Is the number of the players in the pool dropped after this news come out?

not really

My stats fwiw.


Never really noticed as I never filter for 4, 5 players and I hardly check the years stats. But by the look of it I am missing about :

4 handed : 30% Cuttoff Positions missing , about 9 000$ in gains, 17600 hands missing

5 handed : 30% Cuttoff Positions missing, about 6 000$ in gains, 20000 hands missing



Considering the very tight margins playing the fast forward games this is a pretty significan amount of $ playing mainly .5$/1$ and 1$/2$ PLO.











Please make other grinders aware of this. It's the only way to get party poker moving.

i was on a break for awhile, came back and it seemed normal, this past week tho the entries have def been lower than normal.

Thank God this room is slowly, but surely dying..

I know that I'm being a conspiritard, but is there a possibility that Party put bots in the game to make a hand quickly available when there wasn't enough players? The bot being placed in the CO and always folding? An ignorant programmer might think that it would make no difference to the game.

Everyone knows party is running stable of bots so yeah this is allso true. Thought everyone knows that.

evidence? if everyone knows it there must be some..

I see mathematically impossible stuff every time i play here. For a while there, like 5000 hands, 4 card flushes were more common than 3. LOL. Try winning with aces there twice a tourny. I think if this is true with the ff games, there is no reason to play poker online at this point.

lol

I am concerned about a much bigger conspiracy with fast fold poker in general, which I don't think anyone has touched upon.

We can see that there is clearly a site's interest to give winners more SB and BB seats and less IP seats, and vice-versa for losing accounts as this closes up winrates and allows more rake to be generated.

However, there is also the incentive for a site to unfairly distribute opponent strength to players too, and this could be done by ALL fast forward poker sites, not just Party.

For example, say if there is a fast forward pool of 100 players and you are about to join it yourself as the 101st player.

If we rank all 100 opponents in skill order and say the top 20 players are 'very good' and we give them a score of 5, the next 20 players are 'good' and we give them a score of 4, the next 20 players are 'average' and score 3, the next 20 players are 'poor' and score 2 and the worst 20 players are 'very poor' and they score 1.

Now if everything is truly random and fair and we play 60,000 hands in this pool and always choose 'sit out next BB' and play complete orbits, with every hand dealt 6 handed, we should of course have approximately 10,000 hands dealt in each seat.

However we should also have been dealt in an equal amount of times vs each opponent type, so our average opponent skill quotient (AOSQ) would be:

(60,000 x 5 + 60,000 x 4 + 60,000 x 3 + 60,000 x 2 + 60,000 x 1) / 300,000 = 3.00

This would be under the assumption that we would be equally likely to play opponents in the different 20th percentile slices of the player pool, and on average in each hand we should be playing one opponent from each slice.

If someone was deemed a winning account they might actually get the following distribution:

(75,000 x 5 + 70,000 x 4 + 60,000 x 3 + 50,000 x 2 + 45,000 x 1) / 300,000 = 3.27

To balance this out, someone else who was deemed a losing account would get the following distribution:

(45,000 x 5 + 50,000 x 4 + 60,000 x 3 + 70,000 x 2 + 75,000 x 1) / 300,000 = 2.73

(2.73 + 3.73) / 2 = 3.00

So perhaps over large samples, top regs get an AOSQ of 3.50 say, and fishy players will get an AOSQ of 2.50 to balance it out at 3.00 for the player pool as a whole. Sites could rig this and it would be almost impossible to detect, as they ensure that good players play more often than they 'should' with other good players and bad players play more often than they 'should' against other bad players, allowing the site to generate more rake than they deserve as money just gets pushed back and forth among equally skilled players. We already know that sites categorise players in terms of the amount of rakeback and rewards they get, so those same accounts can easily be assigned fast forward weightings to ensure that they 'randomly' play more or less often vs other strong accounts.

As a new (but experienced) player to a fast forward pool you would probably have an AOSQ of 2.50 to start with and as you win money you would gradually be labelled a 'winner' and your AOSQ will rise to 3.00 and then 3.50 as you play more and more winners. Then perhaps you start to become a loser as you are dealt in with mostly regs and very rarely vs fish, so as you lose, your AOSQ drops to 3.00 or 2.50 and the cycle repeats so that you never get to win any money but you are constantly being used to generate rake for the site and are essentially working for free to help turn fishy deposits into rake while never being able to take some of the spoils for yourself.

