Hi, some will remember some of my rants in the past that were certainly based on truth. I will say that I do not believe Poker Stars intentionally rigs their games.
I am crushing on their cash games. I was doing well before with an almost absurdly TAG looking graph with a redline that was way too low, but I was still doing 12bb per 100 at the low stakes cash games, why not, most poker players are not good players and play low stakes.

However, I watched a video by Carrot Poker, and even though I did not pick up much from what I saw as I only watched the intro, I am sure it is good, I did realize that my graph and redline must be wrong cause he mentioned it.

Now I am bluffing a LOT, pretty much whenever I detect weakness in regs and straight forward players, which are many. You can often tell if they are weak by their betting patterns. In the past I was not taking advantage of this, now I am and I can not believe how high my redline is now. Not in the plus, but it almost horizontal at a slight down angle.

I will say that live poker is much different because you do get a lot of quads, straight flushes, boats in live settings as anyone knows who plays in live card rooms during high hand bonus.
That being said I do not think this is intentional from online poker, the online poker is mathematically sound no doubt, but it does not have the same type of wild variance for some reason.
Maybe that is because the way it is programed has it restrained to narrow parameters. Kind of like flipping a coin and never seeing heads 8 times in a row. If it is heads tales heads tales it will come out to be the right math, but not the natural variance, so this is no doubt an issue.

That being said online poker cash games are very beatable but it takes and incredible amount of skill to do so. Now that I am play LAG style with a lot of bluffs it is amazing how much easier it is to win, that is because I am now winning many pots when I got the losing hand as most people fold too much.

I am sure a lot of players here are good LAGS, but it is very new to me. I am an incredible TAG player, I really am, I crush by playing a pretty straightforward style, would bluff very big at times and check raise draws, but over all I was not bluffing enough and not taking advantage of fold equity. But my decision making is so accurate that I am still winning.

I am not bragging, just telling you all the way it is.
I don't want anyone saying to me " oh you are great" I honestly do not care, but I am excited about it all. Just crushing live and online cash games like never before. I thought i was a good player a year ago and compared to now I did not know **** really, though I was still better than the vast majority of players out there.

I am sure some players here will know what I mean. I do not use solvers, I use Flopzilla so I can do the combos and estimates in my head, and I got an idea of ranges heads up and multiway later.

So that is it, I was right in the past about the differences, but I do not think it is intentional, and if you are a good LAG you can beat Online cash games pretty easy in the USA. I am sure the games are much tougher in others countries, but here most people are pretty weak on average.

You do understand that if it is programmed not to have the same variance that it is rigged? How many examples of superusers do you need to realize that it can be rigged?

Please let us know how much more proud you are of yourself...

Trust me, I was holding back

NO, that does not mean it is rigged. What it means is random generators are different, but their long term expected value will be accurate. You can have this without the wild variance we should see. Think about flipping a coin, what if it goes heads, tales, heads, tales, heads,tales heads, tales, 100 times in a row, this is obviously not proper variance, but the expected value will be right on the head. Of course for online poker it is not this extreme, but this does show how it happens in a lesser way.

That is what I was trying to tell a lot of pea brains, but most can not understand these things it seems. Anyway, I do not think it is rigged, but it is different, and you really do need good LAG style to crush the games. LAG can work too if most of your opponents are weak.

I knew from the very start that it was very different, but thanks to the pandemic I played again, and started winning. I still say it is different, without a doubt, but I do not think it is intentional.
And also NOTHING is set up. It works the same for all players.

It can be different, but still have the right expected values, that is what so many people can't understand.

One look at the spelling in the title of this thread and you know poker isn't dead in 2023.

You are pretty low IQ if you think misspelling is a sign of intelligence, actually it is often a high "sing" ( makes your weak mind happy for a second) of it. Sorry I missed the "e", you pedantic twit. We know you are good at simple things.
However if you think you are so superior, try me on LiChess.org I am UFOCLUB there, and just watch my 2400 rated chess brain make you look like the idiot that you no doubt are. Any time pea brain, will be happy to play, but I play speed chess, do not have all day to wait for your slow brain to find bad moves.

Also I have no doubt you are one of those NIT idiots who still thinks it is 14 years ago, you sit around waiting for nut hands all day, only 3 bet AA and KK, you are one of those morons right? You will only make a tiny amount of money, bingo players like you always act like they are so cleaver for playing like a 3 6 limit player. LOL

You have a simple minded style, and you are not a good player, you are just a tight fish who does not understand the game.

