[Dima2000123]

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I don't know if sites are rigged or not, but I'm hoping someone more intelligent than myself can explain it to me.

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I've already explained it using a very simple Stats 101 approach, and received some very bad replies. Let me explain one more time.

FOR ANY PROCESS WHICH INTERFERES WITH THE SHUFFLE OF THE DECK, that is, where the 52 cards that come out are not random, and interferes some non-neglible amount of time (that is, more than a few times), you are going to see results. How?

Imagine that we are playing a coin flipping game. After 100 million flips of the coin, what interval will it come in over 99.999% of the time? Between .5 - e and .5 + e percent heads, where e = 0.00022086 . That is between 49.9977% and 50.0221%, 99999/100000 of the time.

So say you play your friend Pokerstars and he gets a result of 50.023% percent heads. Then you will notice, because this will be a "significant" result. If you were betting tails, he has a win like that or better much less than 1/200000 of the time.

You can't use tampering together with "averaging" techniques because tampering one statistic ruins other statistics. You can't store data on people's rushes and change river cards both on the good side and then on the bad side so that they average to the same deck, because it is detectable. And it becomes pointless if you are going to make the deck tend toward the mean anyways.

Now notice that places like PokerStars have dealt over 12 billion (12000 million) hands.

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I'm not arguing that poker sites are cheating, but I don't see how your conclusion must be true from a statistical perspective.

Let's say that that some poker site has 1,326 pre-set fixed decks, corresponding to each combination of hole cards. The poker site somehow identifies the player they want to shaft, and keep randomly dealing him one of the 1,326 fixed decks. Obviously not every one of those 1,326 fixed decks would be a cold one, since most of those decks would not entice the mark to get into the pot. However, once he gets a playable hand, like a pocket pair, he'll get into the pot, and of course run his set against someone's higher set.

How do you use PT analysis to spot this kind of hypothetical deck fixing? The mark keeps getting fixed decks, there is no random shuffling at all, and yet the probability of getting any two hole cards is not affected. I don't think you can figure out the probability of a cooler happening to you post-flop, because that depends a lot on how other players play, so there is no theoretical number to compare against.