If poker sites are rigged, let\'s prove it.
 

There seems to always be some discussion going on in these forums that various sites are rigged in favor of flush-chasing fish, in order to keep said fish alive (solvent) longer, so that sites can collect more rake.

The standard argument to this is that sites wouldn't risk losing their business and having a huge scandal for a bit of extra money, but this isn't really proof that they're not doing it.

It seems to me that it should be fairly simple to take a few million played hands and do some statistical analysis on them to determine if any site has rigging going on. For reference, some of you may have already seen this link:

poker-sucks.com/poker-sucks/pokerstars-is-robbing-you.html

While this person claims to have done some analysis, the fact that he is making money off a website called poker-sucks.com calls his credibility into question.

Therefore, perhaps a few people from 2+2 who have no financial motivation would care to do some statistical analysis on their hand histories. In order for such a study to have credibility, the following would have to be true:

1) It would have to be a respected/long time poster in the forums (I am no good for that reason)

2) It would have to be over a very large number of played hands (hundreds of thousands at least)

3) The methodology and/or programming code used to do the analysis would have to be published/explained to make sure that there were no errors in the method.

Instead of sitting here and always having a theoretical discussion about whether the sites are rigged or not, it seems that with all the data that has been collected by 2+2 posters over the years, that question should be very easy to answer with a bit of statistical analysis.

What do you think?

Re: If poker sites are rigged, let\'s prove it.
 

[ QUOTE ]
perhaps a few people from 2+2 who have no financial motivation would care to do some statistical analysis on their hand histories.

[/ QUOTE ]

Do you really think any people from 2+2 have no financial motivation?

Re: If poker sites are rigged, let\'s prove it.
 

We don't have any discussions as to whether sites are rigged or not.

No serious poster thinks the big sites are rigged - it's like you popped up in a geology forum and asked for proof that the world isn't flat - if fish want to think they are losing coz the sites are rigged then fine..just so long as they blame anyhting other than the fact they are meeting better players..

Re: If poker sites are rigged, let\'s prove it.
 

Saying that "the sites aren't rigged because they wouldn't do that", or "the sites aren't rigged because most 2+2 serious posters don't believe it" hardly constitutes mathematical proof, which was the point of my post. Personally I would THINK that they wouldn't rig their results, but then read the discussion a bit further down where Pokerroom just blatantly didn't give some guy money that he had won. There are other stories too. The only way we will know is if we do some analysis on it...

And yes, I do believe that a group of a few well-respected 2+2 posters would have minimal financial motivation to lie about their results... as long as they weren't too closely affiliated with any one site. At the very least, it would give us some hard data to discuss instead of anecdotal evidence of some guy complaining about bad beats, which is completely useless.

EDIT: One other thing - I am not complainig about personally losing money, because that is not happening to me.

Re: If poker sites are rigged, let\'s prove it.
 

It looks like a pointless wild goose chase as you are trying to prove a negative.

So you want to run the numbers on million of hands for every single site/network with any significant number of players? (because just proving say Stars isn't squewed won't be enough will it?)

And if we manage to do it that just removes an excuse from the losing players who then realise why they are really losing so much the faster?

And if we find a dodgy site then that's great press for online poker and really attracts new players, huh?

er right let's summarise - proving no rigging (to the extent this is logically possible) = huge time investment to show something most regulars are perfectly happy is the case on all reputable sites anyway (and removes excuse for losing at a site from fish) ; alternative is proving that one or more sites actually is rigged in some way (more likely has a bad RND or whatever) which frightens off new fish.

Hiow about you go away, run the numbers and come back if you do find anything wrong?

-- good luck..

Re: If poker sites are rigged, let\'s prove it.
 

I think the community isn't motivated to discuss it anymore, in all these threads the ones who think it is rigged never seem to actually take any argument to the contrary into consideration. I think no proof will change that, if somebody thinks it is rigged due to arrogance wrt personal abilities (and I think the vast majority of the ones who think it is rigged is in that group), extensive psychological councelling would be needed to change it, not stats. Admiting weaknesses is obviously something many people are unable to do, I think you can't change that, just give up.

Re: If poker sites are rigged, let\'s prove it.
 

