Sigh: Online Poker Still Isn't Rigged

Someone just posted a comment on my 2005 post about why online poker is not rigged and I think it brings up some interesting points I haven’t necessarily covered before. So instead of responding where it will be buried in a 5 year old post, I’ll respond to “duh” here.

Warning a lot of sarcasim The numbers you see in this post are mostly fictional but I hope u get my drift @ gavin

You actually believe pokersites are happy with 1 mil as opposed to 100 mill. OK sure I believe you, but only because you said it.

My common sence tells me that without fishes you dont have a pokersite or at least not one that makes money. All you have are some regs playing other regs obviously a pokersite is more than happy with that.LOL

Because on any of the big sites, playing cashgames with all regs at your table is why we play poker. We dont want to play weaker bad players, rather loose/flip money with regs.

The only way a pokersite can keep fish not losing their entire savings, mortgage etc etc to regs is to rig the deck. I mean cmon where’s your common sense, luck plays a part thats why regs lose too often, suuuuure. Its funny though that these fishes never seem to be lucky when playing live, yes they might win a few hands down to luck but beat me or shall I say kill me the way they do online NEVER.

Actually, it wasn’t until recently that many card rooms figured out that you make money on the fish, not the sharks. In fact, some rooms still haven’t figured that out. I guess I was fortunate to work at online poker rooms who got it very early but I still talk to people who work at poker rooms and various affiliates and they still don’t seem to understand how the poker ecosystem works.

So, if you’re telling me people too dumb to figure out how the poker money flows through the system would then be smart enough to rig the game in favor of the fish, I find that rather hard to accept.

And even though we’ve seen countless examples of poker rooms letting serious bugs slip through the system (awarding the pot to the wrong player, security/encryption flaws, etc) how is it that nobody has been caught rigging the game for the fish? Billions and billions of hands dealt and not a single person has been able to find any abnormalities.

In fact, when I worked at Party we were contacted by a world famous economist who wanted access to a few billion hand histories because he wanted to prove that poker was a skill game. We were in the process of discussing details when another big name poker room stepped in and offered to supply the data. Now, why would two poker rooms get into a pissing contest over supplying their hand histories if they were rigging the game?

And before anybody talks about UltimateBet and Absolute, they were not rigging the games to favor one player over another. They were allowing players to cheat. That’s different from rigging the game. The outcomes were not changed to favor any player. They did have a backdoor that allowed players to see their opponent’s hole cards but the cards were still dealt as they normally would.

It’s not impossible to rig the game but a lot harder than most people think. Maybe there is some no-name poker room rigging the games but the larger the room (in terms of players) the less likely it is.

I litterally dont stand a chance when playing online agaisnt the weakest of players. Why is it that they always wake up with a hand, always and i mean always have what they are drawing to if a 3 flush comes and they bet they show suited connectors, if the board pairs and they bet the river its a boat. When you’ve seen as many hands as i have(over a mill)you cant help but to become suspicous.

What I think of online bingo I mean poker, its TV poker all I seem to see are huge hands, isnt it suppose to be hard to hit a pair let alone constant sets, straights and flushes. Always one hand over an other. Iam scared to get it in with aces because I know im only a coinflip vs any 2. Live im licking my chops as I know its hard to make something. Online though pokersites wants me to have aces becuase the fish cant fold k8o to an allin bet.

Actually, one mistake I see very often with players is that they think they can play the same level online as in a live casino. At The Hustler in Los Angeles I had no problem sitting down at the $25/$50 fixed limit. In fact, I would normally crush the game. But there’s no way I could play at that limit online. The highest limit online where I showed a profit (and not even a healthy profit) was $10/$20.

Why do sites rig the deck this way, well for obvious reasons. What I see a lot of people overlook is the fact that by doing this not only do fish continue playing on their site, the site makes a hell of lot more money than one would think. Take Stars as an example 300k players, 10% regs and 90% fish. If fish stop playing Stars are left with 30k regs might aswell stop doing business as its not profitable for them no longer.

