Pokerstars Is Fixed

[ZKoeske]

[ QUOTE ]
"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. "

--When I read this, I had to laugh. I am sorry, normally I am not patronizing in my replies to posts. But a dismissave refusal to accept ANY statistical evidence answering your worries about the legitimacy of the online poker game, makes you come across as a person who is simply too stubborn to even consider the possibility that you may be wrong.

You ask for proof of the online games legitimacy. Someone offers to show you statistical proof of the online games legitimacy. And before you have even seen the proof, you accept that it is correct, then you disregard it as being completely irrelavent.


"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."

--- So, in your opinion, the ONLY WAY to prove that poker is not rigged, is if there were never any winning or losing streaks more extreme than say, 100BB to around 150BB?!? Whether online or offline, poker players go on streaks of 150+BB (and in the extreme 300BB+) all the time. And your bankroll has to be around 200-300BB to be able to absorb those swings, (did you think poker pros just threw out the 300BB number for laughs and giggles!?).

What you need to try and understand is that there are two key facts that make online poker different from live poker... 1) More hands are played, and 2) When you play bad, you play bad over more hands.

Too many people on two plus two, who play online, fool themselves into thinking they are the Doyle Brunson of the online game, and ridiculously over-estimate the profitable edge that they have over their opponents (myself included).

Its like they read a couple of poker books, and suddenly they don't need to study the game anymore because they're are beating the $2/$4 game for 3BB/100 over 10K hands?!?

But the truth is, they are nowhere near as good at poker as they think they are. Just because you can outsmart a donkey, doesn't mean you aren't one as well.

And with the amount of hands that you play online, if you are making a mistake in your game, such as you are playing scared or you are playing too tight or too passive... you are going to be making that mistake up 10 times more often online than if you were playing offline (online 300 hands per hour/offline 30 hands per hour). When this happens, downstreaks (or winning streaks) seem to last longer, and your bankroll ends up weathering an El Nino type poker storm as it gets tossed and turned about by your own glaringly incompetant understanding of the game.

[/ QUOTE ]

Ok dude,feel free to criticize me all you want, but before you go ahead and do that I would appreciate it if you'd stop misunderstanding everything I've said. It's fine if you choose to skim what I wrote because it's long but then don't make comments like you know what I'm saying when you clearly don't.

1. I am not dismissive of any statistical evidence at all. In fact, I previously asked people to offer any statistical data they knew of. My belief is that over 100K hands, any given hand will approach the theoretical value it should have of winning. Thus a broad analysis will show nothing out of the ordinary. My contention was that over a large amount of hands there are continual spurts where hands with 1-10% chances of winning will infact win approximantely 90/100 times. Now, the chances of something liek this occurring once over a thousand hands is certainly likely, but my point is that for every 300 hands where the expected winning hand prevails possibly even more than it should, there are then 100 more hands where the expected winner loses 90 of the 100 times. This cycle repeats itself again and again on pokerstars, and other online sites.

Thus, a broad largescale analysis of thousands of hands won't answer my question. What I want to know is what is the statistical likelihood that a huge underdog of less than 10% wins greater then 75/100 hands, not just once, but repeteadly in spurts over a large sample.

Secondly, you comment that I seem to believe there is no possibility I could be wrong. Again, I previously stated that I am up in the air about whether online poker is fixed and I have just noticed many peculiarities that I wanted to address. I am willing to listen to any explanation people have and have no qualms about changing my stance if I think someone gives me a good enough explanation. What I don't appreciate is you coming in and acting like I'm ultra stubborn when you aren't up to date with what I've been saying.

Lastly, I have said absolutely nothing about the length of winning or losing streaks. I haven't found that any winnig or losing streak I have experienced over my 3 years of playing has been particularly long. Like I stated earlier, I just think that there are continual spurts where good hands lose 90% of the time to huge underdogs over a few 100 hands..and this happens over and over again. For instance. 200 hands where the best hand wins more than it should...followed by 200 hands where the best hand wins less than 20% of the time.Followed by 150 hands where the best hand wins more than it should. Followed by 150 hands where the best hand wins less than 20% of the time, etc.

I'm sure I know far less about statistics than most people on this site, but I would imagine that something like this is unlikely to keep occurring repeatedly over thousands of hands, and that has been my experience with online poker.

So yea, I'm not a moron. I never said I was the Doyle Brunson of the online game. I'm just a college student who plays a lot of poker and wanted to get some people's opinions about it.

[Ray Of Light]

Sure, why not, I probably did misread your post (and I've probably misread your most recent post too because I skimmed through it and grew bored). But unless you have some actual 'online poker is rigged' proof, (or you have something to say that will give me some new insight into the complex game of poker), then I really couldn't give a tiny rats ass.

So because of that fact, I will simply go ahead and use my replies to go on and rant about pretty much whatever I like. Because once a general forum thread reaches more than 8 pages long, the posts pretty much run out of anything new to say anyway...

Oh, and Bill King, I've been on this forum since 2003, and I have fewer than 200 posts in total. Thats because I spend the majority of my time reading, learning and applying what I have learnt from reading the medium/high stakes forum strategy posts, rather than making random little reply posts like these on virtually every single topic my eyes come across. It all gets boring real quick...

[KKbluff]

Call me a sucker but i checked out this guys last blog post...
and here is what i found

[ QUOTE ]
Sunday, August 20, 2006
Alert

The previous post was removed due to a pending criminal investigation.

posted by Zak Koeske @ 9:16 AM

[/ QUOTE ]

hmmmm..
Maybe pokerstars nailed him for preaching the truth... or not [img]/images/graemlins/cool.gif[/img]

[Ace Eleven]

I completely agree that pokerstars is fixed, and I also win.