Look, I am not saying that I personally think that the sites are rigged, and I am not complaining about bad beats that went against me. Having said that, the link I provided in the first post comes from a guy that claims to have done analysis against 1.3 million hands and shows that there is a HUGE statistical discrepancy (to the tune of 10% in some cases) in certain situations that occur at Poker Stars.

So if you don't want us to advertise that sites are rigged because it will discourage fish, then I understand that. However, wouldn't it be good to do our own analysis to prove that they are not (if that is the case), because this guy is advertising that they are anyways - and that isn't helping the fish situation. I don't see how doing our own analysis and publishing it on this site is going to hurt the image of online poker more than what he is doing. Anyone who goes to google and types in "poker sucks" is going to find his site before they find a post on 2+2 anyways.

The strongest practical argument against rigging is simple dissemination of information - in order to rig a site, you have to get a programmer to do it, and that is typically someone who has no real incentive to keep quiet about it after he leaves his job. The fact that we haven't heard of any programmers talking about how they were personally directed to rig a site by this point is the strongest evidence against it, IMHO. But that is still just conjecture, and not proof.

I find it amazing that this guy can publish an article claiming that he analyzed 1.3 million poker stars hands and noted a huge problem there, and nobody here seems to even care enough to try to prove or disprove it.

EDIT: One other thing - even if a site is slightly rigged (even as much as 10% in certain heads up situations), a good player will still be able to make money. Anyone who complains about losing money solely because of rigged sites is obviously just a bad player... but that still isn't proof that it isn't happening.

Re: If poker sites are rigged, let\'s prove it.
 

[ QUOTE ]
It looks like a pointless wild goose chase as you are trying to prove a negative.

[/ QUOTE ]

Exactly! It's like trying to prove that god exists.

Re: If poker sites are rigged, let\'s prove it.
 

I don't even care about reading his article to be honest.

I might get around to it later if I'm bored I suppose.

I'm sure he just made some errors in his assumptions of what was supposed to happen and perhaps what is a large enough sample for the specific situation he was looking at.


There was a PhD who was supposedly an expert on gambling-theory who said that nobody can beat any poker game because of the rake.
He was quoted in articles about this as a 'gambling expert'.
He said that because of the rake, everybody just passes their money back and forth and loses $3 rake-chunks at a time.

He couldn't even comprehend that some players' skill is so much greater than other players that they can overcome the rake-disadvantage.


Some guy who says he studied 1.3 million hands and has provne that it's all rigged-up doesn't impress me at all.

As somebody noted earlier, it's like some guy arguing that the world is flat.

Some guy comes to me and says that he's proven conclusively with geological evidence that the world is actually flat, therefore there's a big conspiracy around the scientific community where they convinced the rest of the world otherwise.
I say, "Yawn."

Re: If poker sites are rigged, let\'s prove it.
 

[ QUOTE ]
Look, I am not saying that I personally think that the sites are rigged, and I am not complaining about bad beats that went against me. Having said that, the link I provided in the first post comes from a guy that claims to have done analysis against 1.3 million hands and shows that there is a HUGE statistical discrepancy (to the tune of 10% in some cases) in certain situations that occur at Poker Stars.

[/ QUOTE ]

Their experimental methodology is flawed. Each hand must be evaluated for its EV and then the total EV is compared to the total wins. They have used many approximations and the errors are likely large.

THere's no automatic way to do this that I know. I'd be a real coding chore for me but likely not too much for someone sharp. Once you had it automated you could more-or-less validate a site to some reasonable certainty.

To do it by hand you need to enter every head's up match into twodimes.com to obtain the EV then sum it up. It really doesn't take too many hands to find a flawed site.


Want more info? PM me.

Re: If poker sites are rigged, let\'s prove it.
 

[ QUOTE ]
I don't even care about reading his article to be honest.

Some guy who says he studied 1.3 million hands and has provne that it's all rigged-up doesn't impress me at all.

I say, "Yawn."

[/ QUOTE ]

While it is your prerogative to yawn, I am amazed that you would just blatantly dismiss something as relevant as a 5-10% discrepancy without checking it out. And unless you have details about his methodology, you have no proof that it was flawed. Do you have such evidence?

