Pokerstars Is Fixed

[Psycho Boy Jack]

i agree whith you PokerPlan, i don't think online poker is rigged. But your proof is not sufficient anyway. here is a counterexmaple:
in france, there is a national company which organize the "lotery" and manages all other "luck games" to scratch ...each week they gain thousands millions euros. they don't need to rig anything. but they recently have been condamned by a tribunal because they actually rigged one of their games (where u have to sratch a piece of peper to discover "you win" or "you loose") and it didn't appear until someone proved it. they rigged it. a so respectable "institution" which plays whith ppl money all year long rigged their games.it is possible.
just wanted to point it happens sometimes.

very sorry for the so bad english i am speaking, but i hope you understood me a bit.

[Poker Plan]

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very sorry for the so bad english i am speaking, but i hope you understood me a bit.

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Your English is fine- well understood.

Interesting to hear about the lottery company that rigged the scratch cards. But the underlying question still has to be "For what reason"- there has to be a big reward to justify the huge risk of "loss of reputation".

The fact that poker sites readily offer you hand history files to obleviate fears of "rigging"- should demonstrate the importance they place on providing a fair game.

Thinks of the hug amount of money an employee could make if they could sell their story of "online poker site rigging", or if it is rigged- I am sure some "insider" would have tried to expoliot their finding. But it just hasn't happened.

Ian

[Psycho Boy Jack]

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The fact that poker sites readily offer you hand history files to obleviate fears of "rigging"- should demonstrate the importance they place on providing a fair game.

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i find this more relevant, and i agree.

[DING-DONG YO]

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The fact that poker sites readily offer you hand history files to obleviate fears of "rigging"- should demonstrate the importance they place on providing a fair game.

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i find this more relevant, and i agree.

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This is such a ridiculous statement. So, dr. Statistics, have you ran an analysis on these hand histories and can say with X percent confidence that everything is on the level?

I am not in the "poker is rigged crowd". I just think the arguments you guys use to dismiss "rigging" are silly.

1) Why would they rig it, they're making a ton of money anyway. because rigging it makes you more money!!

2) They are audited/would get caught you have no idea how thorough the audit is plus it isn't that hard to fool auditors, ever hear of Enron, Worldcom, etc? Those frauds were 100 times less complex than rigging and the most prestigous accounting firms in the world didn't catch on

3) They give you had histories, the numbers don't lie. I have yet to ever see a true statistical analysis from someone who is qualified to do one.

Again, not saying I agree with OP, but these arguments blow hard.

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Thinks of the hug amount of money an employee could make if they could sell their story of "online poker site rigging", or if it is rigged- I am sure some "insider" would have tried to expoliot their finding. But it just hasn't happened.

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Sorry, another bad point. If this person did exist, they would be very highly compensating and incented to keep their mouth shut. Again, think of Enron and Worldcom and Healthsouth.

[Psycho Boy Jack]

i didn't say hand histories were a proof, i said i agreed this was a little more relevant than the "they already make money, why would they cheat" argument. anyway this is still far from making any proof that cheating don't exist.
if u have a valid argument, give it. i don't have one at the moment, but i'll think about it a bit.

[MatusowIsBald]

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The fact that poker sites readily offer you hand history files to obleviate fears of "rigging"- should demonstrate the importance they place on providing a fair game.

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i find this more relevant, and i agree.

[/ QUOTE ]

This is such a ridiculous statement. So, dr. Statistics, have you ran an analysis on these hand histories and can say with X percent confidence that everything is on the level?

I am not in the "poker is rigged crowd". I just think the arguments you guys use to dismiss "rigging" are silly.

1) Why would they rig it, they're making a ton of money anyway. because rigging it makes you more money!!

2) They are audited/would get caught you have no idea how thorough the audit is plus it isn't that hard to fool auditors, ever hear of Enron, Worldcom, etc? Those frauds were 100 times less complex than rigging and the most prestigous accounting firms in the world didn't catch on

3) They give you had histories, the numbers don't lie. I have yet to ever see a true statistical analysis from someone who is qualified to do one.

