Manipulating The Deck In Online Poker

Ed I think you are right on the money here in terms of your analysis of the incentives for the card rooms. Keep the money sloshing around.

I have no hard evidence but I swear there must be a three-outer/dominated hand algorithm in place for heads up no limit at Poker Stars. It feels like 70% of the time I get all the money in and get called by a dominated hand (AK vs A5) for example the three-outer will hit. In the long run I should win in this spot about 70% of the time but I only seem to win about 30% which is really flipped odds wise. The phenomenon is so uncanny and consistent that I am afraid to get my money in even if I am really confident that my starting hand dominates my opponents likely calling range. It makes playing big aces really scary in heads up.

I’m not sure how third-party auditors examine an online poker room, but if I were an auditor, I wouldn’t just look at the code. I’d also examine the results of all the all-in situations and perform statistical tests for bias. On sites that allow data-mining, virtually anyone could perform this kind of analysis.

“occasionally more than 52 cards are consumed”

Please let us know how often this occurs.

“Therefore, this rule change betrays the implied assurance that PokerStars accurately simulates live play.”

I have a much bigger problem with sites that do not handle blind/button logic correctly.

Also, ever bet 194.53 in a live tournament or cash game? Didn’t think so.

Up to now, you posts have been pretty good. But this entire post is just not sitting well with me.

And your first two commenters are not helping.

Well, pokerstars is not only poker room. I dont know so much about virtual poker bussines background, BUT lot of rooms have not own software, they even dont manage money resources at all. Todays poker rooms are just marketing departments. (Titan, Expekt, TonyG or Marmaid, Heaven, Paradise) If there is separation between these blocks its much harder to manipulate it (of course still posible)

ad reality simulation, bossmedia’s software limit holdem, unlimited raise count is really horrible

i notice on pokerstars, it seems the Chip Leader in a heads up pot usually wins the hand…you can have 92 vs 55 and the 9 will hit for the chip leader the majority of the time.
I’ve seen it happen way too often that it seems rigged….but either way, I still play because it’s fun.

I think this is just a small effect that exerts itself continuously over small samples.

Here is my post on the 2p2 thread:
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/28/internet-gambling/official-poker-site-data-analysis-discussion-thread-264915/index24.html#post6293682

Ed> “…greed commonly overcomes common sense.”

Certainly true, as seen by the UB super-user scandal. Common sense dictates that you don’t call a huge all-in with only a 10 high and expect that no one will ask questions, but they did it and got found out because of it.

That kind of blatant cheating can be found out, but other lesser things are probably easier to hide. So yes, they very well could be doing some things to increase their profit and we would never know.

Ed,

I have to agree with Nico here. I think pretty much everyone understands the financial incentive for the online sites to tweak the deck and although it was informative from a purely academic standpoint, your most recent post is only adding fuel to the fire for the conspiracy theorists who prefer to make claims of cheating rather than focus on improving their game. I think it is safe to assume that the anecdotal posts from “degenerate bluffer” and “JJ” are just the first drips of a coming cascade of ridiculous claims that will now seem justifiable because a noted poker authority has given them weight.

Although it is clearly not your job to corral the fish for the sharks, unnecessarily scaring them without any kind of evidence is counter-productive. In fact, although I agree that it is possible, I hear this claim over and over again mostly from lousy players who could only beat a weak home game at best– pretty much all of whom have never bothered to track their online results. I think that this kind of anecdotal evidence speaks volumes more than what is “theoretically possible.”

hey.

all these stories about how this or that pokerroom is rigged sound really funny to me, actually. look. namely pokerstars generate profit of definitely millions of dollars per day and there is just no reason to believe that they have any interest in getting $10.000 at max (the effect can’t really be much better than this - cutting the winrate of regulars has just some kind of semi-effect by giving the money to worse players who will put the money into the rake a bit more likely, not for sure though) for ANY kind of risk… that’s just SO ridiculous.

but then again, i just lost with my pocket kings against pocket eights when another king appeared on the flop… with two eights along.

RIGGED definitely.

Ed,

I like your analysis. There’s one aspect you haven’t touched: the programmer.

If an executive gave a programmer the task to implement those “rigging algorithms” (and also to hide them) wouldn’t that make the executive vulnerable to blackmail by the programmer? Imagine the huge loss a site would have once a proof of rigging would materialize (especially if the proof is presented by the guy who wrote the code).
What if the programmer gets the order but chooses to inform the media instead of implementing the code?

Thinking about it: if I ran such a site I would try to have some kind of check in place that prevents the programmers from implementing code so that a single player (they themself or someone they collude with) can manipulate the game. Do you know if there are such processes in place?

Greyzy

When people tell me that online is rigged, obviously, duh… I think to some of the nearly impossible hands I’ve seen in live play recently ..

QJ flops AKT, K9 goes all in, QJ calls, turn 9 river K
K4 goes all in to my AA, board runs 44KKK
44 goes all in to AA, board runs A44xx

of course there’s the quad Aces against Royal on TV that everyone’s been talking about …

“Common sense dictates that you don’t call a huge all-in with only a 10 high and expect that no one will ask questions, but they did it and got found out because of it.”

Apparently you don’t play much poker

Ed, I think we have to be a bit careful about this. You mentioned going through hand histories looking for anything suspicious but it’s very hard to know what is shady from what is not. The other night I had pocket kings beaten by AK twice (all-in preflop) and pocket queens beaten by pocket 77s (also all-in preflop). This happened at the same table within 20 minutes. suspicious? Or just an unfortunate set of events?
At the end of the day some incredible bad beats happen in poker, and you will see loads of them if you multi-table online. Something may have a 0.05% chance of happening but that doesn’t mean it was cheating.

I do trust them. They would probably love to tweak the games, but I would say “additional winnings by tweaking” is lower than “probability of getting caught * consequences of getting caught”.

On the other hand, it is extremely unlikely that a player can detect those little unfair adjustments, if there were any, so I wouldn’t bother making statistical data mining on your playing logs.

The one problem is when you say they have a financial incentive to alter the code to alter the deal in some instances. I disagree with a large site (such as a FTP or PokerStars).