As an aside, I might point out that after reading all of these "who cares, rigging is not an issue, we haven't actually bothered to investigate but we know it's true" posts from so many people, I might be a little more inclined to believe that there is some rigging going on - the apathy about this issue might encourage a site to try something.

In any case, I have not decided myself that any sites are rigged, but checking it out shouldn't be too hard. All you have to do is scan for the most simple matchups - head to head, pre-flop, all in. Those should be easy enough to find and verify in a database of a few million hands, and the percentages are well known. Depending on the number of times this has happened (I would suspect at least a few thousand in a large enough sample size), the numbers should be big enough to detect rigging on that level, if it exists. Of course I don't have that database so I can't do it - that's why I was hoping someone here would want to!

Re: If poker sites are rigged, let\'s prove it.
 

[ QUOTE ]

Their experimental methodology is flawed. Each hand must be evaluated for its EV and then the total EV is compared to the total wins. They have used many approximations and the errors are likely large.

[/ QUOTE ]

This is EXACTLY why I was hoping someone else on this site would want to confirm their results. You could start with simple head to head matchups, all-in. See what the numbers say - it shouldn't be that hard. If those came out as expected then I would have 99.99% certainty that the site wasn't rigged.

Re: If poker sites are rigged, let\'s prove it.
 

[ QUOTE ]
Exactly! It's like trying to prove that god exists.

[/ QUOTE ]

It's nothing like trying to prove god exists. If there is rigging, it's in the hand histories, and can be detected statistically.

Re: If poker sites are rigged, let\'s prove it.
 

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
It looks like a pointless wild goose chase as you are trying to prove a negative.

[/ QUOTE ]

Exactly! It's like trying to prove that god exists.

[/ QUOTE ]

It's a negative thing if god exists? Wow...I'm not religious and think that's f'ed up.

Re: If poker sites are rigged, let\'s prove it.
 

[ QUOTE ]
There was a PhD who was supposedly an expert on gambling-theory who said that nobody can beat any poker game because of the rake.
He was quoted in articles about this as a 'gambling expert'.
He said that because of the rake, everybody just passes their money back and forth and loses $3 rake-chunks at a time.

He couldn't even comprehend that some players' skill is so much greater than other players that they can overcome the rake-disadvantage.


[/ QUOTE ]

He's right, in a closed senvironment that exists until all the money is gone to rake. The problem comes when you either open the environment (allow the influx of new money) OR end the environment "early".

The former (new money constantly coming in) is really what blows the argument up.

Rational folks like us know this, but it's easy to get stuck in the idea of a closed system (and even easier for lazy journalists to take the idea and run with it).

Re: If poker sites are rigged, let\'s prove it.
 

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Exactly! It's like trying to prove that god exists.

[/ QUOTE ]

It's nothing like trying to prove god exists. If there is rigging, it's in the hand histories, and can be detected statistically.

[/ QUOTE ]

It already has. You can simply look at the winning percentages and BB/100 amounts of the Sklansky hand rankings in PokerTracker. Good hands win big, medium hands win smaller amounts, poor hands lose money. The bottom line is that if rigging exists, it's so small as to be inconsequential to the average player. I (and others) have run database queries to see how often sets win when going to showdown, how often a flush hits, etc. The numbers agree very well with expectation. See the PokerTracker forum for more information - I think there were also some 2+2 posts a while back.

There are also other types of rigging. Things such as EV always adds up over the long run, but you're set to win a bit more often after a deposit and bit less often after a cashout. Or they could set heavy depositors to be losers - and their 60K hand sample wouldn't be significant to prove anything, because you don't have data points that indicates what gets rigged and what doesn't.

In short, it's a pointless exercise. If rigging exists sufficient to make the sites more money, then it would be easily detected via PokerTracker...if it's so small as to be undetectable in PT over large samples, then the sites have no incentive to do it (I argue that they don't have an incentive to do so anyway, especially with the tracking tools available).

And finally - twodimes type analysis doesn't account for the type of rigging where you constantly run into bad turn and river cards.

Also, solid players wins money, month after month The winners in almost all databases are tight aggressive, which fits with the math and theory of the game.