This would be hard to detect but it seems like players are not assuming that the above situation can happen just as easily and is a smarter and sneakier way of rigging the fast fold games than Party dealing less CO's to winners. All other fast fold sites could instead be just employing the AOSQ method to collect all the deposits and have experienced players grind for no returns.

As an additional thought, this would also help explain why certain pools that don't run 24/7 like $500 Zoom can be beaten and people post good graphs from it as they run short handed when a few fish are in the pool and the player pool is not big enough for AOSQ to be a factor as regs just quit the pool when they see there are no marks, but lower stakes fast fold pools seem hard to beat over huge samples as with larger player pools being involved the regs can be scammed into playing tougher opponents more often without them easily being able to notice so well, so the larger player pools become rake traps, but the smaller higher stake player pools are less so.

So yeah, in summary, with this seating discrepency being a very real issue, how can we be sure that there aren't other issues with the fast fold format such as the one outlined above that essentially makes fast fold poker unviable for players that hope to play for profit.

Yea this is an utter conspiracy, on the other hand, we have concrete proof of fewer CO hands being dealt.

On the other hand, there might be a way to get seated with fish more often, I remember times when there were seating scripts for Sit and go games on Pokerstars, maybe there is something similar for FF games that would explain the discrepancy ?

You misunderstand the point of my post. It is not to say that definitively this is happening, but that if it was, then it would be a good hustle against regs and they would have little chance of detecting it.

We have seen Party hide fishy regular tables from regs in the past, but that was spotted fairly quickly when losing accounts could see more tables and winning accounts could only see tables with good players on. So that was a bad hustle on their part, but clearly helped outline their intent. They mentioned something about it being 'an experiment' back at the time. An experiment for what? To test how vigilant their player base was? Clearly they got their answer that they are very vigilant, so more secretive methods would need to be employed in the future.

Then there is the hustle mentioned in this thread where winning accounts get more OOP seats and less IP seats, and vice versa for losing accounts. This hustle has probably been going on for years and has only just been noticed, so this is a reasonable hustle but they are rumbled now, (although their silence and lack of willingness to do anything about it shows that they are trying to milk this hustle for all it's worth, as well as also making this not seem like an innocent coding error on their part and instead far more nefarious).

Then there is the potential opponent selection bias hustle that I aluded to above, and perhaps this has been going on since fast fold poker was invented, as it would be a brilliant hustle if so, effectively doing the same thing as what the first hustle attempted to do on regular tables. This even could be on other sites too, we would not know one way or the other, but we know that the sites seem to view winning regs as competition for the recreational deposits so I wouldn't put it past them trying to do something like this.

So yeah, everyone play fast fold poker at your peril, as you really are leaving a lot of the elements of your gameplay in the site's hands, and it is in their interests for you to breakeven and slowly lose.

Do you have another account that has already been participating in these threads?

Amen f pp.

I am new to this thread but I have a keen interest in developments here, as I think all players should.

I want players to be recompensed and to be able to participate in fair games.

We tend to think about these games being fair so long as the card RNG is not rigged, and that the virtual deck behaves exactly like a physical one, but it needs to be fair in all the other ways too. Players should all be sitting in the different seats at the table an equal amount of times as the other players due to the inherent profitability of each seat, and all players should be able to either select which other players they play against, or at the very least be able to play against a fair average distribution of the player pool strength and not an artificially enhanced distribution of player calibre.

The more I think about this fast fold format, the worse idea I think it is, (for the players). For the sites they are of course excellent.

I remember Phil Galfond tweeting about these games having better 'rake efficiency' in a tweet once; perhaps it's these types of things that he was referring to.

