 52/48 game, where people could still come out big winners in the short term, are artificially changed by a game that adapts the outcome of each play based on prior results.

Its a lure thing. They get the person to deposit and play this game at 100% but it is remarkably dull. Essentially picking higher or lower, a coin flip game but with cards. Then they use the deposit on something more interesting like roulette, blackjack, some more complex game or slots.

In this case they clearly didn't bother with the lure bit - except in advertising the game as 100% rtp as they ripped them off anyway.

It depends on how the site rigged the game.The simple (and legal) way would be to have the game pay out unevenly - like roulette and keep the odds even for the outcome. They did not do this in this case.

The outputs however are not consistent with the other simple option of waiting for them to choose high/low or red black and then delivering the card. This may be because such a game is against the rules in Gibraltar, it would be - "adaptive"

In any case the outcomes are not consistent with a simple 96-104 rebalancing of likelihoods, instead the outcomes seem to be skewed all over the place by card colour and type of card. The game was not producing the outcome in a simple way distributing card likelihoods to a consistent pattern. (This also BTW is against the rules as if cards, dice or real world objects are used in the games the game needs to reflect what people expect from those real things - ie a roulette wheel should have red and black equally likely and each number equally likely).

This means that we know they had a more complex system going on - the RNG was not producing the outcome consistently, player behaviour was affecting the outcome not just in the simple way outlined above - tweaking the likelihood of machine say no but producing cards in a more complex way. One possibility is that they did this to make it look like it was a close call, ie betting lower when the card was an 8 delivers a seven or a nine more often - another was that the skewed it to make it subconsciously seem more likely that the next bet is +ev . For example that a king is produced which is a losing bet this round but makes a low bet seem like a good deal next round.

The final option is the one that is the worst and the only one that means that the bold sentence might be true in this case. The software could be tracking that players return and tweaking the results to deliver 96% RTP. Some UK based fruit machines operate in this way, they check how well the machine has been doing then change the likelihood of a win/loss to maintain the rtp...

This approach for this game would make it highly adaptive and illegal but it has some pluses for the site, the game can feel more like a real hi/lo card game - when you get a king it can be more likely that a low card will come - this pattern and illusion of some skill encourages people to keep playing whilst still delivering the 96% RTP. You can't prove this from just the outputs which is all we have - all we know is that the game was not random, the distribution of cards by colour and number was not uniform and it paid out 96% when advertised as 100% - all these things broke the rules but under the wrapper hidden in the code it is perfectly possible that they produced a game that tracked that players performance for the RTP and so that player would never be allowed to have a lucky streak that gets them back to break even - the size of the streaks that are possible would be software limited.

I would not be surprised if there are more rigged casinos out there.

I have strong proofs that gamblers choosing casino by game types what casinos offering [e.g. popular slots like Mega Fortune, Gonzos Quest etc], and most these games are offered by huge software developers like NETENT which are basically bought in, and casino provider cant change any algoritm/payout%.

Opening casino and developing your own games is pointless and too expensive. Also rigging default games like Roulette/BlackJack is the same as rigging online poker. No point.

Only way is to manipulate with payout $$$, but gambler isnt so stupid. He wont play roulette where payout is 1 to 30 or so.

About rigging poker: I am firm believer, that there are rigged poker-sites, especially small ones. InstaDeal is a good candidate, and cant prove it.

Its speed poker room, offering lots of free money and at peak time 100 players online, moslty low stakes like 10NL etc. I tried to play 100NL there, and tried to start 100NL table.

First it was impossible, no-one didnt come, but afer few days I got one 100NL running table (6 players). Players were awful, worst what I have ever seen. Played about 20-30k hands there.

But its impossible to prove. I am not sure if you can datamine or not their speed poker tables. Even, if you can, and only higher stakes are rigged, then you need millions hand to prove it, but at peak time, there is maybe only one table running, usually 0. So it will take a years before you get a reasonable sample.

Coming back to poker. PokerScout listing right now 60 different pokerrooms, basically top10 is only playable, rest is a trash.

Big rooms and skins have problems with their moneyflow, cutting their expenses and trying to save deposits.

Poker is a big money making industry. We all have seen dirty side: superusers, pyramide schemes, bankrypty, using players money for operational costs, letting people deposit when money is not taken from their bank accounts, botting, stealing money/players from affiliates etc.

