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The other thing about the store vs. poker is the "identifiable value." That is, if the store only has bad vegetables, you'd know they were bad, and you would go somewhere else. In poker, that's not really the case. You expect to have some bad runs and unlucky breaks. Because there is no "standard" unlucky streak or whatever, players have less (indeed, probably zero) ability to determine that you are not getting good quality from the provider, especially if the modifications are so tiny.

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Using this logic I could argue that the fish will inevitably keep redepositing because they would rather chalk up their losses to bad luck than admit they suck at poker.

Now I do believe that it is possible for internet poker to be rigged. I don't think they would do it because of the easy access their consumers have to the data(pokertracker). Tons of us around here have 100k+ hand history DBs that could easily oust the rigged sites.

If the game were rigged I don't see how it would help the fish at all. If they make it so gutshots, 3 outers, flush draws, and straight draws come more frequently it benefits the fish as well as the sharks negating the motive for rigging the game to begin with.

To have the fish be the sole beneficiaries the poker sites would have to track the play of each person at each table and then somehow alter the cards that come out once the hand has started based upon if it is fish vs fish shark vs shark fish vs shark or whatever. This becomes increasingly hard to do as pots become multiway. I mean who gets the help if there are 2 fish and a shark on a flop of KJ2 where the shark has AK, fish1 has AJ, and fish2 has AQ?

I feel that actually implementing a rigged game that benefits the fish is incredibly difficult to do ESPECIALLY given the fact that they are being closely monitored by the sharks who are keeping large databases of hands.

In fact, why don't we settle this once and for all. We pool our hand history databases so that we have millions of hands logged and then find a statistician to analyze it.