The value of a little incremental profit could be no where NEAR the potential catastrophic loss if this was ever proven. Its hard to argue that a business making over $50 million in profit a year, based entirely on the trust of their “game”, would risk that for an incidental (what are we saying here? 2%? 5%) amount of extra profits. Its possible with a smaller poker room, but you have to impute very good business sense on the biggest of poker rooms - and this equation is easy for them to make.

That being said, there should be outside auditing companies for additional verification.

It is a fact that the rooms have an interest in having a large pool of players in their room.

It is also a fact that the rooms can manipulate play in such a way that players will stay in their room as long as possible.

It is a fact that pokerrooms make enormous profits with online poker.

In such an environment pokerrooms are automatically suspicious without independant supervision. It is not without reason that even state lotteries are supervised by a notary.

To think that these offshore pokerrooms with million (billion?) dollars interests and no notary supervision will not manipulate is very naive.

My concerns are much more mundane than all the the ones above.

I have asked sites about the randomness of the deal. They all say it is random. But, every time I fold a good hand in early position and I see that I would have busted someone, I wonder. Are they really random.

A collory to this is: If Hold’em is so easy to code and deal online, why do away with the burn cards? Doesn’t that affect the so called randomization? Come on! The burn cards could be popped out there so fast that the players would hardly know the difference in time.

How could the hand or deck be right without the burn cards coming out?

Even if they dealt the burn cards all you’d have is their word that the deck was randomized.

Just make it look more kosher to make me feel better: put the burn cards on the table.

Natcheztoo

Eric>”Apparently you don’t play much poker :D”

Well yes, anyone who has read my previous posts knows that I don’t have as much time to play as I would like. But that doesn’t matter here, because what I said above is factually true.

The UB superusers were found out when one of them, it might have been NioNio but I’m not sure, called a heads-up all-in bluff with only 10 high and won. He knew his 10 high was good because he could see his opponent’s cards.

And that’s just one example. These guys pulled moves like this all the time. After the above move, the other guy got suspicious and asked for the hand histories for the whole tournament. It was this that led to the discovery that NioNio could see everyone’s cards.

Their cheating was so blatant that anyone with any common sense at all would know that they couldn’t get away with it forever. Nevertheless, they still did it. That was the point I was trying to make.

I have been following the 2+2 “DOOMSWITCH FOR REGULARS” discussion a bit.

Here is my theoretical question :

If it was really true that the winning regulars are constantly beeing sucked out in all-in situations vs. losing players that make a -EV all-in push or call, how would this affect this winning players longterm winrate ?

Would this really be a “cut into the winrate” of the winning player, for the benefit of the fish and the pokersite ?

This manipulation would protect the fishes from going broke to soon, maybe making them believe they crush the game for a while.
The later they go broke, the more time they had feelings of success, the more likely they will come back making a new deposit.

So on second sight, wouldnt this manipulation be in favor of the winning player, secretly increasing his winrate by making fishes come back, come back, come back, … ?

To address the last post by JJS, the reason that those cheaters were caught were because of the reason stated above. But yet how often have you ever had your bluff sniffed out in an all-in pot by 10 high? Myself? Never. It might happen occasionally where a min-bet was made simply so someone could see your cards- in fact, I have done this myself on occasion.

But let me actually add something here: the reason I don’t like this post is because I have a close personal involvement with the subject matter. You see, both my father and uncle were pretty much some of the pioneers of online poker and both of them won big back in the old days. They both each read Winning Low Limit Hold’em by Lee Jones and Hold’em for Advanced Players by S&M. They played tighter than the other players, kicked some ass and took names, and then pretty much sat around and expected the same results over the years even though they stopped actively trying to improve.

Neither one of them has ever posted or read anything on forums, has not kept up with the literature, never done a simulation, tracked results, or just about anything that someone who is expecting to achieve professional results would do. Now they both play at the lowest limits they ever had and bounce around from site to site every time they lose with AA twice in one day.

Why? It’s rigged! That is what I hear over and over again and I constantly find myself defending the integrity of the sites and point out to them the things that I do differently that they choose not to do and the much more difficult nature of the modern online game.

But they keep choosing to take their business elsewhere in search of the elusive “random shuffle.” Bottom line? Selective memory of this type CAN cause a site to lose business.

This leads to my second point that I am sure that you (Ed Miller) will agree with. A site NEEDS to have winning regular players to start games and keep them going. If the regulars keep getting cheated by the doom-switch, they will probably eventually get suspicious and take their business elsewhere.

While I certainly can not prove which direction is true, I don’t like the idea of propagating conspiracy theories because new players already have enough reasons to fear putting their money online and getting started.

http://smallstakeshero.blogspot.com

Hi Ed,

Interesting article. Almost everthing has some sort of incentive. I need money, the bank has money, so there exists a financial incentive for me to rob the bank.

The issue is whether the reward is worth the risk. And for most companies, it is not.

As anybody who has worked in technology can attest; everything is possible in theory. Your example of how a room could fix the game does work in theory. But as Greyzy points out, now you have greed factored in. The programmer blackmails the CEO (or whoever ordered it) which would ultimately negate the benefits of having done it in the first place.

Whenever I’ve had this discussion with someone I’ve noticed that it looks true at 50,000 feet but when you start asking questions of exactly how one would go about it then things start to get murky and eventually the other person simply declares “I’m sure there’s some way to do it.”

The one question that nobody can seem to answer for me is; how do you make a change that is so small it would be impossible or difficult to detect yet would produce such an outcome that would have some sort of substantial impact on company performance?

It is very easy to rig a single hand. It is more difficult but relatively easy to rig the game for a specific player. However it is far, far more complex to rig the game in favor of thousands of poor players.

You’re not fixing a single hand. That would do very little to extend the life of a poor player. So you would have to fix many hands in order to keep the guy in the game. Likewise, fixing the game for a single player would have very little impact on your bottm line numbers so you would have to fix the game for thousands and thousands of players.

So now you’re rigging tens or hundreds of thousands of hands a day. I don’t think you can hide that. Or if you could, your entire poker room would be devoted to keeping track of what was dealt to every player so you could try to balance out the fixed hands.