[Uppercut]

[ QUOTE ]
Someone always seems to call preflop with a low pocket pair, or AK, or QJ, whatever they do, it never fails to somehow outdraw my far superior hand. I'm not saying this happens 100% of the time.

[/ QUOTE ]

Yes you are.

[davebwell]

This post is way to long to read but I love Poker Stars for the tech support. They come to us here to give a detailed explanation of how they fixed the site and I didn't even know it was down. No other site has ever done this.

[benfranklin]

[ QUOTE ]

My contention was that over a large amount of hands there are continual spurts where hands with 1-10% chances of winning will infact win approximantely 90/100 times.

[/ QUOTE ]

I must conclude that you do not have a very good grasp of probability, and are reporting your undocumented impressions as facts. What hands have 1-10% chances of winning? A 7-2 offsuit has a better than 12% chance against AA.

[ QUOTE ]
What I want to know is what is the statistical likelihood that a huge underdog of less than 10% wins greater then 75/100 hands, not just once, but repeteadly in spurts over a large sample.

[/ QUOTE ]

Again, there is no such huge underdog. But however you define a huge underdog, if you take enough 100-hand samples, you are going to find some where the underdogs won 75% or more. (I assume that the 75/100 number is one that you just made up.)

The phrase "repeatedly in spurts" is also imprecise and untestable. You are asking for statistical analysis of a problem you cannot define.

[ QUOTE ]
there are continual spurts where good hands lose 90% of the time to huge underdogs over a few 100 hands..and this happens over and over again. For instance. 200 hands where the best hand wins more than it should...followed by 200 hands where the best hand wins less than 20% of the time.Followed by 150 hands where the best hand wins more than it should. Followed by 150 hands where the best hand wins less than 20% of the time, etc.

[/ QUOTE ]

Again, you are reporting your impressions without documentation. This also appears to show a fundamental lack of understanding of probability. Random data does not appear random to the untrained eye, because of the human tendency to impose patterns on things. Raw random data generally appears to be "streaky". Flip a coin 100 times and write down the results as H or T. The data isn't going to be HTHTHTHT..... It's going to have streaks. That is all that you have been able to report. You have not even shown the magnitude of these streaks, let alone make any attempt to show that they are statistically improbable.

In short, you have asserted that there are spurts or streaks in poker results (we knew that), that there are statistically improbable streaks in games that you have played, that you cannot document those streaks, and that you challenge anyone to prove that your alleged streaks are in fact within the range of probability.

This boils down to a basic logical fallacy. You are asking for someone to prove a negative propostion. It only takes one example to prove that online poker is rigged (which you have not provided). It is logically impossible to prove that it is not rigged.

[chesspain]

Cliff Notes: Poster postulates a long-winded, unscientific hypothesis about the possible rigged nature of Pokerstars while continuously looking over his shoulder so as to not get caught for his unauthorized use of the internet on the campus of the Devry Technical Institute.

[PokerBob]

did not read the post, but did read the title. it is because of this that i can safely draw the following conclusion: You Are Dumb.

[The Raizer]

I will throw some things to consider out and leave it at that. Ok first off there are a few huge misconceptions about the math involved PERIOD. First off, all starting hands are 50 50 before the flop. Yes starting with AA you will win more of the time than with worse cards, but POKER HAS NO MEMORY. To claim you will win 80% of the time with AA is to assume there is a poker brain out there somewhere keeping track and makes sure you win that much. Playing on full tilt about 3 months ago, I lost with AA to a lower pp all in preflop EIGHT TIMES in one day (it was a sunday actually). How can this happen??? They were all 20%?! It happens because in poker ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN AT ANY TIME. Period. The math you read about is simply guidelines, it means this or that will happen to this degree of probability, BUT for this hand, this one hand right this second that is unfolding, anything is possible. Taking this into consideration, you have to then assume you will, over say a 3 year period of gaming, experience periods of time where everything is logical, you get your money in their with kk against qq and win, you call with a flush draw and it hits, everything is going ok, sometimes you lose hands you think you should have won but whatever. You will also go through periods of time where the cards are TOTALLY falling your way, all your draws hit, nothing misses! You always flop a set, you are unstoppable. Then you're going to hit a down turn, and everything will miss, other players will hit magic cards and you cant win. Its only logical and its called variance, and its real. For every period of time which you cannot lose, you must also have a period of time which you cannot win. I hate to say it but online poker is not rigged, you just have to understand sometimes you will sit down and win some and lose some, sometimes you cant lose, sometimes you cant win. With that being said I will admit online sites do not deal cards totally random, the card generator they almost all use uses an algorhythm which is probably less than half as random as a casino shuffler, and this translates into cards falling a bit more unrealistically, but in the long run you can use this to your advantage. Just try to cash in when youre hitting and play lower stakes when youre not. I find that playing online, if I get someone all in and say I have AA and he has J8 suited, if he hits the flop with a pair or draw in dead and I know it, he will connect with the turn or river and I lose the hand MOST of the time. Draws hit more than they should, and PP hit sets a LOT more than they should. Simple. As for sites being rigged, how are you defining rigged? If you mean someone always hits and wins a tourney by getting incredibley lucky, how do you know how hes been running lately? Maybe he's been in a slump, and suddenly his luck turns. A friend of mine won 6 sit and gos on full tilt in a row, only to not place in the money the next ten. Hey, it's poker. I really thought online gaming was rigged for a long time, but I finally came to realize one fact that you simply cannot ignore- in the end poker is GAMBLING, yes you can help shift the odds in your favor by making mathmatically correct calls and raises, but in the end you are still GAMBLING and thus you cannot ever totally predict the outcome and thats all there is to it. If youre mind is so brilliant that you can sense what future cards are coming, why arent you using that to your advantage and clear out some pros bankrolls? The pros are all waiting bro, theyre waiting for you go get em!