Pokerstars Is Fixed

[Ray Of Light]

"When it gets heads up regularly the person with the worst hand will suck out and win."

-- Have you ever bothered to check up on some of the odds for many of those hands? Preflop, often times the favourite hand has around 65% (2-1) chance of winning. Even overwhelmingly favoured hands have around an 80% (4-1) chance of taking down the pot. In other words, when the underdog sucks out, it isn't really that big of a surprise. My god, the way some players act, they think that their 'favourite' hand should win 99.93% of the time. This just shows a needless ignorance about the odds of the game.

"This may be because the hand algorithm is so advanced that it tries to make up for the lesser hand to make it competitive but regualarly goes too far?"

-- What are you basing this argument on. Your (seemingly poor) knowledge of poker odds? Sit down with something like pokerstove, and crunch some numbers, comparing hands before the flop and on the flop.

"Anytime I have taken a break and then gone back I have run extremely well, is this because I was fresh or is it because I've been gone for a while and pokerstars wants to get me back again?"

-- Its because you are playing with less frustration and impatience having taken a break, than if you were sitting down to play right after having gone on a 300BB downstreak. There is a reason why top poker players always recommend taking a break from the game when you are having a tough time at the tables.

"Any time I have had to reload I have run extremely well - points back to luck factor?"

-- I find that when I have to reload, I am focused on playing even better poker, simply because I am now glaringly aware that I am losing at that point in time (hence having to reload). So unless I am tilting, I actually play better. Its that old adage, people tend to only work on their game when they're losing, and get lazy when they are winning.


End of the day, whatever a man thinketh so it shall be. If you believe that you are losing because the game is rigged, you are going to make needless mistakes (like slowplying when you should bet and such, which leaves money on the table), because you are always thinking that you are going to get outdrawn or such.

Just play the game, don't let the game play you.

[Zetack]

Sigh.

As far as I can tell your evidence that stars is rigged is that you have hot and cold streaks, you have "familiar" flops and can sense the cards that are coming, and on certain hands when you're a big favorite (you gave two examples where your opponent had gutshot straight draws) you "can be certain" or you can "bet your ass" the card is hitting.

Ok. (1) Hot and cold streaks. Postulate, if you will, a site that is completely non-rigged with an honest rng. Statistics would tell us that you would actually expect to see a bunch of hot and cold streaks. It would be suspicious if you didn't.

2. The flop are familiar. If you see tens of thousands of hands, a lot of flops are gonna trigger that deja-vu feeling. Although there are many thousands of combinations of cards, there are actually only a handful of types of flops. See enough of em, they all start to look familiar.

2(a) Thus you can sense what's coming. Um....I doubt it. If you note down for me precisely what you sense coming for the next six months and then record what actually came, well then we can talk. [and no, "I sensed it was coming a seven to make his straight and it came an eight (see so close) and made his two pair to beat me! OMG!!!!] doesn't count as a hit.]

3. You have a big favorit hand and the guy has to hit his gutshot or whatever to win. Bet your ass all you want, if you actually track this, I suspect you will be very surprised in how off your perception is from reality.


Ok, poker could be rigged. I don't beleive Stars is, but its at least conceptually possible. However, if it is (1) I doubt they'd do it in the ways you describe and (2) You certainly are not capable of detecting it in the ways you describe.

Look, we have pattern recognition "software" in our brains. Its been an incredibly important tool for our survival as a species. The problem is, its so important to us, that the software works to find patterns even when there are none.

On the other hand, if you're simply a troll, I want my fifteen minutes back, pond scum.

--Zetack

[boc4life]

OP claims that he's up money longterm, but the games are rigged? Good thing he's such a dominant poker player that he can overcome the rigged-ness.

[tom10167]

Obviously it is rigged for him and they just turn it down sometimes to keep the fish in.

[Colt McCoy]

Cliff Notes: Riverstars is rigged. Oh, and I'm not very smart.

[nath]

Outstanding work, OP! You've really cracked the code here. Keep it on the down low, though; there are a lot of operatives at work who would just as soon see our project reach an untimely end.

Next stop is to head to Costa Rica and firebomb Pokerstars' servers. It's a tough mission, but you seem like the man for the job. Someone will contact you in the next three days. Your contact man will give you some basic information, which will include where and whom to meet for more detailed instructions, a passport and matching identification, and a plane ticket to Costa Rica.

Of course, if you want to back out now, you can choose to abort the mission. We'll have to drug you and wipe all memory of this, though. We'll still set you up with a nice corporate job and suburban home to cover for the operation, as per the agreement. But once you accept and rendevous with the contact, there's no turning back.

[Superfluous Man]

[ QUOTE ]
They fixed it, its about time.

[/ QUOTE ]
wtf i didn't know it was broken.

[keikiwai]

LOL RIVERSTARSAMENTS

[Catyoul]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]

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

[/ QUOTE ]

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".

[/ QUOTE ]
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.

[Pokerlicious]

tl;dr

Didn't know Stars was broken.