Until someone can answer those types of questions I have a hard time buying the rigged deck argument.

Bill

So the question is what should we do to protective ourselves?
I believe the Ulimate Bet and Absolute Poker issues have shown us the industry needs more regulation and the poker sites’s inner workings need to be open to more scrutiny. Clearly this is going to be difficult to achieve especially in America where the Government’s standpoint is to ban rather than regulate.
I believe that the Poker Players’ Alliance should be lobbeying not just for online poker to be legalised but also to be regulated.
Individuals on 2+2 and other forums have done a great job uncovering bad practises but the sort of potential skullduggery that Ed alludes to would be enormously difficult to discover without a regulator being able to examine the poker sites’ inner workings. Would you trust your money in an licensed gambling den? Is there any difference to an online site? I’ll continue to be playing poker online but I think we all need to lobbey harder to get some regulation in place.

First of all, sorry for my english….

I am a small stakes player of cash games and tournaments and this is my opinion :

POKERSTARS is a clear clear CLEAR manipulated site and I think most of the sites i have played it happens just the same but a a bit less scandalous.

I am not talking about probability of wining or not a hand in a all in being clear favourite (80% or more). I am talking about loose a BIG POT AGAINST A BIG UNDERDOG … this is the most frequent fact that happens in POKERSTARS, specially in tournaments. Like some comments say you have AK and the other have Ax and x appears lot of timess (not just 3 of 10 times), and if the pot is big it is very common that AQ wins AK by example. Another clear situation in Pstars is that almos never QQ wins Ax, or almost never AK wins 44-55-66 ….

In cash games, you can see how every fish or maniac get money quickly; probably he loose then in the next hour but HIS STUPIDS CALLS OR MOVES WITH 2-3 OUTS CONTRIBUTES TO GENERATE RAKE. THAT IS THE ONLY THING POKERSTARS WANT : RAKE !!!

If you observe tables, let´s say a very tight table, it is very common some players get big hands: AA vs QQ vs AK or some like that. Really, a few players see flop but MORE REALLY is that 2 of the players get big hands both of them.

If table is loose or semiloose, every draw is favoured. A common case is that you re-raise a limper with your big hand and he calls every raise (it is just the same 4bb or 20bb) and he get piece on flop: with 2 suited cards the donk call any bent and get the draw ALWAYS and ALMOST ALWAYS get his flush or straight, being the same if you protect your hand or not. Or if he has some like Ax he get A on flop. Or if he has Ax and you have AK, he get 2 pair… it is so outrageous !!!!!

In PokerStars this situations happens continuously, at least in small stakes, and I think they manipulated game to generate the maximum possible rake.

My question is:

Is there some decent investigations about ODDS AND BIG POTS in Pstars or in other poker room ???

Why the fish or maniac in poker online connect flop almost alwawys and not 33% of times ?

Is there some public inform confirming with real data that plays aren´t pre-defined ??

Greetins for all of readers and thanks to Ed Miller by his bright and useful blog

I don’t believe that online poker rooms have the integrity of the game at heart. I think it’s far easier to say that the online rooms are after one thing…money. I agree with ed’s points, but there is a much bigger and more obvious problem to worry about, online collusion. While I have never personally seen, I have heard 3rd hand from a few people who have been over at a friend’s house, seen several guys with laptops and sat cards. Sat cards from what I understand assign each card a separate IP address for each computer. The people in question may even have more than one type of internet connection…dial up/dsl, cable, satellite, etc. And then all that has to happen is have the group sit at one table together. This is one of the major reasons why the only thing I play online anymore are MTT…between the possibility of collusion and the possiblity of people cracking the algorithim, an altered deal, etc…which I would have no way of avoiding anyway…it seems to me the “fairest” game is a MTT. Can anybody suggest some software that I can use to find out how often a 70/30, or 80/20, etc hand holds up. Barring the selectivity of the human memory, it does strike me as strange that the odds don’t seem to hold once the majority of the money has gone in the pot. OTOH, suckouts will always happen. It’s hard to know and I don’t know if any statistical analysis I could/would bother to do would have any meaning. *shrug* It’s just one of the reasons I don’t mind driving to the local cardroom and playing for larger stakes b/c I feel the game is much more secure and a lot more fun and social as well…which is a part of the enjoyment factor for me, besides all the strategy that goes into the game.

“It is very easy to rig a single hand. It is more difficult but relatively easy to rig the game for a specific player. However it is far, far more complex to rig the game in favor of thousands of poor players.”

Rigging the game for thousands of players would be a peace of cake. Anyone who has some experience in programming knows this.

It is very easy to rig a single hand. It is more difficult but relatively easy to rig the game for a specific player. However it is far, far more complex to rig the game in favor of thousands of poor players.

Rigging the hands of thousands of players would be a peace of cake. Anyone with a little expirience in programming knows this.

To address fsp’s post about big pots- this is only “natural selection.” The reason is that the bigger a player’s hand, the more money he is likely to wager on it. If another hand actually GOES to showdown, then the player’s opponent is more likely to have caught at that point.

Ask yourselves this: how often have you been pushing a strong hand like 2 pair or better to the river and gotten heavy action, only to have that other player fold for one more bet? You might be puzzled at the time and then quickly conclude that he must have missed his draw. These hands are then mentally filed away and tend to be forgotten rather quickly. Take this for example:

You raise AK and get called by one opponent. The flop comes A94. You bet 2/3 pot and he calls. Now a 7 falls. Again you bet 2/3 and he calls. A 3 comes on the river and your opponent only has 1 pot sized bet left, so you put him all in. He thinks and then decides that his A5 is no good so he folds. You will never get to see this hand so it becomes rather insignificant. But now suppose that 5 falls on the river and you put him all in and he wins with his 3-outer. This will sting and you will probably curse and claim that these things always happen.

