Originally Posted by JeffLynneLives
I joined this board for the sole reason of making the following statement, which I think needs to be made.
For a little background… I’m a middle-aged U.S. resident, and have a corporate gig for which I’m paid well. Accordingly, I have no desire to become a full-time, professional player, and I do not rely on any income I make from these pursuits in any way, shape or form. I play primarily for the love of the game, which I do take seriously.
Prior to Black Friday (“BF”), I was a low-stakes cash game multitabler on Stars (24 at a time), with a rig that included multiple screens, HEM, TableNinja – all the standard tools. I also had a professional coach with whom I worked in an effort to continually improve my game. I wasn’t a great player by any stretch of the imagination, but I was a winning player. When I started playing no-limit, I deposited $100. A couple of years later, I cashed out approximately $26K (immediately following BF – the only cashout I ever made). In the interim, I used VPPs to purchase all sorts of goodies – flatscreens, video/SLR cameras, an espresso maker, all that crap. All in all, pretty good for a hobby – but it was nothing more.
After BF, I tried to convert to live games, but quickly grew bored of the single table action. Later in the year, in dawned on me that, years earlier, I had made a very small deposit on what is now Bovada, which I never cashed out. In discovering the site was still allowing U.S. players, I downloaded the latest software, and logged into my account – et voila. A $50 balance.
I initially tried a couple of small sit and goes, which I never played before – and found them relatively easy to cash in. So I continued. Over the last few months, the $50 has grown to a current balance of close to $3K, through a steady progression of sit and goes, cash games and MTTs.
Not having the ability to use a HUD didn’t bother me so much in tournaments (single table or MTT), as the relatively fast structures didn’t allow for much full-stack cash game type of play anyway (at least from my perspective). I found that playing a standard style served my purpose well, retreated into the "most actions mean exactly what they represent" type of thinking, significantly reduced instances of bluffing and generally curtailed metagame type of activity, and instead focused on Dan Harrington-inspired tournament theory. Things were fine.
Then came the anonymity, and the remarkable backlash from the poker community. Honestly, I wasn’t terribly concerned with this initially, from a pure gameplay perspective. Since I wasn’t generally basing my play on the specific tendencies of my opponents (assuming most players on Bovada were fairly poor seemed accurate enough), and my standard approach was working well (my sng ROI, which I tracked using excel, was > 25% over about 600 games), I actually felt this might help me, as opponents wouldn’t be able to use sharkscope to identify me as a winning player at the tables. So, I marched on.
For all the time I played on Stars, I never once questioned the integrity of the game. I logged over a million hands there, and, well, statistics don’t lie. You can cut up any statistically significant number of hands any way you want using HEM, Pokertracker, whatever, and if you’re honest with yourself, the bad beats you experience on a site like Stars are in the context of standard variance. I never once suspected anything out of the ordinary.
I have to state the foregoing regarding Stars, because I simply can’t say the same thing for Bovada. At least, not definitively, as I’ve never been able to download Bovada hand histories for later analysis. But compared to my significant prior experience on Stars, there did seem to be an astounding percentage of action boards/situations. By this distinction, I mean obvious action boards (e.g., monotone or two tone with multi-connectors, etc.), or less obvious boards that hit competing players equally hard (e.g., set over set, with the underset turning quads, etc.).
I’ve seen a fair amount of commentary regarding this perception on a variety of message boards, and most of it seems to come down to the thinking that action increases the rake, which obviously benefits the house. That may be the case, but my thinking has always been along the lines of the following: if (and that’s a big if) a site with a relatively small flow of traffic (like Bovada) wanted to influence the games to their benefit, an alteration of the RNG so that it regularly benefits the underdog hand would be of greater benefit.
To the extent the rationale for this isn’t obvious… more players means more games, and more games means more rake. For a site like Stars, which had hundreds of thousands of players, this wouldn’t be much of a concern. But what about a site like Bovada, which now struggles to fill its complement of sit and go and cash game tables? If the strong players were able to easily feed on the weaker players, relieving them of their bankrolls, those weaker players would quickly disappear, resulting in a notable compression of the player pool. Add to that the current difficulty associated with getting money on sites like Bovada from within the U.S., and it should be clear why a site like Bovada would have an incentive to alter the game in favor of its weaker players.
What’s one way to accomplish this across the board? Figure out a way to program the RNG so that the underdog hand gets there more frequently than it should. Why? Well, weaker players tend to get it in relatively bad.
Now, here’s the thing: I’m not stating that I definitively think either of these things is going on. And I honestly don’t know if it would even be possible to alter the RNG so that it would have the systematic ability to accomplish the latter task (i.e., consistently interpret how to help the weaker hand improve). But even if all of the foregoing were occurring, at least it would be happening systematically – meaning everyone would be subject to the same software bias. The way I see it, the strong players would still win, but perhaps not quite as much. So I really wasn’t losing sleep over the possibility.