Not sure what is more disturbing... getting effectively cheated or regs that continue to play regardless the positional disadvantage

50-50 imo

I think you are on the right track as far as a bigger conspiracy but are off with your logic. I think since 99% of players that play online poker are losing players, the argument of "winning" accounts and "losing" accounts isn't true. What degree would the site consider someone more of a losing account versus another losing account? Doesn't really make sense and I don't see them doing that. So far all the stats posted have been from people saying they have less hands in the cutoff. If the site was trying to even it out then there would be many more coming forward saying they are getting more hands in the cutoff. Since that isn't happening, I think it's likely that the site is giving those spots to bots that they own. Real casino's use shills or prop players and I think online sites use bots in the same way. Also think of the Fast Fold format and the waiting time is almost zero from hand to hand. It's hard to believe that someone folded at the exact same time as me every hand. But if they had bots that fill any empty seats when a real player folds then I could see how it is so quick.

That's just my guess and I disagree with some of the other posters here who want this thread to die because that is insane. This is a major issue and if we as a poker community put up with this, we are telling the sites, "you can cheat us" "you can rig the site and we will still play". This should be an eye opener to everyone because if they are manipulating this, then it is not the only thing they are manipulating. It is just the only thing that has been exposed. Party Poker's response has been disgusting and telling players that they won't get a refund because they knew about the "bug" is a joke. It isn't a bug when it is by design which is why it hasn't been fixed. I sincerely hope that the traffic has slowed down on Party Poker because we need to set a standard and that standard should be zero tolerance when it comes to a site manipulating their games. The goal of the site should be to create a safe environment for every player and this is obviously the last thing on their minds. You have to ask yourself what else are they manipulating that we don't know about? If you think it is just this then you are way too naive. They are taking away money from players by stealing their hands in position but they wouldn't rig the most important thing of all like the RNG right? I think it is pretty obvious that they do and their RNG certificate is from iTech Labs which makes it as credible as if they got it from a cracker jack box. What has been the New Jersey Gaming Commission's response? They should be monitoring this type of thing and should be making Party fix it at the very least.

so does people think online poker is not rigged anymore? All sites are rigged somehow.

Yes, they absolutely could be rigging the RNG, I will leave that up to the experts with big hand samples to determine, but in general, the consensus has been that online poker has, up to this point at least, not been rigged in this way.

If they are using bots in any way, shape or form, that is awful too.

Your idea of 99% of players being losing players is not accurate over the short term. Over the course of a few days, around 30% of a particular fast fold player pool would be up money and so labelled as a 'winner'. Then as those players continue to play in the pool over the next few days, they will be weighted towards playing more of the other 30% of winners and the 70% of losers are kept together more than they should. Then over the next few days some of the earlier winners will now be losers and their account status will shift and so on, but no one will ever be able to gain any momentum with their win rate as they just get dealt more and more -EV all-reg setups and very rarely get paired with any fishy players that are required to create a +EV setup when the rake is high.

So yeah, I am on about shorter time horizons that a specific player's opponents get artificially tampered with, as we know that poker sites love equally skilled players to battle it out with each other, it's great for the ecosystem remember, (even though of course they won't do their own part and lower rake from 6bb/100 to 0.5bb/100 to facilitate reg vs reg action).

I actually don’t think using SBMM would be unethical, even without telling the players about it. A site is responsible for providing fair games only. There’s nothing unfair about being paired with players of similar skill levels.

Poker only works for the participants if you have a realistically beatable structure. That can occur with very low rake and pairing similarly skilled players together, or having a high rake and allowing players with a large skill gap to play together.

Why do regular tables always run around a mark if that was not what the participants knew to be necessary? Players do not want to help a site turn deposits into rake if they are not allowed an opportunity to swallow up some of those deposits themselves over the long term and be able to feed their families. It takes time and effort to play hands and the promise of a fair and beatable game needs to be there or otherwise you are asking players to essentially work for free.

Fast fold poker is there to create the illusion of regular table poker at a super quick pace, but in reality it is likely a hustle that doesn't recreate regular table poker anywhere near enough to allow reasonable profits to be garnered from the game for all the time put into it.

People don't play poker for the love of the cards, it is about extracting money from the poker ecosystem, and doing so in a fair way. The sites get their transaction fees from facilitating this, but they shouldn't be doing anything to artificially force more transactions between the participants to occur for a given level of deposits. It is highly unethical for them to manipulate poker like this.

I saw a thread on reddit about this. It is apparently related to a "sit out" loophole that people are exploiting.