But do they? Just remember that are LUCKY to have the opportunity to see any hand that does not go to showdown. We only see the ones that do, and therefore if a hand goes to showdown, most un-showdown worthy hands or hands that have not improved have already been weeded out by the intense betting, so naturally many of these suck-outs will seem more frequent than they actually are.

http://smallstakeshero.blogspot.com

Lorin–

Your arrogance is so cute, i just love it when people talk like they are god’s gift to poker. Feel free to insult me all you want if it makes you feel superior. However, you do raise good points. And I can’t comment on fsp’s scenario. But the situation I am taking about is much different. I am not talking about overlooking the fact that people fold their missed draws for one more bet on the river. The scenario I am referring to is very specific. Headups, preflop shove with with a hand that is likely dominating your opponents range. AK vs. A3, or AJ vs A10 for examples. The three outer where they were “drawing” preflop when they put all their money in. And heads up most people seam to play any Ace like it is pocket Aces. This three outer is a situation where the dominating hand should win 70% or more of the time but “seems” to lose about 70% of the time. I am keeping a tracker of this scenario but I would have to play a lifetime of poker to create a hand history that is even relevant for discussion. And moreover this scenario is so common for me that the only way to improve my headsup game is to avoid this scenario altogether. And that means not even shoving with pocket Aces. Wait for two pair or better before I make all in decisions. Which is probably sound advice. The biggest leak in my heads up game is not necessarily playing at negative EV, but rather front loading my play too much and playing more preflop when I should make most of the stack decisions post flop or on the turn. This is a lesson that unfortunately has cost me a lot of money to learn. But it is learned.

Ed–

I fully accept your premise that psychological bias is a factor. Am I am not stupid or ignorant. I am a dye in the wool David Humean empiricist. I need analyzable and verifiable facts. And statistical analysis of large sets of hand histories is the only methodologically correct way to verify malfeasance. But as it is we don’t have this currently so the card rooms must be treated as suspect. I am also a skeptic, like the philosopher David Hume seems to be. I would love to see a regulatory agency publish statistical analysis of hand histories for all hands in a given online card room. The technical feasibility is trivial and the datasets are well within the means of any modern data center’s ability to archive.

To Bill who earlier said that it would take “rigging tens or hundreds of thousands of hands a day.”. Sure why not? The problem as I see it is that poker is not a game of massive edges but rather small edges. Barry Greenstein famously said in his book that he believes has a 3% edge over his game and that this is enough to provide a very comfortable living so long as he is sufficiently bankrolled to play at high enough stakes. So we are talking about small edges here. So again I say why not? The algorithm could be very subtle and not a 100%. Implement the doom switch even 60% of the time and you are going to slosh around quite a bit of money over the long term. The casinos make money with small edges distributed over a very large amount of action. Why wouldn’t the same hold true for online poker? Anyone, who says it is only 5% therefore doesn’t really mean we should be worried, simply doesn’t understand the power of large numbers.

The strongest claim against the conspiracy theory is the blackmail factor. But anybody has their price. And sometimes it doesn’t involve cash, but all means of coercion. The programmer who implements a doomswitch has lots of incentives to stay in the fold and perhaps less incentives to deviate. And more over if the problem is relegated to a small number of actual programmers it is all the more unlikely that they can blow the whistle anonymously. Perhaps it is a dangerous game they play but but the risk to reward ratio does not that often lean towards the the side of good. Just look at the pressures any whistle blower undergoes. It is even worse in an unregulated industry.

That being said I do think Ed and other overestimate the downside risk of malfeasance. Perhaps there is a major risk posed to the online poker industry as a whole. But individual card rooms? What’s the real risk? Say they get caught. Big deal. Close shop and reopen a completely different branded card room and even hire new management to obscure the audit trail. The barriers to entry in this market are not that great if you have the resources to write good software. Poker rooms are a dime a dozen and opening new one is really only a marketing exercise away. In fact I think the competition is so fierce and margins to small that it amplifies the upside more than the downside.

And finally, this is not to be construed as a grand conspiracy theory. I make no such claims because I don’t have empirical facts to support any such claim. I just think the discussion like any discussion about bots or collusion is healthy. It provides the thinking player tools to protect him or herself. And anyone who suggests that we shouldn’t have a conversation like this in the open likely has an agenda. And I am sorry, “don’t scare the fish” is not a legitimate reason to avoid this conversation.

Ed — it looks like someone is copying your work without credit or attribution.

http://groups.google.com/group/rec.gambling.poker/browse_thread/thread/4f6baad319d20ce3/145f809e0df31f36?lnk=raot

@Ben Attenborough: Excellent point and that is one of the reasons why I’m not all that excited about many of these legislative half-measures.

Many of the bills going before Congress basically get us to a point where the federal government won’t enforce the UIGEA. That does nothing towards legalizing it. Without legalization the US can’t regulate it.

@Slide: Okay, maybe I should have made it more clear that you need to show your work. I’ve been involved with software development for 17 years and I can assure you that it is not as easy as your two sentence response seems to indicate.

Like I said, everybody is quick to say that it’s trivial to do but nobody can seem to explain how they would do it. I’m not saying that it is impossible but what I am saying is that it’s a lot harder to do successfully than people like yourself make it out to be.

Just walk us through the major considerations and how you would solve them. I think once you get past level one thinking you’ll realize that this is a massively complex problem to solve if you want to remain undetected.

Well said degenerate bluffer. I’ve pretty much given up on online poker all together….while hard core statistical analysis is the only way to know for sure…and it could and should be done since it is so easy to do. However until this happens, the only thing we have to go on is our own experience…and I can say that through my own experience there are far too many times my opponent is catching after enough money has gone into the pot to prevent any other outcome than the mathimatically expected one. When I play online I seriously expect to lose 60-70% of the time when I have an all in showdown and have my opponent dominated by anything less than the stone cold nuts. Most of the time this is happening when I have an overpair or a two pair plus hand and they catch trips or two pair on the river. When by all accounts even the stupidest of players should’ve let their hand go at that point. It’s the combined “stupidity” of the players, which may or may not be authentic, and the mathematical improbability of these “random” players hitting miracle cards all too often. Not only can I say that it doesn’t happen all that often in a B&M casino, but the times it does happen tend to happen with the correct frequency, no matter how much they sting. Furthermore, it’s highly unlikely that a casino will risk it’s reputation to have dealers rigging the deck for any specific players, as any players would have to be in on it as the rake is the only money the house collects from each deal.