That’s actually a pretty interesting point. It’s true that about 90% of poker players are net losers. So isn’t it funny that so many people consider themselves winning players? I’ve never met anybody who’s ever admitted to being a losing player.

You know where I’ve also seen that? When I was a stockbroker. I never met a client who lost money in the stock market. I never met anybody who ever admitted to losing money in the 1987 market crash. None. Everybody felt the market was too high and pulled out just before the crash.

I even had guys who would trade with me and tell me they were up trading for the month and I would go over their trades and they were down. Way down.

The vast majority of people who tell you they’re winning players are liars.

Face it companies like this are dependant on their fishes, if they dont rig the deck fishes will lose everything to the regs, smarten up and leave. Stars cant afford not to rig the deck.

Or they could spend millions upon millions on marketing.

This whole argument is so flawed it’s hard to know where to start. This argument only works if one believes that the size of the poker market is fixed and finite. But we know that’s not true. One has only to look at Poker Scout to see that the overall market size is still increasing.

To the people that do not believe that unfair, greedy, shitty, no morals or standards people exist who blatantly steal your deposits(the pokerroom owners etc etc)prob the mafia. I say I too believe in fairytales and Superman is real. Heck even God almighty himself came to me and told me himself that I am the only person that can prove he exists.

Anywayz the bottom line is online poker cant be rigged because, they just wouldnt do it. If you can make 10 mill a year, why on earth would you want to make 10 billion a year. You just wouldnt risk it to make that little bit more.LOLLLL

Again, another faulty argument. First off, many of these companies are publicly traded. PartyGaming, 888, etc would all have a hard time explaining a sudden windfall. Likewise, any company who wasn’t rigging the games would be screaming bloody murder because they know what your expected ROI is.

That doesn’t mean that there isn’t some shady dude sitting in a shack in Costa Rica ripping people off but why would you pick poker? You can use hand histories to prove that a game is rigged. Why not casino? People will pump money into a slot machine forever regardless of the payout. And there’s no hand histories. Or blackjack. Or any game where the odds are in the houses favor.

One of the other major flaws in this argument is there are so many legitimate ways the poker room can make more money. Shortening the time to act by 1 second would translate into millions for PokerStars. They can change how the rake is calculated (e.g. instead of .10 on every $1 make it .01 on over .10). I could list at least 50 completely legitimate things a poker room could do that would translate into huge profits.

The beats/cold decks etc etc seems so surreal to everyone except a handfull of posters. I went through a number of blogs that have this discussion, what i have realized is that the people that say it isnt rigged are always in the minority.

And after having had this conversation more times than you’ve read blog posts about it I have yet to see a single person offer any proof.

Or let’s go back to the 90% fish to 10% “regs” numbers. If only 10% of the players are winning players and they’re the ones getting cold decked, why would the majority of people claim that it’s rigged? Are the fish complaining because they’re winning too much?

Wouldn’t it be faaaaaar more likely that there are a lot of players who aren’t as good as they think they are and use the crutch of the site being rigged to explain why they can’t beat the game?

And finally if I had a fair deal I probably would have been up more than triple to what im up now( yes iam a winning player who thinks online is rigged to fck).

Like I’ve said before, I’ve never met someone who thinks online poker is rigged who admits to being a losing player. Yet, of all of the professional players I know, all the way from 12-tabling micro-limits grinders to high stakes players, none of them think it’s rigged.

Taking away an allin pot of you is worth double, if I start with 100 and ship 20 allin and win i make 120 if i lose im on 80 difference in my roll is 40. Some people tend to forget this and say well i lost 1 buyin, actually you lost 2 buyins.

I guess that’s one way to look at it if you were a 100% favorite to win and still ended up losing. I mean, this logic just sounds so whacky. It assumes that you are guaranteed to win when you get your money in ahead but you also get full credit when you get your money in behind and suck out.