So - there is no rigging sufficient to be caught by any analysis that we could do, and since you can't prove a negative, it would useless in convincing the paranoid. You can't prove that THEIR account isn't rigged.

Re: If poker sites are rigged, let\'s prove it.
 

[ QUOTE ]

I (and others) have run database queries to see how often sets win when going to showdown, how often a flush hits, etc. The numbers agree very well with expectation. See the PokerTracker forum for more information - I think there were also some 2+2 posts a while back.

So - there is no rigging sufficient to be caught by any analysis that we could do, and since you can't prove a negative, it would useless in convincing the paranoid. You can't prove that THEIR account isn't rigged.

[/ QUOTE ]

Well, thank you for the first post that fully addressed my question. If I understand correctly, you have already done at least some of the type of analysis that I was asking about, and your results tell you that there is no statistically significant rigging going on. (That is the only type that matters, because as you say, if it's so small as to be undetectable then de facto it's not rigging.)

Given that you have done this analysis, what do you think about that link I provided in the start of this thread? That guy is saying a 5-10% discrepancy exists, which is huge. Would it be fair to say that you are confident enough in your personal analysis to be able to completely dismiss his claims? Just curious...

Re: If poker sites are rigged, let\'s prove it.
 

Basic statistical analysis of known hands would not be sufficient. No site is going to be moronic enough to blatantly rig without statistical correction / appropriation. If you want to determine if a site is rigged, look at the player's earn rates. Any rigging will drag the top down and the bottom up.

Now of course even if you prove, beyond a doubt, that the lower 50% of players at site 'x' have lose rates 150% less than site 'y' - you've still proven nothing. There could be a million reasons for it and you're only going to convince those that were already convinced of rigging.

There is currently one major site that shows some interesting abnormalities if you do the above test and compare it to the other sites.

Re: If poker sites are rigged, let\'s prove it.
 

FYI, the definitive analysis is this survey of a half million hands on PokerRoom.com.

https://www.pokerroom.com/main/page/games/cardStats

Re: If poker sites are rigged, let\'s prove it.
 

poker-sucks.com is a TOTAL JOKE!

Here is a quote from the poker-sucks.com regarding a review of Pacific Poker:

[ QUOTE ]
[Pacific Poker players] will suck you out constantly but should toss their money at you eventually. So even though they suck you can make good money here.

[/ QUOTE ]

Uh, "...suck you out constantly"??? What a joke?

Or, "...even though they suck you can make good money here." Apparently, this site is suggesting that you can win more against solid players (so you might want to play on other sites), but you can still "win good" against the sucky ones on Pacific.

Nice analysis poker-sucks.com!

I don't take anything they say seriously.

Re: If poker sites are rigged, let\'s prove it.
 

[ QUOTE ]
[Pacific Poker players] will suck you out constantly but should toss their money at you eventually. So even though they suck you can make good money here.

[/ QUOTE ]

It's true.

I'm married and at the beginning I would get "sucked out" all the time but eventually it just stopped happening.

Re: If poker sites are rigged, let\'s prove it.
 

Is this really what you joined this site to 'talk' about or are you just a pointless troll?

Is this the most pressing question on your mind about online poker? Because none of the pros and semi-pros here give it a second thought.

It has been done to death hundreds of times before- did you even try to use the search function? - you may as well go and argue about proving intelligent design in a geneticists forum.

There are so many sites, so many possible ways to 'rig' that what you are asking cannot be proved negatively.

I have played on 27 sites over the past 3 years. I am up on 25 of them and down on two - Codepoker (cash games) and Pacific (MTT's). Do I think this means 'something is wrong' at these two sites? No I don't. And I'll bet you by the end of next year I'll be up on those sites too..

Re: If poker sites are rigged, let\'s prove it.
 

OP, I'm surprised that you don't realize that the site you linked is a sham. Whoever created it simply decided that the subject matter would attract hits from Google searches and, in turn, make the site owner money from people clicking through his poker room banners.

I mean, come on. I saw a Pacific Poker ad on a page called "Pacific Poker Sucks." I saw the same for Absolute and others.