@sam and degenerate bluffer:

You guys are just spouting off. There are people with millions of hands in their databases, who have shown no statistical anomalies.

also, sam, the exact reason you say the casinos wouldn’t rig their games, is the exact same reason why the online card rooms would? what?

disingenuous.

I’ve lost a lot of money to people who play any two lately. Overpairs against two undercards that make 2 pair. My winrate has been getting crushed but still play the same game. It just seems when all the money goes in, I lose too often.

In response to degenerate bluffer-

I apologize if it came across that I was including you in the so-called pool of fish. I was not referring to anyone who posted here as such, just referencing those who have never tried it or are just beginning. But I do stand by what I had said concerning anecdotal evidence- which all of it is.

The truth of the matter, at least as it stands now is that until someone actually comes out with the hard numbers, ALL of it is anecdotal evidence. Notice how every post on here is claiming a different sort of deck manipulation. Notice further that if the deck is truly being manipulated, than that money must, by definition, be going to SOMEONE. Yet you never hear the stories from anyone about how incredibly lucky they are at online, or how a miracle card fell down from the sky to save them in a pot that would have completely crippled their bankroll.

http://smallstakeshero.blogspot.com

well, I can say, that as of today, my bankroll has been crippled by four other people hitting miracle cards falling from the sky.

On the bright side, I did manage to NOT get drawn out once today, and that was when I flopped a royal. But I was playing 2c/4c NL and only made about $1.

Lorin, seriously why would you hear those stories? Assuming for a moment that something not completely kosher is happening, through one or more of the possible ways that manipulation could be happening, the people benefiting are highly unlikely to post anything about it…and that’s assuming that they are aware of it. In the case of a theoretical doomswitch, from what I understand in this thread, the concept is not that it is player specific, but that it gives that person that is behind and unrealistically high probability of taking the lead on whatever street it is. This would naturally affect better players more of the time as they will be getting their money is as what they will percieve to be “good” most of the time…and will usually be very far ahead unless their opponent was playing any two and completely outflopped them and crushed them.

One of the common arguements made in online poker’s defense is that b/c you are seeing many more hands in a given time period that you will experience the swings that much quicker…if that is true than the collary is also true that the results should even themselves out that much quicker and the better players should be getting the fruits of their results that much quicker as well. But this isn’t what appears to be happening…and I must say after checking out your blog and having yourself state that you’ve only had 3 losing months out of 46 (correct me if I’m wrong on that)…I would say you haven’t really experienced a downswing…at least not the kind that most of the people here are talking about that has made us so cynical about online poker. I think the only reason you’re not that cynical is based on your results…but when you are continually confronted with all in situations where you get your money is as no less than a 70/30 favorite over the hand that manages to somehow beat you way more than 30 percent of the time, something starts to smell bad. You make a good point about this being anecdotal…could you (or anybody reading this) point us to a program that we can use to do some statistical analysis…as I stated in an earlier post I would love to perform some analysis on my own hand histories but really do not have the computer savvy to write my own program with the formulas to know how to do this. Having a program that could do this sort of analysis for me would be a great help and timesaver.

What about you Ed? Do you have any resources to such a program? This conversation is a worthy one and if what we need is hard facts let us in the poker community start number crunching and combining our data analysis. After all the poker sites aren’t going to do it for us.

Lorin — Apology taken. I did not mean to overreact. It is just sucks to watch suckout after suckout happen.

Anyway, you raise some interesting points here. But in some respect I think you might be missing the larger point. These moments of luck are not bankroll making or breaking moments. In fact there are very few of those kinds of moments in poker. A single bad beat isn’t going to break most players. And beside who plays that way? I mean if you have several thousand in an online account it is not like you are playing $4000 sit and goes. More likely one is playing a small percentage of their bankroll in any given moment. About the only exception to this is the player who deposits a $100 in an account and sets it all on the line in a 1-2 no limit game. But at that point if $100 truly represents someone’s bankroll then they probably should not be playing at those stakes unless they purely want to gamble. But what many of us are talking about is specific scenarios that appear to deviate from the mean in terms of outcome. Of course we don’t have the statistical means to fully investigate this. But that is part of the point. The card rooms don’t make that readily available. And until then I think it is healthy to discuss the potential motivations in order to understand how these mechanisms of malfeasance might work.

So specifically to your point the money must “by definition go to someone”.Yes that is true. This is not a matter of my money being shipped to a player who works for the card room. The online card rooms are not conspiring against me to take all my money each hand and put it in there pockets. Mechanism works through the rake. Think of it this way. Say you and I each have $10,000. And we decide to play a series of matches (cash or heads up tourney doesn’t matter but let’s use tourney for simpler math). Each match costs us each $10 in fees so $20 total to the cardroom. Now after a series of matches it appears that theoretically speaking we are both evenly matched. Both have an equal grasp of odds, strategy and equal commitment to playing optimal poker. Is it a good bet for us to continue playing each other online? No. And here is why. Over the long run the casino or card room is going to take all of our $20,000 (10k each). In this specific scenario it would take a 1000 iterations at $20 a piece. But statistically speaking if we are equally matched the variance is negligible compared to the downside risk of both losing $10k in rake. We would be fools to continue playing each other under those conditions. Now obviously the real world doesn’t work that way. There are players of varying skill and so we all look for edges in the game and moments we can exploit that make it worth our time. Otherwise it is purely gambling, no different than playing slots or the lotto. And what we are talking about here is not simple theft in that the card room is taking money from a player directly for their benefit. But sure you don’t hear stories of people getting incredibly lucky and with a miracle turn of the cards that makes their bankroll. But incrementally people get “lucky” all the time. The money gets sloshed around. And through the slow persistent force of the rake the card rooms are enriched. And that is something not as many people notice.