So, its so naive to think, that smaller rooms without any or low reputation not manipulating with their RNG or atleast have some kind of house-made bots. I think its only question of the time, when we will see rigged room.

This thread illustrate it. Why the hell casino-game should be rigged? It should easier add some jokers or whatever system to make game profitable for casino. No, they went the way, that you are getting black card more likely when betting on red and vice versa.

Also players attitude support rigged rooms. If someone post "X room is rigged", then he will get trolled, laughed etc. Obviously we are not talking about big rooms - there is no point to rigg rng, and it will be caught sooner or later, but I am talking about very small rooms, which are shady anyway.

It would be nice if this were true but again this case proves that this is not so. Initially in the thread a UK software firm Realistic Games got the blame, this was until BetFred said no, they got the software from Finsoft (the G-Tech subsidiary) and that whilst the game was an RG concept they were not responsible for the game operation as installed on BetFred.

Finsoft and BetFred did change the algorithm/payout. Worse they left the play game unaltered so that it did return 100% RTP and did have a proper spread of randomised outcomes. This cheated player initially used the play game before moving on to lose $20k on the cash game. (This is another licence breach btw).

Again worse - the software firm (and Betfred) used a certificate from the unchanged game to get regulatory approval of the cash game and falsely reassure the player that the RNG was tested and approved.

Saying that a large software supplier or casino has no motive to do this or cannot do this is demonstrably false - they just did. As for the motive...this game ran for several years, the one player who spotted it had lost $20k on a game where over a decent sample size (which she had) breakeven should be expected.

Just how much do you think they made in total? Also Finsoft sold it to other casinos.- the motive was $$$$

I'm leaning towards this being an isolated incident. They have too much to lose by not playing it by the book.

Lottomatica Group is a market leader in the Italian gaming industry and
one of the largest Lottery operators in the world based on total wagers
and, through its subsidiary GTECH Corporation, is a leading provider of
lottery and gaming technology solutions worldwide. Together, the
companies are the only vertically integrated full service lottery group.
Lottomatica Group is majority owned by De Agostini, which belongs to a
century-old publishing and media services group. Lottomatica is listed on
the Stock Exchange of Milan under the trading symbol LTO. In 2011,
Lottomatica Group had 3 billion in revenues and 8,000 employees in
approximately 60 countries.


That's from a company profile I won't bother linking..

Of course it would be possible to make the game like that but it would also be very stupid. These companies do realise that one of the main reasons people play these games is precisely because it's possible to go on winning runs. If it was never possible, even over the very short term, players just wouldn't keep coming back and playing the game and it wouldn't make any money. There is no incentive for making a casino game in which nobody can ever go on a winning streak.

I made an article about this case (in Estonian), and asked commentary from person who have been in casino industry very long time.

He said that online casino operators «buying» the games from providers, and do not have access to change any game algoritm/logic. Also game providers must get certificates for games before selling/renting them, not casinos.

In this case: games were rigged because next card was dependant on which side bet was placed. But at the same time there was a flaw in help-file.

Big company as Nordicbet, is not interested to offer rigged game. They trusted GTech, and offered accidentaly broken game.

Think: If they are interested to offer rigged games, then its foulish to rig coinflip game which is easy to track. Much better choice is to rig video poker or slot because basically you can never reach to long run in these games.

Maybe it is an isolated mess up. Never underestimate the ability for human beings to mess up but the extent of incompetence revealed here if that is what it was if frankly staggering. It also happened at more than one site.

Yep Nordicbet pulled the software as soon as they looked at it properly - post this complaint which was primarily about a different site, they also promised full refunds. They don't seem to have been to blame, they were sold some rogue software with a false certification. Their problem is that they don't seem to have bothered to check/test the game. This was definitely not in their interest. I suspect they will be more careful in future.

I haven't researched their Malta licence to see how many licence conditions they broke and to be honest they look like a victim here but that is not the case for BetFred who did this for years.

My impression from the casinomeister thread was that Nordic had only just got the game and pulled it immediately they saw the complaint. No messing about just them saying- this game does not operate properly we will refund everyone. That's why I did not name them here as the other known site.

I can believe that someone accepts a game that others have run for years and makes the mistake of not testing it as a simple mistake. What Finsoft and BetFred did was a lot worse than that.