Need sense knocking into me (I hope)

[Fuchida]

Never thought I would make an 'is online poker rigged?' type post, although this is slightly unusual in that I am not trying to convince everyone that online poker is rigged. I need everyone to convince me that it isn't [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

I have been pro for two years and have made a decent income every month. There have been ups and downs obviously but I haven't had a losing month in three years. Until recently, that is. I usually play anything from $600 - $2000 NL and multi-table 3-8 tables depending on the site and the limit. The last three months it is as if the doom switch has been thrown. The number of times I get my money in with the best hand and lose is approaching frightening proportions. Its getting so I know my opponents hand before the cards are revealed, based on what hand the river card would complete. Most of the time, my opponents have to be stupidly optimistic or horrible at maths to even be in the hands, which only makes it worse. This isnt a particular site though. My luck seems equally bad on Stars, Bodog, Mansion and Full Tilt.

I have even sat down and played 4000 hands of $100 NL on Stars over the last couple of days and still lost! As usual, its either money in with best hands or cold decks.

As you imagine, my mind has started to wander a little to the 'rigged' argument as the statistical chances of the combined beats I have been taking, many of them 2 outers and runner-runners (even flopped quads losing to a runner-runner royal flush on Mansion) are massively unlikely.

The usual argument I hear against the poker sites being rigged are that it wouldn't be in their interest and that poker tracker stats would show any discrepency. However, surely a problem for the sites is bad players losing their money. Rake income will be higher if the bad players stick around longer. To do that, they would have to suck out more. It sounds like Poker tracker would pick that up but I was a commercial programmer in a previous life and if I wanted to achieve the above, I would weight the chance of hitting miracle cards based on the size of the pot. I have noticed over the last three months that I do hit some cards but only when the pot is small, never when its large, or when my opponents have nothing anyway. I bet that if I ran a check on PT, I will be hitting straights and flushes about the right amount of time (as would some of my more dumb but lucky opponents) but I hit when the pots are small and the idiots always hit when the pots are large. Is there a way to find out from PT how often draws are hit by different players based on the pot size?

OK, I know I sound like a paranoid idiot but as you can imagine, winning solidly for two years and then losing steadily for three months is enough to make anyone start to see things [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img] I may be playing bad due to tilt but I am usually very good at self-diagnoses and I can't see any tilt effects except calling a little too much after a few beats close together. As soon as I pick up on that tendency, I quit for a while anyway. My stats seems the same as always, except the BB/100 column.

So anyone else finding the major sites a little more hostile than normal in terms of beats recently or is this completely my imagination?

I know what this forum is like so I await the flames, but that may be a good thing and snap me out of my current conerns.

Steve