There is also a link there to a site selling "information" on how to make money off the online poker industry (presumably how to be an affiliate). It's the typical scam site format, just like you would see on a site selling a bot. Oh, and while the info is "worth" more than $450, he's selling it for $97. And "today only" it's on sale for $47.

Don't believe everything you read on the internets.

Re: If poker sites are rigged, let\'s prove it.
 

It's probably his own site - I mean 6 posts, come on..

Re: If poker sites are rigged, let\'s prove it.
 

[ QUOTE ]
And finally - twodimes type analysis doesn't account for the type of rigging where you constantly run into bad turn and river cards.

[/ QUOTE ]

It most certainly detects rigged turn and river cards. It's really the only way. All-in matchups are the only pure tests. All others are tainted by the action.

Analysis of PT databases without some homemade tools gets you only the most brain dead tests. Tests for things no reasonably smart site would rig.

Re: If poker sites are rigged, let\'s prove it.
 

[ QUOTE ]
FYI, the definitive analysis is this survey of a half million hands on PokerRoom.com.

https://www.pokerroom.com/main/page/games/cardStats

[/ QUOTE ]

A joke?

PokerRoom audits PokerRoom?

Re: If poker sites are rigged, let\'s prove it.
 

[ QUOTE ]
The strongest practical argument against rigging is simple dissemination of information - in order to rig a site, you have to get a programmer to do it, and that is typically someone who has no real incentive to keep quiet about it after he leaves his job. The fact that we haven't heard of any programmers talking about how they were personally directed to rig a site by this point is the strongest evidence against it, IMHO. But that is still just conjecture, and not proof.


[/ QUOTE ]

This is a good argument but not the strongest practical argument.

The strongest argument is that hands are in public domain. If the dealing is rigged any close to what this shady site claims it would be discovered long long ago. There are thousands of players on Stars with hundreds of thousands of hands in their PT databases. It's enough that one respected player would post about a deviation discovered you would see a very different reaction from online community. But that never hapenned. To the contrary there were quite a few posts with players posting their results that were as expected.

That is very close to a proof you can imagine for a negative.

Re: If poker sites are rigged, let\'s prove it.
 

Admittedly getting a little long in the tooth now, but Jim Easton's post stopped most of us worrying as much as you seem to be.

The sites all pretend they have secret methods to check for cheats, colluders and bots. Really, it's up to the players to report things and plays that appear to be unusual, and then the sites can look back at their records to check if the same guys play together all the time; team-raise others out of pots; fold strange hands; etc.

It's the same thing with the deal. Everyone has Pokertracker, and if anyone with a good track-record at Twoplustwo posted their records that showed out of the ordinary statistical deviations then that would alert others to recheck their records in the subject area.

This has never, I repeat, never happened.

That is good enough "proof" for 99% of the members that the deal is fair; and, reasonably so, imo.

Re: If poker sites are rigged, let\'s prove it.
 

I love the way he claims he has 1.4 million hands from Stars but he won't make them available.

Re: If poker sites are rigged, let\'s prove it.
 

I wonder why he cares whether or not the sites are rigged anyway when he's also advertising bots for sale. It's almost as if he's only in it for the money and has no scruples whatsoever.

Re: If poker sites are rigged, let\'s prove it.
 

[ QUOTE ]
I wonder why he cares whether or not the sites are rigged anyway when he's also advertising bots for sale. It's almost as if he's only in it for the money and has no scruples whatsoever.

[/ QUOTE ]

Maybe his bots are not working and he's angry about it.

Bad poker player = bad programmer?

Re: If poker sites are rigged, let\'s prove it.
 

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
FYI, the definitive analysis is this survey of a half million hands on PokerRoom.com.

https://www.pokerroom.com/main/page/games/cardStats

[/ QUOTE ]

A joke?

PokerRoom audits PokerRoom?

[/ QUOTE ]

PR's tournament-award system notwithstanding (:o), this is the type of data that confirms randomness in the deal of each game. PR's database has complete information (on all dealt cards, on board cards, on the stub), and thus its tests for randomness are going to be the most precise.

As for the question of intra-hand rigging, the best defense is one of complexity. Programming a random card to fall on the river is a straightforward exercise. Programming a "rigged card" is much more complex, particularly when you have to ensure that the overall results still meet the statistical requirements for randomness.