Your simple mind is right about one thing, poker is alive and well, no thanks to stupid leeches like you who take up space waiting for AA and sets all day, and BTW moron, even a lot of DONKS will not give you action, you just got to bum hunt to win, see I am good at profiling people fast, that is another reason I win HA HA

Concepts like 3 bet bluffing make no sense to your low IQ brain, right?

Graph or it didn’t happen.

"It's not rigged, the cards just don't come out randomly".
Clueless.

ah, so this has descended into chess for rolls lol

Having the right EVs but being non random IS rigged. That’s what people are trying to tell you. Knowing the nature of the non randomness can potentially give a player the ability to exploit that lack of randomness to his benefit.

Take, for example, a coin flip generator that will never generate a sequence with more than three heads or three rails in a row. It would be easy to set this up so that the overall frequencies are correct, but if betting is allowed on the flips, it is easy to see how it is rigged. If you know the manner in which it is non-random, you simply don’t bet until you see a string of three heads or three tails; then you bet on the opposite. Easy money for you and rigged against someone who is not aware of the pattern.

Admittedly this is a simplistic example and poker is much more complex, but if cards are actually not random, then there will be exploitable patterns that a savvy player can use to get an edge over his opponents. That is indeed rigged, and it still is even if the overall frequencies are right.

This is NOT a post saying online poker is rigged. In fact I had to pay taxes for my cash games winning on Poker Stars 3 years in a row here in the USA. How many of you fish can say the same for online cash games?

I have played everything from 10nl to 2 5 on Stars and I have a win rated over 10 bb per 100 at all of them, during the pandemic I was not half as skilled as I am now, but could still win a lot cause so many fun players were on the site.

What I dislike about Poker Stars, they got new owners and they took away the "player cash game intensive bonus" that brought in a lot more players. Now it is always **** for their online casino and no way would I trust that because they had a promotion for black jack with fake money and you could not loose a hand, as soon as you used real money the obvious happens. I am not talking about rake back bonus, I am talking about when they would give people cash basically for playing a lot.


Regarding poker, I am a winning player, at the lower stakes I play mostly a TAG style, though bluff a lot. Even managed to do a month or so with something close to a positive red line.
Unfortunately this is my only income and I pay my rent and other bills with it so I am having trouble saving a bankroll and this has been a big mistake on my part cause if you are spending what you make every month that is obviously no good.

It's not totally my fault, we got a very small player pool in my state, and since the new management at Stars decided to take away the cash game intensive promotions there are a LOT fewer players. Still plenty of week fish on there though.


The game play is different online compared to live and oddly even a lot of good players are really stupid about this. Anyone who plays live poker at a casino with a high hand promotion knows how many Full Houses and Straight Flushes and quads we see in an hour, even a room with 20 tables going often has a lot of straight flushes and quads in a 10 hour period. If you get quad Aces and there is an hour to go you know you are very worried about a straight flush, but that would not be the case on Poker Stars because we hardly ever see this type of large short term variance.
Online poker, I may have seen 4 straight flushes in the last year of playing almost everyday, yet at a live casino cash games there may be 5 or more in a 7 hour period for a 20 table room. So WAKE UP dummies, that is not the same kind of game play now is it?


Part of the problem is the statistics morons only look at the long term outcome, but the idiots never looked at what happens in between. If you flip a coin 50 thousand times in a row, and it is heads tales heads tales heads tales, heads heads, tales , tales, heads, tales heads tales, ( a pattern with not much short term variance) well guess what ******s, you are going to get the right longer term outcome, but the "game play" in between is not going to have many large variance spikes, as happens in live cash games with real cards.

This is because the Random Generators are calibrated for proper long term results. I have noticed that the short term variance spikes are a lot like customer buying statistics for an online store. That is if you are selling products online, the day by day numbers often have not much short term variance, but we know with real table games there should be a lot. Often we can see roulette games with 15 reds in a row, 20 blacks in a row.
We also see things like this in live poker variance, but that does not exist in online cash games because they play with far less variance spikes. This is NOT a good thing for strong players. Who wins the most in these high variance situations? The good players of course, and who looses the most? The bad players do in high variance.


My guess is a lot of online pros would not even want the cards to play like live situations, cause many of them are so used to online that some do not know how to adjust. Carrot Poker which is a great poker channel, even he said he does not like live poker, but even though he is very strong he has clearly made the mistake of not playing live cash games over the last couple years or so that are so much softer, though require some big adjustments at times, easy to do though if you are good.


