Do we really know that online poker is on the level? I.E., not rigged

[Double Ice]

DB is significant. From wikipedia, "The coin is tossed 12000 times with a result of 5961 heads (and 6039 tails). What interval does the value of r (the true probability of obtaining heads) lie within, if a confidence level of 99.999% is desired? Ans: .4766 < r < .5169" Obviously if you had a million hands instead of very few, you could find a stronger trend.

Anyways, on big sites it isn't rigged, because even a very small rigging, in any way, shows up in the long run, as the standard deviation shrinks to next to nothing in comparison with the expected value.

[eljizzle]

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DB is significant. From wikipedia, "The coin is tossed 12000 times with a result of 5961 heads (and 6039 tails). What interval does the value of r (the true probability of obtaining heads) lie within, if a confidence level of 99.999% is desired? Ans: .4766 < r < .5169" Obviously if you had a million hands instead of very few, you could find a stronger trend.

Anyways, on big sites it isn't rigged, because even a very small rigging, in any way, shows up in the long run, as the standard deviation shrinks to next to nothing in comparison with the expected value.

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Couldn't the software determine when and when not to rig a hand so that it didn't show up in the long term analysis? Or for every hand it rigs involving a lot of money and/or to keep a player in the action (or whatever the site's hypothetical motive is in the first place) it rigs an irrelevant hand in the opposite way so as to "appear" random?

[ibluffoldladies]

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DB is significant. From wikipedia, "The coin is tossed 12000 times with a result of 5961 heads (and 6039 tails). What interval does the value of r (the true probability of obtaining heads) lie within, if a confidence level of 99.999% is desired? Ans: .4766 < r < .5169" Obviously if you had a million hands instead of very few, you could find a stronger trend.

Anyways, on big sites it isn't rigged, because even a very small rigging, in any way, shows up in the long run, as the standard deviation shrinks to next to nothing in comparison with the expected value.

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Couldn't the software determine when and when not to rig a hand so that it didn't show up in the long term analysis? Or for every hand it rigs involving a lot of money and/or to keep a player in the action (or whatever the site's hypothetical motive is in the first place) it rigs an irrelevant hand in the opposite way so as to "appear" random?

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I agree. What if every "software update" were designed to reverse a trend so the numbers look good? You just can't look at a bunch of numbers and declare "online poker isn't rigged, see". I'm not arguing if online poker is rigged or not, because I have no idea.

[Adebisi]

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DB is significant. From wikipedia, "The coin is tossed 12000 times with a result of 5961 heads (and 6039 tails). What interval does the value of r (the true probability of obtaining heads) lie within, if a confidence level of 99.999% is desired? Ans: .4766 < r < .5169" Obviously if you had a million hands instead of very few, you could find a stronger trend.

Anyways, on big sites it isn't rigged, because even a very small rigging, in any way, shows up in the long run, as the standard deviation shrinks to next to nothing in comparison with the expected value.

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Think of it this way: If you flip a coin a million times, you're very likely to get heads 10+ times in a row a few times. If someone could control when (not how often) these 10+ heads in a row come up, how is that feasibly detectable?

I'm sure it is theoretically detectible if it doesn't happen at random, but you'd probably need a sample size in the 100's of billions (or more) to be able to say the 10+ heads in a row sequences don't occur at truely random intervals.

[corsakh]

You guys are really this stupid?

Running quads happen as often as they are dictated to happen by the probability. The reason you usually see this ridiculous suck outs performed by the fish on someone on tilt is because they put money in behind all the time. Hence the suck outs and hence the fish. This is what makes the freaking game work.

Of course your gonna see running quads and other crazy stuff happed way more often when your on tilt or playing badly simply cos you presumably will not be putting all your money in this spot under normal circumstance hence will not have a chance to see the suck out.