Cutting to the immediate moment… my perception has recently changed dramatically, due to the recurrence of a certain type of situation that leads me to believe any such bias may not be systematic, but rather, one which only positively impacts only certain players. I can best describe this by recounting a couple of specific hand histories. In the interest of disclosure (and as I’d like to protect my identity from anyone at Bovada who may read this), I selected these hands as examples from a list compiled by myself and a couple of friends who also play at the site – and none of us are necessarily directly involved in these hands (although we were, by necessity, at the given tables when the hands occurred, lest we would not have access to the hand histories).
Example 1: Tournament Hand History 2580673876
600/1200 Blinds, 60 Ante
Player A: UTG+2, 27397 chips
Player B: UTG+3, 13670 chips
Pre-flop: Player A raises to 1800, Player B reraises to 4590, Player A calls.
Flop: Jd5c4s. Player A checks, Player B bets 9020 and is all-in, Player A calls.
Turn: 9s.
River: 6s.
Player A shows 8s7h.
Player B shows KhKc.
Thoughts:
Approaching the end stages of the tournament, and 3 of the 4 other remaining players (besides Player B) left to act after the initial raise had stack sizes at or below 8K, meaning the initial raise was both (a) inviting a shove from a smaller stack and (b) really didn’t have all that much to gain in the way of implied odds. Very interesting that this player would choose to raise with this hand from EP given the scenario, call a smallish (but committal) 3-bet from an apparently very strong hand and call a flop shove for another 1/3 of his starting stack with nothing more than a gutshot.
Example 2: Tournament Hand History 2573962545
10/20 Blinds
Player A: UTG+2, 1500 chips
Player B: Button, 1500 chips
Pre-flop: Player A raises to 100, Player B raises to 330, Player A raises to 1500 and is all-in, Player B calls.
Flop: 4s5d2h.
Turn: 9d.
River: 6d.
Player A shows Kd3d.
Player B shows QhQs.
Thoughts:
First round of the tournament, all-in preflop with K3s. I’m not sure there’s anything more that really needs to be said here, except that I did just notice the relative similarity of both boards in these two hands.
I need to clarify something at this point. I’m not concerned with these hands because of the “bad beat” component. What I am concerned with is a pattern I’m discovering involving players who are playing hands in such an unreasonable and irrational manner (and being rewarded for that play), that it seems as if they know, beforehand, what cards are coming. Please keep in mind, while these are just two examples, I’ve seen instances of this occurring over and over again.
I don’t remember the specifics regarding the Potripper situation over at UltimateBet. What I do vaguely remember is that the general consensus was, if he had approached things with a modicum of intelligence, it would have taken players much longer to discover what he was doing – assuming he would have ever been discovered. In other words, it was this person’s ridiculous pattern of play that ultimately exposed him.
Unfortunately, on Bovada, we have no way of identifying who the individual players are who making this type of play, so there is no way to identify a repeating pattern attributable to a single player.
In further consideration of the foregoing, the following thought occurred to me: if one goes to the “Game Play Settings” tab of the “Preferences” table, one can check a box titled “Rabbit Card”. This particular option allows players to “rabbit hunt” – which, as we all know, is to find out what card would have come had a hand not ended prematurely due to everyone folding.
Let me rephrase that: the Bovada programmers have developed and incorporated code in their software that allows players to see cards that will be dealt before those cards are actually dealt.
I have no knowledge as to whether this particular function is present on other sites. What I do know, however, is that any other sites incorporating this function do not hide the identities of its players. How difficult would it be to expand on that code so that the values of all board cards could be seen before the hand is actually dealt? Does anyone really think the “auditors” at a firm like PWC would be able to readily identify this code (unless it was highlighted with blinking Christmas lights)?
Is it really a stretch to imagine that the internal Bovada team consists of players who have the ability to regularly access this functionality, and play their hands accordingly? Given that most of Bovada’s traffic seems to center on MTTs these days, what kind of opportunity would that present Bovada? If you, as a player, had that advantage, how frequently do you think you would make final tables – or win tournaments outright? The answer, of course, is that you could literally do it every time. How much of the prize pool would Bovada be able to retain for itself by pursuing this course of action?
Hey… at the end of the day, I realize this is pure speculation. I have no evidence demonstrating that Bovada is engaging in any illicit activity. But when I see recurring patterns like the ones I’ve described above, and I’m given no means of further investigating whatever suspicions I may have (due to the inability to download hand histories or identify my opponents), I feel I have legitimate cause for concern.
Beware the Bovada Rabbit Cam code.
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Edit/MH: Post copied to Rigged thread for responses.
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