Now don’t misunderstand me. I am not fundamentally opposed to a rake. Dealers need to feed their families and software developers need to feed theirs. I appreciate the service they provide. What disturbs me is the idea that the random might not be random. Therefore obliterating any ability to have an edge in the game. But let me say that from a game theory perspective this situation is not entirely insurmountable. If I know that there might be “a three-outer alogrithm” in the game I can work around it strategically. The net result is that it just reduces my overall edge in the game. I can no longer depend on those spots where I know I am a 70/30 favorite. But if the conditions are such that I can’t even beat the rake then it is time to move on. And online poker has gotten to that point for me unfortunately. Maybe there are better bots and players out there that are more patient and more skilled than me that are able to turn a profit. Good for them.

[...] Whole thing here. [...]

degenerate bluffer,

personally, i’m not anywhere near a fantastic player, but i still make hundreds to thousands a month, playing stakes from 0.25-0.50 to 1/2. If you can’t beat a $3 rake, well… they say that there’s always a fish at the table…

To implement most tweaks, it would require less than one day of work for just one developer.

It would also take one disgruntled developer one our to spill the beans about what his employer told him to do therefore your arguements are errant.

To the last two people who I replied to my messages:

This will be fairly brief as I am ready to pack it in for the night and will probably have more to say tomorrow, but here goes:

I should admit that I have had many of those same frustrations, believe me. I used to believe the stories that my father told me, and here is where it first started. 5 years ago when I first started playing, I deposited at UB. My dad was highly successful for a part time player and was playing at some site that no longer exists today, but I was modeling my future career after him. I asked him to help out my bankroll at the time and he agreed to play on my UB account for a few hours. While he had managed to ring it up a few hundred bucks, he told me that he did not like the site because he felt that it dealt out too many pocket pairs to players, and thus would tie them to the pot and thereby generate more rake for the site. Can someone actually infer this from playing for just a few hours? Surely not. But over the years, I had watched the man who’s game I had originally admired’s results tail off his with work ethic. While I would be telling him about the great pots and reads that I had won, I would only hear about the “bad beats” he could not overcome and why his bankroll was going bust over and over again. But then again, if you are playing $50/100 limit with a $1,200 bankroll, how many beats can you really manage to handle? Furthermore, the last time we had had this exhaustive conversation, he was bitching to me how he had gotten tired of poker on Carbon Poker one evening and decided to play Caribbean Stud. He was complaining how the deal was dealt a pair EVERY single hand (true? I don’t know) and blew through $500 in short order.

I then threw back at him, “so let me get this straight: you play a well known sucker’s game and you are bitching about getting cheated? The house edge in that game is a sickening 5%, they will get your money in no time, so why would they cheat? And if you felt you were getting cheated, why did you continue to play?”

Not that is necessarily indicative of poker, but it certainly raises the question: if you seriously concerned that you are getting cheated, why would you not only continue playing there, but do you really trust them enough to park thousands of dollars at their site?!

But anyways, here is a concept that I have been rolling over in my head lately: good players NEVER put bad beats on anyone! I don’t mean this in traditional terms as in being ahead most of the time. The last time that YOU put a bad beat on someone, tell me if you didn’t say one of these things to yourself (be honest):

1) I couldn’t possibly fold that hand, I had set.

i.e. you had bottom set on a 875 board and your opponent flopped a straight, or even worse, you hit a one-outer against a bigger set.

2) I had pocket aces, he never should have called my pre-flop raise with that trash!

i.e. your opponent held 5-3 and the flop was 5-3-3 and you rivered your ace.

3) You should have have raised bigger before the flop.

i.e. your opponent held aces and you cracked him with 87s.

4) I thought he was bluffing.

i.e. you check raised all in with 98 on a JhTh4c board when your opponent held KhQh and you spiked an off-suit 8 to win the hand.

5) I was short-stacked!

i.e. in a tournament your opponent raises QQ and you call for your remaining chips with 75o when you only have 3 BB’s left in the BB and you hit 2 pair.

6) I had 14 outs!

(self-explanatory)

These are only a few examples, but ego defense plays a large role. We have to suffer a bit to realize when we made a bad call or play and got lucky. Admitting to getting lucky means we have to admit that we either have a lack of skill or got outplayed. Not necessarily, I say. In fact, in order to win, I have ultimately determined that you have to not only play well, but you must get the amount of luck over time that you are entitled to. In other words, we have to hit our 3-outers and win our races when we have somewhat the worst of it.

When it comes to tracking, I can say this much: I hear often in casinos that aces never win or ridiculous things like “I would rather have JJ than AA.” After looking through my results on pokertracker, there is one thing that I see time and time again, and that is:

1) I make far more money with AA than with any other hand, no matter the limit or type of game.

2) I make the second most amount of money with KK.

http://smallstakeshero.blogspot.com

Hi,

First my english is poor:)

I played over 3 000 000 hands since 3 years, easy to see it is rigged

you get to a situation you know you will not win this pot… before seeing the river… and you cannot fold.

Why? because you are $ ahead and you have a winning account.

It is a pattern.

Your hands hold the first 20 minutes to make you believe it will be a good day and after that it is the setup, then you are frustrated by the weird play who just bad beat you. You continue to play and you realize suddenly you are playing since 4 hours and you are even.

90% of the time you play more than 4 hours you lose and 90% of the time you are ahead in the first 30 minutes..very frustrating to not be able to put the hours in a game you like.

yes i can beat the game, you need to beat the software not the players.

When i ask the poker room why my account is rigged the first thing they say is “You are a winning player!” the only thing i can reply to them is “Do i need a losing account to have my share of luck?”

Try to gamble 10 hands in a row with a player who have a VPI$ 50+ and is willing to call. he will take you your last 3 days of winnings so fast.

Anyways easy to see it is rigged, i think the only way to prove it is to have a programmer telling it. Maybe if we build a jackpot who increase by 100$ each time a player join until a programmer cannot resist when he see the jackpot is 120 000$ and prove it

“The more you suck the more you flop”

Ed, thanks for discussing this issue which not many people employed in the poker industry seem to want to. I agree the incentive is there, you just have to look at the amount of money sites spend on trying to sign people up in the first place. The other major challenge for them is holding onto players. Anyone who’s ever kept a buddy-list of soft players can see how the sites suffer from quickly losing existing players. Considering how much they spend signing players up, they must’ve thought of ways of better holding onto players.

