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

[trader01]

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?