Stars gives long term statistical correctness but without the right kind of SHORT TERM variance. I am not convinced this was intentional as it's probably just that the random generator works that way, after all it is not real cards. Lately cause of **** traffic on the site I may only see 1.500 hands per day, but for many years I was seeing 3000 hands per day easy and you hardly ever see quads and straight flushes, but do I think they set us up. Well maybe in some way, but you can still win.

The one thing I noticed is you can never get a monster size stack unless you play like a total donk who is loosing way more than winning, OR you happen to be playing a bunch of morons that fold too often and let you run them over.

Now this may just be part of the random generator's natural way of working though. Just that the short term variance does not have huge fluctuations.

I am not complaining about it being rigged because you can still win a lot, and the site does not favor anyone or set anyone up. I am convinced of that, so no I do not think it is rigged or we are set up to lose a hand, though if you are playing a LAG style you will find that it's almost impossible to build up something like a 500 bb stack on one table.

This is no doubt because the random generator does not have big variance fluctuations often, which makes the online cash games far less fun to play and also drives away fun players.

I wish those idiots would fix this flaw, but because most online players, even good ones, are too stupid to realize that they are not seeing a lot of big hands at the same rate as live games, and yes most players online are still calling way too much pre flop with **** hands, but because of this online poker will continue to be boring yet profitable for us people with small player pools.


Of course if you live someplace with a very large player pool then this will not bother you cause you can multi table so much that it sort of does not matter, but if you are in a position where there are only about 6 tables to play at a time you will see it.


And yes I am a winning player, I am hoping to get out of this rut soon and not have to spend my bankroll on rent, electricity and phone bills etc, car insurance too.

Anyway I do no expect anything to happen, and again I am NOT saying it is rigged. What I am saying is that computer generated random generators are different than the real thing, that is a fact, and I hope they do something about this in the future to make it more like real cards because the real cards are so much more exciting. I like playing online cash games, but it could be so much more fun, and if the games were more exciting, as they should be, then fun players would stay and not run off cause it's so boring for them.

Most people on here are idiots that probably vote for Trump, so I am not expecting anything from you at all when it comes to brains to understand the big picture.

But for the record Poker Stars is NOT rigged, and you CAN make good money there if you are a skilled player. But if you think a digital random generator is the same as real cards in how the game play happens, then you are really stupid. But at again it's not rigged, it's just hard to make a computer play like real cards, it's actually a very difficult thing to simulate, though I suspect with the more powerful computers in the near future it will happen finally that computers will be able to simulate the short term variance of a real deck of cards. The fact that they already do replicate the long term variance is why most online prose have not noticed the short term variance, they think it does not matter, but it does, those situations are always way more plus EV for the better player.

Cool story bro

Just the way it is, BTW I meant to say " if you are playing a TAG style it's impossible to build up a large 500 bb type stack. Though somehow I wrote LAG by mistake. It's true, you never see anyone with a huge stack in online poker unless the guy is total idiot loosing heaps, or you can get a lot of people to fold too much.

Global Poker could remove a lot of speculation of rigging if they allowed accurate HH. I know, I know...this is about a different website...but I keep coming back to how useful being able to look at your own decision making in a hand after the fact would be.

IDK, I'm not convinced they're rigged; but at times the four of a kinds and straight flushes seem 'streaky' or 'clustered'. In fact; most of my development in games, happens because of the clustering. It's like the game hammers home... "If you're getting into a reraise battle with top pair and top kicker paired on turn on rainbow board; opponent has a set".

I will lose for like 3 days to same exact type of play; and it seems that only when I beat that does it stop sending them my way. Clustering is supposedly a sign of a faulty RNG, but...idk, i have no clue; I just know that when it keeps hurting me in the same way; I get better because I adjust to avoid said pain. I'm allergic to pain. That said; Global uses a known broken RNG...you can read more about it here -> https://bishopfox.com/blog/untwistin...er-killed-prng or here -> https://github.com/anneouyang/MT19937

They may have already changed the PRNG, but...last checked, it was using the PRNG that is crackable. Meaning; that if someone has cracked it; they *MAY* have a free pass to print money and will always make the right call. AKA; SuperUsers but not in a UB type way; more like a bot that just knows the seed and outcome. A human wouldn't be able to make the calculations fast enough. I mean; I think everyone has played someone they felt was super using, and while it's technically possible, I just think if it was occurring on Global; they'd likely have already been outed. On the other hand; with no HH, they're really making it hard to put up a fight against 'riggies'.