How often you can say "omfg if I only did not fold this pocket pair on the flop i would hit a set now" or "if i just payed off this gutshotdraw i would now stack him". Well guess what, for a fish - this a way of life. The suck outs are there, the variance is there, you want the glory - go for it [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

If you say that a hand can be staged against a winning player, then CTS and durr must have thousands of hands to prove it. How do the sites balance this off?

They dont? Then there must be a DB to prove it where cts gets more suckouts than he is supposed to.

They do? Then wtf is the difference. If I loose the amount of money that strictly abides by the probability laws (this means in a long run i loose and win as often and as much as i am meant to by the poker mechanics) - then i rather be loosing this money to a fish on tilt who will further donate this money back to the table economy, than some rival good player who is going to cash this out.

IE if some player is statistically "due" for a suck out, he should loose his money to some donkey, not to a good player. This is good for the fish. This is good for the poker economy. This is good for you. This is good for the poker site. What are you upset about? If such mechanism exists that controls it, its only for the best for all the parties involved.

If sucks outs do happen against the odds, there will be proof. If suck outs do happen and the odds abide, I rather see the moneys go to the fish.

[eljizzle]

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How exactly can it be rigged in a way that a DB would show nothing unusual?

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What if I decided to deal a staged hand? I will deal AK to somebody, and pocket 7s to somebody else. I also want the flop to be K 7 A. You can't say the hand was rigged by looking at the numbers.

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Let's use the above example. Let's say that sites DO rig on OCCASIONAL hand to keep someone in the action. Let's pretend I played the hand from above, and I was the one holding the AK. Let's assume this is the only hand of my whole online career that has ever been rigged at all. We'll say that I'm a regular who plays thousands of hands a week for a living. The guy with 77 however, just made a deposit last week and the site wants to keep him playing. So they "rig" they flop to not only hit his set, but give me a big enough piece of it that I double him up. Instead of letting "random probability" determine the outcome, the site rigs the hand to keep the fish playing thus increasing their rake in the long run. Plus they figure I won't notice because "these things happen."

So my question to those of you saying that any riggedness would show up in the database is...

At what point? If I showed you my hands for that day, you surely couldn't prove that hand was rigged. I could show you my hands for the week and you couldn't prove it was rigged. So at what point would someone be able to go back and say "yep...now that I've played X million hands, I can safely say that that hand was rigged...I mean look at these numbers, they prove it!?"

edit: I realize this scenario is VERY hypothetical, but it should not be dismissed just because of that. It was basically a simplified (for my sake) way of asking the question. Because I still don't see how databases could reveal any rigging if it was happening here and there. This was my attempt at that answer. I don't know if sites are rigged or not, but I'm hoping someone more intelligent than myself can explain it to me.

[DING-DONG YO]

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If sucks outs do happen against the odds, there will be proof. If suck outs do happen and the odds abide, I rather see the moneys go to the fish.

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there will not be proof. There will be data that looks suspicious. It would take someone with a background in statistical and data analysis to actually examine a database with X million hands and provide a confidence level that (percentage) there are no statistically significant deviations. So, even a PHD could spend months examining this data and still not be able to tell you 100% everything is OK.

I find it funny that players with no background in statistics can say "I have a DB with 3M hands and nothing looks out of place". o rly? Where is your analysis? Where are your credentials?

A BBV thread from back when we had srs biz threads about variance.

[DING-DONG YO]

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[x] OP has last laugh

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[X] MUAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!

[ibluffoldladies]

Calm down corsakh. Am I arguing that online poker is rigged? No. I'm saying you can't look at a DB and claim it's not. You sure did get defensive though.

[DING-DONG YO]

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obviously

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not rly, believe it or not. My purpose with this post was to inject some doubt and much needed skepticism into this community at a time when it was nonexistent.

I still marvel at how posters on this site can be so suspicious of the US government and at the same time assume online poker sites based in loosely regulated third world countries are on the level. Not saying either view is correct or incorrect, but I am always amazed at what people choose to believe.