Is there a website with information on why internet poker isnt rigged

[Sponger15SB]

Wouldn't it be nice if there was something out there that you could reference with like a FAQ about common questions that are answered and why people think this way.

Like they could have "why does my KK lose to AA all the time" and then the reasons why this doesnt actually happened and why you still believe this are laid out in front of you

[imported_CaseClosed326]

Even if there was a site like this would anyone even read it? No, because people who asks these questions can't read. If they could read, they would not go to the FAQ. They can't trust something like that, it might be rigged.

[CountDuckula]

I sometimes find myself tilting at that particular windmill. More often these days, though, I just shake my head and move on. If people are determined to believe that any given online site is rigged, the mere possibility that it could be is sufficient proof to them that it is. Yeah, it could be. I think it would be incredibly stupid to try it, but people do indeed do stupid things at times. But I'm also well aware of the ability of the human mind to fabricate patterns out of randomness, and believe that it's cracked a secret, despite any evidence to the contrary. The conspiracy theorists give much more weight to any hands that support their theories than they do to those that don't. My feeling is, if you think it's rigged, quit playing online.

-Mike

[Freudian]

Don't know about a site, but I think I have read some column (perhaps by Roy Cooke in Cardplayer) about why it wouldn't make any sense for the pokerroom to rig the games.

I'm assuming you ask because you want something to show to someone.

[Freudian]

[ QUOTE ]
I sometimes find myself tilting at that particular windmill. More often these days, though, I just shake my head and move on. If people are determined to believe that any given online site is rigged, the mere possibility that it could be is sufficient proof to them that it is. Yeah, it could be. I think it would be incredibly stupid to try it, but people do indeed do stupid things at times. But I'm also well aware of the ability of the human mind to fabricate patterns out of randomness, and believe that it's cracked a secret, despite any evidence to the contrary. The conspiracy theorists give much more weight to any hands that support their theories than they do to those that don't. My feeling is, if you think it's rigged, quit playing online.

-Mike

[/ QUOTE ]

I think a website explaining variance is more useful than a website explaining why pokerrooms aren't rigged.

Because sometimes it really feels like a giant conspiracy when you play.

[benfranklin]

[ QUOTE ]
Wouldn't it be nice if there was something out there that you could reference with like a FAQ about common questions that are answered and why people think this way.



[/ QUOTE ]

The big problem with this is that proving internet sites are not rigged is a case of proving a negative proposition, which is usually difficult and often impossible. It is conceptually easy to prove a positive proposition: you only have to find one example of "X", and you have proven that "X" exists. On the other hand, no matter how often and how hard you look for "Y" and don't find it, you have not proven that "Y" does not exist. (That is why our legal system is based on the presumption of innocence. Proving someone guilty is much easier conceptually than for you to prove that you are not guilty.)



[ QUOTE ]
Like they could have "why does my KK lose to AA all the time" and then the reasons why this doesnt actually happened and why you still believe this are laid out in front of you

[/ QUOTE ]

The best explanation of this was a post by Paul Phillips some time back on RGP:


[ QUOTE ]
Some of you know that in a past life I was a programmer and a manager
thereof. In mid-1997 our company acquired an online game site called
playsite that had a decent population of people playing classic games,
one of which was backgammon. The codebase was something of a mess though,
so we undertook a complete rewrite and released it in early 1998.


After we released the new code, we began receiving email from people
and hearing chat online that there were unusually many doubles being
rolled in the backgammon games. That sounded unlikely but I took a
look into the code, and it was as straightforward as could be, no room
for a wacky error. The server picked two random numbers from 1 to 6
in the normal java fashion.


The java random call is a simple wrapper around the C library function.
We were seeding it in the normal ways. Everything was fine. But the
complaints were unrelenting, so we took increasingly extreme measures
trying to figure out what was going on. First we incorporated a java
RNG to avoid the C library. When this didn't "help", we started
logging all the die throws and did statistical analysis on tens of
thousands of logged rolls.


What we found was that doubles were being rolled at precisely the rate
one would expect. There was absolutely nothing surprising in the stats.
We communicated this to the complaining players, but it still didn't do
any good. You could go into a backgammon lobby anytime and you'd
rarely have to wait more than a couple minutes before chat would emerge
that "everyone knew" that too many doubles were being rolled. It had
entered the realm of known facts, and there was no getting around it.


We closed the dozens of filed bug reports involving our loaded dice and
moved on with our lives, but I've never forgotten the certainty with which
people asserted that our dice were not rolling right. And the point, of
course, is how similarly that certainty is echoed here when people talk
about online poker being rigged for this or that result.


I see three major factors contributing to this misplaced certainty.
The three are the same whether we're looking at original vs. rewritten
playsite, or B&M poker vs. online poker. Much of this has been
written before by myself and others, but I include it here to help
illustrate how similar the backgammon and online poker situations are.


1) SPEED. We build an unconscious model of how often noticeable events
take place, but it's largely rooted in time, not in number of events.
When the number of events per unit time increases (the rewritten playsite
was of course faster, just as online poker is faster than B&M) then we
are surprised to observe more noticeable events.


2) SELECTION BIAS. We notice quads. We notice doubles. We feel like
we know how often they happen because we know that we notice them, but we
do not know how often unnoticeable events take place. We therefore lack
the necessary data to do analysis, but we have so much faith in our brains
as pattern recognition machines, we try it anyway.


3) MEMETICS. This is in some ways the biggest one. When you're
surrounded by people who have become convinced that something is true,
it's difficult not to start believing it's true yourself. Online chat
environments make it very easy for people to share their feelings about
the injustice of the randomness, and it's such a seductive idea anyway,
it's not hard for it to gain followers. Read "The Tipping Point" for more.


In closing, here is one quote I found in my old email. I wish I had
the whole file so you could see how widespread the certainty was.


Message: your dice are throwing doubles again---CALIBRATE THEM! get
your act together


A message to online poker sites: Your decks are dealing bad beats
again. CALIBRATE THEM!


--
Paul Phillips | Gir! Remember with your brains... you must
Everyman | behave like a human dog monster.
Empiricist | -- Zim
i pull his palp! |----------* http://www.improving.org/paulp/ *----------


[/ QUOTE ]

[PygmyHero]

I'm pretty sure this is the article (http://www.cardplayer.com/poker_magazine/archives/showarticle.php?a_id=14638) that Freudian is referring to.

There was a thread about this a little while back, but I wasn't able to find it in a cursory search. Definitely within the past month, probably within the last two weeks. IIRC Lorinda started the thread, but I could be wrong about that.

[CountDuckula]

[ QUOTE ]
I think a website explaining variance is more useful than a website explaining why pokerrooms aren't rigged.

Because sometimes it really feels like a giant conspiracy when you play.

[/ QUOTE ]

Yeah, I know. The problem is, most of the sites I was able to find via a quick Google are way too academic and dry for the average player to read. Most people are perfectly happy with a seat-of-the-pants idea of probability, and think that if 2 1:100 chances show up in sequence (or heck, maybe even 1:20), something is wrong. And they'll blithely throw out odds without respect to reality; they might assert that someone with a pair of 2s vs. a pair of As who catches a 2 to crack them hit a 1:1,000 shot, and start yelling, "Action flop!"

-Mike

[TheHip41]

It seems that good players don't complain that it's rigged. And at this point, if it is rigged, then keep rigging it, I need another TV /images/graemlins/grin.gif