Aside from all the possible ways it could be cheated; I truly just want HH so I can see where I'm making mistakes; and learn how other players are playing their hands. I have no care as to who specifically played the hand against me, I'm only interested in what their cards are; what mine are; and how it played out. The usefulness of this would likely make the playing field harder; but still something I'd want implemented.

That said; they never will implement it.

Side note; the book 'Kill everyone' hammers in the point of LAG for tournament play. Specifically because of low blinds and the ability to hit an unexpected hand and stack an opponent. When you play TAG; it's harder to stack an opponent.

Right now I'm reading that book because I frequently find myself 10% away or less from ITM in MTTs. I figure if it improves my game 10%, I'll be ITM enough in MTTs to be profitable in MTTs.

One thing I noticed; and take this however you will. On global poker when I first made my account; the amount of times I'd stack an opponent with a flush was extremely high. In fact; it was like I was only ever dealt nut flushes, or second nut flushes. Almost uncanny how many I'd get. Now I rarely get any nut flushes. Most of my hands now; I'm winning with small hands (pairs; 2 pairs; etc). That wasn't the case when I started, and I don't know if it's because I've improved and recognized opportunity to stack opponents with lesser hands; or if I was having a 'god run' when I first signed up.

Either way...please, let me look at hand histories. I'm so bad; and it would help me so much.

You lost me trying to explain the amount of quads and str8 flushes live to online. There’s full tables seeing flops and getting to rivers, AND during high hand promotions it doesn’t need to get to showdown, players flip their hand over if it got folded. You’re not going to see either any of that online

It is not rigged because it is programed, it's just different because it is a program. Rigged implies it was intentional. It's a very difficult thing to make a random generator for cards that plays like the read thing, so far they have not done it.

They managed to make a random card generator that has the right long term results, but as I said we can simply compare it to the types of big made hands we see during high hand bonus at a casino and that shows it's not playing the same short term variance.

Though online poker still has the same long term math, it's the action in between that does not have the same kind of extreme variance situations on a regular bases as we see with real cards.

LOL, I don't think of it that way, I want your money, not interested in your respect.

I do not think Poker Stars is rigged, though I can not speak for other platforms as I have only played on Stars.

I already posted graphs on here that show the results. Some thought it was funny cause they were so TAG looking, though that seems to work at low stakes and I am working on a more LAG style at the moment. I am not trying to impress anyone as what is the point since you do not know who I am lol

You are clearly an idiot. But I know I am speaking over most of your heads. Most of you idiots probably like Trump too, he is for the low IQ types who are stupid and can't reason out of a paper bag.

If anything, online is more random than actual physical cards. You can have someone poorly shuffle live whereas online you're going to get closer to a pure random which is better. That being said, I've only played live a few times.

What is your username on Pokerstars? I wonder if I've played against you before.

What did you find had a softer field?

Should newer players be prioritizing softer fields or should they focus on targeting the best players they can?

Logic being -> Soft fields make soft players. Hard fields make battle hardened players.

Most of my 'skill' gain has come from learning from the people bending me over. 'Oh, I see what he did there; let me try that vs this guy' type stuff.

As far as sharkscope goes; it's a legitimate joke of a rating, and not because it has me rated lowly. Over 1,000's of games getting ITM in SNGs (low stakes), and placing in low stake tournaments, I donked a sattelite to a $218 entry tournament; and placed 57th of 54th. My skill level did not change between the day before I donked it; and the day after I donked it. The website says I went from 58 ability to 66 ability.

It vastly overestimates stakes impact on ability.

I'm tempted to say micro stakes are harder for me than the more expensive buy ins; but I just don't have enough experience yet to confirm that. Theory being; people are way more willing to all in in micro stakes than they are when real money is on the line. It makes it more 'luck based'; but...again...low experience in mid stakes, just seem to do better when I luck out and win a ticket.

Live was a much softer field by far.

Newer players should prioritize softer fields because they will make money. Winning builds confidence and makes you play better. Naturally you'll advance and play against tough players sometimes, but my goal is to just win as much money as possible and it is more lucrative and fun playing against someone who will spew rather than a reg battle.

I don't really play tournaments that much, because you need a lot more volume to reduce variance. Cash games are a better way to make a living imo.

Thank you