[OrangeKing]

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I would like very much for you to explain what advantages one hand has over another one, if all hands were not 50 50 we would just wait for pocket aces. You can make a boat just as easily with 57os as you can ak, AA will lose to 27os, the flop determines who stands where so how is everyone not almost even before the flop?

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Wow! You really must stop playing poker RIGHT NOW!

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Shh, don't tell him that! If he keeps losing he'll keep losing to you!

Besides, he's right,* all those hands are close** before the flop.


*Completely wrong, unless...
**He considers being favored to win somewhere around 85% of the time or 65% of the time "close."

Edit: To the OP, really, what did you expect? We've read these threads time and time again, dismissed them time and time again, and now just see them as a source of amusement. The best way to prove it to yourself is to use PokerTracker or something similar, play 100,000 hands or so, and take a look at your stats.

Invariably, the vast majority of your hands will have won as much as would expect. Your draws will hit close to their expected frequency. Cards will come on each street as often as expected. The hand that will have made you the most bets per hand will be, by far, AA, and will almost certainly be followed by KK (variance may play around with the hands after that, but big pocket pairs and AKs/AK are going to be coming up next).

And if you have any specific things you think may be rigged, make a null hypothesis now and try to disprove it. For instance, do you think flush draws don't come in often enough? Straight draws hit too often? Overcards beat pocket pairs at showdown too often? Decide that's what you're testing for now, play some hands, and come back with the results for whatever you are testing - there are people in the Probability forum that can help you run the analysis necessary.

As a warning, what you can't do is collect the data, find the one weird thing that is wrong with it, and then say that there was only a 1 in 83 billion chance that would happen...therefore it is fixed. You need to decide what things you are going to test for before looking at the data.

If you do all that, and come back with results that suggest the games are rigged, people here would listen to you, because that would be something new to us.