If you program a "rigged card" to fall on the river, you then have to store the value of that card somewhere to ensure that it's cancelled out by another "rigged card" falling somewhere else -- and then that card has to be stored and covered up, and so on. Ultimately, you'd need to rig another 51 river cards in order to cover up the first one.

Here's another question without a good answer: if deals are supposed to be rigged in order to protect bad players, why is it that the bad players are the ones complaining about poker being rigged?

The simplest conclusion (and therefore, by Occam's Razor, the correct one) is that people, by and large, are bad at math. Most people can correctly identify AA and 72o as the best and worst possible starting hands; but how many can firmly grasp that in a heads-up showdown between the two, AA loses 11 times out of 100? Let a bad player lose this showdown with AA, and he'll whine that online poker is rigged. In fact, the converse is true: the fact that AA doesn't automatically win lends credence to the theory that online poker is NOT rigged.

Someone (Lee Jones?) wrote an article a while ago, noting that the sheer quantity of hands being dealt online makes it possible to see extremely unlikely outcomes on a regular basis. At some table, somewhere, someone gets sucked out with runner-runner quads. Every day. Multiple times. It's statistically inevitable when you're dealing with so many hands.

For the sake of genuine research... I would like to see Stars or Party or someone strip the individual player names out of a billion hands and make those hand histories (the COMPLETE hand histories, with everyone's hole cards) publicly available. I think that would go a long way toward settling the question, even for the bad players.

Re: If poker sites are rigged, let\'s prove it.
 

Since the poker-sucks.com has published no raw data or detailed description of their methods, I see no reason to take them seriously. If they have actual evidence of rigging, they need to publish it. If they don't, then as far as I'm concerned, they're full of [censored].

Re: If poker sites are rigged, let\'s prove it.
 

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
FYI, the definitive analysis is this survey of a half million hands on PokerRoom.com.

https://www.pokerroom.com/main/page/games/cardStats

[/ QUOTE ]

A joke?

PokerRoom audits PokerRoom?

[/ QUOTE ]

PR's tournament-award system notwithstanding (:o), this is the type of data that confirms randomness in the deal of each game. PR's database has complete information (on all dealt cards, on board cards, on the stub), and thus its tests for randomness are going to be the most precise.


[/ QUOTE ]

Let's start by putting on our critical thinking caps, OK? Assume PR is rigging. Further assume they provide detailed hand analysis that shows total randomness. Every thing looks good.

Next case.

Now assume PR is clean. Further assume they provide detailed hand analysis that shows total randomness. Every thing looks good.

How do you tell the difference? Obviously you can not. PR can not audit PR in any meaningful way unless they are 100% stoooopid.
[ QUOTE ]

As for the question of intra-hand rigging, the best defense is one of complexity. Programming a random card to fall on the river is a straightforward exercise. Programming a "rigged card" is much more complex, particularly when you have to ensure that the overall results still meet the statistical requirements for randomness.

If you program a "rigged card" to fall on the river, you then have to store the value of that card somewhere to ensure that it's cancelled out by another "rigged card" falling somewhere else -- and then that card has to be stored and covered up, and so on. Ultimately, you'd need to rig another 51 river cards in order to cover up the first one.

[/ QUOTE ]

Here's how it might work. A is a winner B is new or a loser or otherwise favored and they are head's up. The flop comes 100% random. Now the software calls up T+R pairs randomly and picks the first pair that locks it for B. These are pseudo-random cards and it wouldn't be done except for a fraction of the time, maybe 10% of the hands. You will not catch this counting the frequency of various T+R cards.
[ QUOTE ]

For the sake of genuine research... I would like to see Stars or Party or someone strip the individual player names out of a billion hands and make those hand histories (the COMPLETE hand histories, with everyone's hole cards) publicly available. I think that would go a long way toward settling the question, even for the bad players.

[/ QUOTE ]

Won't happen. The database crowd would invest hundreds of hours looking to crack the deleted names. Also, why trust this stuff provided by a poker room? Same problem as above.

Re: If poker sites are rigged, let\'s prove it.
 