As a programmer, I also agree it is trivial to implement. Let’s say I’m a winning player and I get all-in against a weak player the site wants to keep around a bit longer. X cards in the deck help my opponent, Y cards help me. The software can simply move one of my cards to the bottom of the deck, so now it’s X vs. Y-1, and deal the rest of the hand out randomly. It’s very hard to prove because I’m still winning the hand a certain amount of the time, just not as much as I should.

I’m no conspiracy theorist, but the answer to the questions, do the sites have:
a) the motivation
b) the means

The answer to both is yes.

To degenerate bluffer:

Yes, I understand the theory behind the cheating scandal. Players stay around longer because they get the occasional suckout. And I agree with Ed that if this were happening, it would be undetectable. But what I am trying to say is that people everywhere (and on this site) are claiming that it IS detectable and are offering varied scenarios. If this were indeed true, then there should be an army of lucky losers who can also stand up and say that they do better and get luckier online than they do in B&M’s.

But as everyone here knows, this never occurs. It is a one-sided argument and everyone is claiming to get cheated- no one remembers their lucky hands or as stated in my last post, good players always have a justification for sucking out. The argument of cheating being possible is strong, but the argument of it actually happening as of this moment is very weak.

Loren states “The argument of cheating being possible is strong, but the argument of it actually happening as of this moment is very weak.” This is absolutely true. The reason for this is quite simple. Sam’s previous request for what software exists that can analyize hand histories for statistical abnormalities went unanswered. Perhaps this is because such software does not exist. If this software indeed does not exist it is likely because while there are many poker players who are also experts in the field of statistical analysis or in the field of software engineering, there are very few individuals who are experts in BOTH fields (who also have the time to develop such software). So, what we need to actually perform some kind of concrete statistical analysis as to whether online cardrooms are manipulating the deal or as to whether they do have doom switches that they can turn on and off for individual players is first for some poker players who are also experts in statistical analysis to propose a series of tests that can be applied to a collection of hand histories that will definitively show some sort of statistical abnormality (including how many hands would be necessary to prove this). Once we have that, then the software experts among us can actually develop some software that will perform these tests on a collection of hand histories. Once this software has been run on some acceptable data set, we will have our definitive answer for any specific cardroom!

You don’t think Poker Tracker would be able to come up with the data that you want?

Seriously - what would you want to test for? I bet that you can probably phrase a database query that’ll come up with the answer.

the most logical, rational article i’ve seen on the topic. kudos and you’re right. it is every players responsibility…thank you very much, will spread this around

Just a thought, i am not a programmer or a mathematician

I think the software should analyse statistical versus the size of the pot, if your hand held 60% of the time and its normal, then it only depend when it held.

Ok I play online for really, really, really small stakes and often used to think that sites were rigged, then decided they were not, then decided they were etc etc. Anyhoo, after almost giving up on poker all together I decided to stop playing like a donk and either get better or just give it up for good (hard to get rake of me if I don’t play). Now my win rate has improved and i still get the bad beats (it happens). As someone else said previously and I agree with and have seen, the beats in live play are just the same. Give it enough time.

Now as to how would you rig a game so that you can favor one player over another. Well this I have given some thought (not much mind you) and I don’t think it is necessarily that hard of a thing to do surely. In fact it doesn’t even require a site to have to mess with there deal per se, and it would also allow an independent auditor to examine the deal for fairness, honesty yada yada yada. So how would I do this?

Well, I would have my RNG deal me up millions and millions (dare I say billions mu ha ha ha) of hands and store then away in a nice database. Now these hands (and flops, turns, rivers) which have been generated with an honest-to-goodness RNG are legitimate hands, but how I allocate them to a table and to who I allocate the hands within a given round are up to me. So now I can start to do some really fancy stuff with the database to get me that little bit of extra rake, or more importantly, in the event that games seems to be drying up, how I give the cards out in the round.

Combined with my in-house pokertracker stats (mu ha ha ha again: cause ya know they keep stats. I would) I can take some hand (legitimatley generated) where AA gets cracked by some freakin dork of a hand. And who do I give the AA too? Well I give that to the TAG. And the dork of a hand? I give that to some huge VPIP calling station who chases draws. So now the winning TAG has had his stats confirmed and his AA has fallen into the 20% loss crack while the calling station has triumphed with his superior play and knowledge of how to crack aces (I felt my draw was gonna come in, or I knew i was gonna flop a str8 with my 85o)

Now in most cases only one hand wins (sometimes we get ties), so it doesn’t matter if others come along for the ride since we know that ultimately they wont win if they have the courage to hang till the end. In fact we have just made a little bit more in rake sweet!

Of course there is a wild card amongst all of this and that is the players themselves. We can deal someone the winning hand and for whatever reason they may fold it and not win. Sweet again! More statistical randomness in the mix (keeps it real to all those dataminers etc).

So now my programmer isn’t trying to rig deals he/she is tracking players stats and allocating the hands from within a pre-dealt hand accordingly. And if I am the site who does this I can send the cards for a round out in whatever order i want e.g. 1) i dont actually care just send em, 2) I care. Send em so the guy who always reloads from off site funds will have to do that :), 3) send em so the games dont dry up (artificially feed the fish), 4) make sure my pros and whales dont leave (dont see the big names or anyone for that matter complain when they win a ton through suckouts and the like. I certainly dont).

For the most part i would be doing number 1) from that list since the game will generate me a ton of rake anyway if i am big enough, but if I do the others only 1-2% of the time then I can hide it in statistical noise and really make a sizeable difference to not only my rake, but more importantly who stays and goes and who is happy on the site. Since ultimately the greater the player numbers the greater the rake and less of 2),3), and 4) I have to do.

And lastly since the hands have come from an honest to goodness RNG an independent auditor can check the deals and will find nothing wrong. Sweet once again.

Anyhoo…..If I was going to rig a site thats how I would do it. No need to get complicated and rig RNG etc.

lovey doves
Andrew

[...] Whole thing here. [...]

