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#11
12-31-2006, 02:57 AM
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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! 
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#12
12-31-2006, 03:00 AM
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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.
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#13
12-31-2006, 03:02 AM
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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.
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#14
12-31-2006, 03:08 AM
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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.
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#15
12-31-2006, 03:22 AM
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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).
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#16
12-31-2006, 03:45 AM
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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.
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#17
12-31-2006, 04:13 AM
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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...
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#18
12-31-2006, 04:30 AM
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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.
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#19
12-31-2006, 04:56 AM
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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
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#20
12-31-2006, 05:42 AM
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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.
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