[ QUOTE ]

How do you tell the difference? Obviously you can not. PR can not audit PR in any meaningful way unless they are 100% stoooopid.

[/ QUOTE ]

True. That's why I wrote that this is the TYPE of data that needs to be made available. [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

[ QUOTE ]

Here's how it might work. A is a winner B is new or a loser or otherwise favored and they are head's up. The flop comes 100% random. Now the software calls up T+R pairs randomly and picks the first pair that locks it for B. These are pseudo-random cards and it wouldn't be done except for a fraction of the time, maybe 10% of the hands. You will not catch this counting the frequency of various T+R cards.


[/ QUOTE ]

For an individual hand, you're right. But over the course of millions of hands, better cards (read: aces, suited runners, etc) would appear more often than normal, while useless cards would appear less often. If you're not keeping track of what you've rigged, you can't balance out your statistical probabilities.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]

For the sake of genuine research... I would like to see Stars or Party or someone strip the individual player names out of a billion hands and make those hand histories (the COMPLETE hand histories, with everyone's hole cards) publicly available. I think that would go a long way toward settling the question, even for the bad players.

[/ QUOTE ]

Won't happen. The database crowd would invest hundreds of hours looking to crack the deleted names. Also, why trust this stuff provided by a poker room? Same problem as above.

[/ QUOTE ]

Instead of releasing a billion consecutive hands, release a billion random hands. Strip out the names and starting stack sizes. Encrypt the hand numbers. If there's no guarantee of sequentiality, the dataminers will be hard-pressed to create usable information.

Of course, if you think that the sites are going to provide you with bogus hand histories, then you should really put on your tinfoil hat and wait for the black helicopters to come get you. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img] At some point, you have to accept that the data you're looking at is genuine, or you'll drive yourself insane.

Re: If poker sites are rigged, let\'s prove it.
 

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
It looks like a pointless wild goose chase as you are trying to prove a negative.

[/ QUOTE ]

Exactly! It's like trying to prove that god exists.

[/ QUOTE ]

It's a negative thing if god exists? Wow...I'm not religious and think that's f'ed up.

[/ QUOTE ]

Not quite. Negative-lack of existence in that use of the word. Although God is neither provable or unprovable at the moment, so that post was off.

Example:

Can you prove Bigfoot exsists? Yes, find a living/dead Bigfoot.

Can you prove Bigfoot doesn't exist? No, you could be missing it or it is extinct but did exist.

That's the point. The negative (non-exist) is unprovable. Can you prove a site is rigged? Yes, numbers are off. Can you prove it's not? No, you might be missing something. (Not saying it's rigged)

Re: If poker sites are rigged, let\'s prove it.
 

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Can you prove it's not? No, you might be missing something.

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You can provide an instantaneous proof of site honesty if you inspect the underlying code and watch its installation. You're sure until you leave.

Re: If poker sites are rigged, let\'s prove it.
 

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Here's how it might work. A is a winner B is new or a loser or otherwise favored and they are head's up. The flop comes 100% random. Now the software calls up T+R pairs randomly and picks the first pair that locks it for B. These are pseudo-random cards and it wouldn't be done except for a fraction of the time, maybe 10% of the hands. You will not catch this counting the frequency of various T+R cards.



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For an individual hand, you're right. But over the course of millions of hands, better cards (read: aces, suited runners, etc) would appear more often than normal, while useless cards would appear less often. If you're not keeping track of what you've rigged, you can't balance out your statistical probabilities.


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This is evidence that you are likely not to well educated in statistics. Maybe I'm wrong, but you need to investigate this better before you dismiss it. And from what I've read of you here, you likely lack the statistics tool box to do so.

You're suggesting that the method I describe will leave some trace. I suggest that with ordinairy statistical methods you'll never see that trace in any hypothesis test.

Re: If poker sites are rigged, let\'s prove it.
 

Bottom line: If it's rigged, then it's rigged in my favor. Why should I be motivated to investigate the issue?

Re: If poker sites are rigged, let\'s prove it.
 

Yesterday, I pushed all in with KK. I got called by some idiot fish with TT. He got a T on the flop and beat me. Has anything like this ever happened to anyone else before? If so, please post about it here. If we can get enough examples like this one maybe we can prove something.