Just to keep the numbers small, say you have a small site with 10 tables running, and a $3 max rake. You’re dealing a slow-ish 60 hands per hour (online sites advertise that they pop 120 an hour, right? well, that’s generally bullshiat, but whatever). Presuming every round around the table, someone is going to get uppity and make a pot with a max rake, so you have a max rake every minute. Your site is pulling in $3 per minute. That’s 180 per hour, 4320 per day, 30240 per week, 1.5Million Dollars per year.

Now, I happen to be online on a fairly sizeable site, Cake, right now. Cake claims to have 288 tables with players seated, at this exact moment. 64 of those tables are below 25c/50c, so probably not likely to ever hit max rake. But they are still generating some rake. So, we’ll take our 10 table figure out to (288 - 64) tables, that’s 224 tables. I’ll just round it down to 200, so the math is easier (and you’ll figure some of those other tables aren’t going to hit max rake every once around anyway) ..

200 tables, with 60 hands an hour, and 1 hand going to max rake every round around, gives us $60 per minute, $3600 per hour, 86400 per day, 604K per week, for $32M per year.

This is downtime for Cake right now, most of their players are on during US Day time.

Think about that - making 30+ million a year with your expenses consisting primarily of staff and fraud detection/preventing. It costs you virtually nothing to add in more tables (in fact, every time someone sits at an empty table at Cake, a new one is automatically created). You have your fixed bandwidth and computer costs, and your payroll costs, and that’s probably somewhere along the lines of about everything.

A medium sized site like Cake is pulling in just incredible amounts of money. Why would a site even bother cheating, unless they were right from their humble beginnings? They’ve got a license to print money as it is .. although i’m sure they’d like a license to print double the money, why bother?

I totally agree with you Eric,

if those numbers are correct then the owners of somewhere like Cake are rolling in it. And as you said with numbers like those I sure as hell wouldn’t risk killing my cash cow. Hmmm maybe I should start a poker client I could do with a few million here and there.

Andy

well, I can’t say that those numbers are totally correct, i mean, i was going on an assumption that a significant number of tables are pulling in a max rake every 10 hands, which might or might not be ludicrous, for all i know. but, any sizeable poker site does basically have a license to print money.

Hi,
Being an online small stakes poker player since the early party-poker days (somewhere 2003), there is 1 incident that still today is in the back of my mind:
beating the low-limit games (limit holdem) at that time on party-poker, a railbird (or observer, not a seated player) called my hole-cards twice in row (after the hand) and made the following comment ‘there is no lemon pie to be had on the side of the road’; English is not my native language so i asked for an explanation; he said ‘bananas don’t fly’. What was that!? Someone can see my hole-cards? Someone was trying to scare me, warn me? They don’t like players that beat the game (and take money fast from the lesser players)? Looking back at the hand histories, none of the chat was there!

On rigging the deck:
if a card-room was to ‘deal a second’ every hand on the river in limit holdem for example (discard the one that is supposed to come up but not helping the fish), i.m.o you would never be able to proof this with hand histories. You may find things that deviate (maybe a lot) from the mean, but never something that is impossible (if red comes 22 times in a row on a roulette wheel, that isn’t proof the wheel is crooked, for it is possible). On the other hand, it are people that code the programs; it would surprise me if not a single coder would have opened his mouth by now if the software actively rigged the deck.

dont play at ipoker, i am doing a test since 2 month, i am a regular winner since 3 years and i see a lot of people asking if rigged or not.

then i decided to make a test if they can make someone lose and the best way was to give them hard time.

what i have done since 2 month i started insulting the support until they ban my chat and support, i didnt stop by emailing them.

the result lost 5000$ in a row in .50 / 1$
easy to see nera impossible to win now.

if someone want to have my HH to verify let me know, you will see by yourself Ipoker can rigg account.

Thank you . I posted on 2+2 asking if there was any rigged discussion that was legit . Someone posted I should look here , and I am glad I did . Thanks for the discussion !! Really needed.

I’ve been playing poker now for about 7 years. I would consider myself a very decent player. I have beat the NL cash games at the casinos for quite some time along with local tourneys that I’ve been playing in, all said I’m easily 30k plus winner. About 4 years ago I started playing online and at this present time I’m a 12k loser. I honestly have never seen such BS in my 7 years of playing poker live as I have online. I don’t really want to hear about the “you’re seeing more hands per hour” and stuff. I know just like some others have posted when I’m a huge favorite in a hand and this foolish villian just keeps coming and runs me right down. Does this happen live? bet your ass it does, but not nearley as much as it does online. I mean if it did I must be one of the most lucky losers playing live. I cant seem to figure it out, I’ve got peoples betting patterns down cold to the point I’m knowing what cards there holding, but It just doesn’t seem to matter as long as they are chasing that long shot gut draw without even having odds to call It never fails, that lovely river brings this donk moron just what he was looking for. I would be a liar If I said my hand doesn’t hold up alot of times either, but for me anyway in the long run It’s all this sort of crap that’s got me a loser online, and I refuse to accept that it’s me when I’m chalking wins in for the day live. So as I see it YES there is something most definately wrong with online pokers RNG

> Eric:
>of course there’s the quad Aces against Royal
>on TV that everyone’s been talking about …
OMG … TV poker is rigged!!!

>“Common sense dictates that you don’t call a huge
>all-in with only a 10 high and expect that no one
>will ask questions, but they did it and got found
>out because of it.”
The thing about common sense is that it isn’t so common.

I think the bad beats happen more often online, simply because players are looser. Looser starting hands, looser calls after the flop, then hit with the trash hand they started with. Generally, and I mean generally, live play is $1/$2 and up. Most online play is much smaller. With smaller stakes, people are more willing to gamble.

In the 100,000 hands I’ve played online, a much higher percentage of the “bad beats” happen at the lower limits.

In fact, I used to play .05/.10 trying to beat that consistently before I moved up. Hard as hell to get from $50 to $200. I quit trying at $120, and I went to .10/.25, where my win rate went up. Not necessarily less fish, just less PF call, flop call, turn call, hit river and blatantly bet. The crap is weeded out sooner. Not always, just more often.

*That* is why I think the “OMG online poker is rigged” philosophy thrives.