Again, not saying I agree with OP, but these arguments blow hard.

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Thinks of the hug amount of money an employee could make if they could sell their story of "online poker site rigging", or if it is rigged- I am sure some "insider" would have tried to expoliot their finding. But it just hasn't happened.

[/ QUOTE ]

Sorry, another bad point. If this person did exist, they would be very highly compensating and incented to keep their mouth shut. Again, think of Enron and Worldcom and Healthsouth.

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Heh... you stole my answer. I would also like to say that I have no idea if any online site is "rigging" things, but it never ceases to amaze me how many people act like it's an impossibility. As you noted, companies like Enron and Worldcom kind of shoot down the "their making so much money, why would they risk getting caught" theory, in my opinion. I think people tend to think that the bigger and more successful a company is, the more legit they must be. I'm not sure I believe that. Considering most of these companies are offshore and the regulation process leaves a lot to be desired, I don't think you can assume they are all on the up and up. Like I said, I'm not implying that they are in fact rigged. I just wouldn't be so quick to assume it's an impossibility.

[Poker Plan]

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The fact that poker sites readily offer you hand history files to obleviate fears of "rigging"- should demonstrate the importance they place on providing a fair game.

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i find this more relevant, and i agree.

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This is such a ridiculous statement. So, dr. Statistics, have you ran an analysis on these hand histories and can say with X percent confidence that everything is on the level?



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No one said that Hand Histories have been used to actually prove it's not rigged.

I did say "They offer you hand histories to show they have nothing to hide". They don't have to do that do they?

Ian

[kazana]

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No one said that Hand Histories have been used to actually prove it's not rigged.

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There has been a publication though of a poker player with a couple 100k hands in his DB where he compared the actual winning %'s with the theoretical winning rates.
All percentages were very close to the theoretical values.

Can anyone remember who this was? I've got to search around to see if I can find that article again...

[ZKoeske]

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No one said that Hand Histories have been used to actually prove it's not rigged.

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There has been a publication though of a poker player with a couple 100k hands in his DB where he compared the actual winning %'s with the theoretical winning rates.
All percentages were very close to the theoretical values.

Can anyone remember who this was? I've got to search around to see if I can find that article again...

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I would not at all be surprised that over 100k hands the win % of any given hand would be close to their theoretical values. However, this does not prove in any way that the sites are not rigged. My main contention was that the streaks are so extreme that it would be more beneficial to do an analysis of short runs of streaks, even though this would obviously be more difficult to prove statistically significant. I think it all balances out in the end though. With these extreme streaks occurring, not just sometimes, but seemingly always back to back to back continually, addicts are created and people can't stop either because they are always winning, or always losing (with hands that should be winning more often than not. So they continue playing instead of quitting. Does anyone know of such a statistical analysis done for multiple short hot and cold streaks in succession?

[Catyoul]

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very sorry for the so bad english i am speaking, but i hope you understood me a bit.

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Your English is fine- well understood.

Interesting to hear about the lottery company that rigged the scratch cards. But the underlying question still has to be "For what reason"- there has to be a big reward to justify the huge risk of "loss of reputation".

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I wasn't aware the lottery lost the trial, but from a tv investigation (very heavily cut but still giving enough clues to be sure it was true), they were rigging it so you wouldn't get more than one big winner in a pack (a pack = 40 cards IIRC) and the sum of the other small winners would be very close to the expected value too. Basically, they were twisting the randomness and making sure you got results very close to the average on very small samples. Why ? I think maybe so that people would NOT feel it is rigged actually (oh so ironic eh). The fact we notice such weird runs on small scales in online poker seems to show that it is not rigged that way at least [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img]

PS : obviously the way they rigged the scratch cards made it very exploitable, and apparently it was exploited by some of the cards-sellers who had noticed this for years.