The other day i flopped a mid set and the guy with TPTK pushed me all in and ended up getting runner runner for a FH. Since the villain had sucked out on several significant pots at this table he wasn't very well like and the whole table (excluding me) started berating him saying that he worked for the site. While he did only have like a 1.8% chance of winning that hand, and i have seen many hands like it, doesn't mean that the game is rigged.
many people fail to realize the importance of sample sizes of hand histories and our extremely selective memories. For example I can remember most of the extremely rare losses happening, date, time, table, opp, pot size etc. But I can't remember myself ever doing it...even though I know i've won in some of these situations too.
As far as the sample sizes go..i don't think most people realize how many hands they see online in comparison to playing live. A good dealer in a casino might deal 35hands per hour when taking into consideration shuffling, new seats, conflicts, chip exchanges etc. While playing online with 3 tables open (I usually play 6 max) I can see up to 200 hands per hour. The while the %s stay the same the chances that I see these small % hands play out is larger online because I simply play more hands online that I do in a casino. To compare this to a live tournament...just compare how many bad beats you saw at wsop main even feature tables in 04 compared to 05. I doubt you'll hear Jennifer Harman (losing FH to Str8 Flush [1 outer] on the 1st day)or Tim Phan (losing flopped trip to runner FH) saying that the wsop is trying to attract more fishies/newbies by allowing some to win and portraying that every avg. joe should invest 10K and has a shot at millions.
More on sample sizes, there is a guy who ran the numbers using 37K hands to see how random dealing really is. (
http://pokersafety.blogspot.com/2005...nds-dealt.html)
Here's some results:
Paired starters dealt: 2264 (5.979%)
Paired starters expected: 2227 (5.88%)
Each pair expected: 171 (0.452%)
A's dealt: 157 (0.415%)
K's dealt: 140 (0.370%)
Q's dealt: 184 (0.486%)
J's dealt: 168 (0.444%)
T's dealt: 183 (0.483%)
9's dealt: 167 (0.441%)
8's dealt: 185 (0.489%)
7's dealt: 182 (0.481%)
6's dealt: 192 (0.507%)
5's dealt: 178 (0.470%)
4's dealt: 186 (0.491%)
3's dealt: 162 (0.428%)
2's dealt: 180 (0.475%)
All this looks pretty good, and what you'd expect. There's a lot of room within only 37,000 hands for this to vary a good amount. But the numbers are all "in the ballpark" for being dealt from a random deck. Poor Tony ran pretty dry on AA and KK, but had more than expected QQ, TT, and others. We've all gone on rushes of cards and dry spells of cards.
Several Party Poker is Rigged theorists claim that the board creates flushes too often. I plan to address these theories later, but at first glance, the data compiled contradicts such speculation
Three cards on the flop make up a:
3 straight:293 (3.43%) expected: 272 (3.18%)
2 flush:4698 (54.97%) expected: 4710 (55.1%)
3 flush:463 (5.42%) expected: 446 (05.22%)
From this you can see that expected %s are close to what he compiled over 37K hands...and i can safely bet that if he reruns these stats when he's compiled a 100K hand history that the deviation from the expected %s will even be smaller.
In addition if you go to Paradise poker and check out the algorith used to random number generation (assuming you are at least high school stats educated) you see that this leaves very little room for cheating on the company's part. Also consider that Paradise poker is part of a publicly traded company that is subject to a lot of government scrutiny by SEC's British counterparts. Furthermore, most sites to have independent companies review their random dealing techniques e.g. Paradise Poker hired PriceWaterHouseCoopers to review their dealing techniques and stats. It is worth noting that they also do business with Paradise Poker in other areas as well. For example, PWC was the advisory firm serving Paradise Poker on their sale to Sportingbet Plc. While this might present a small potential for conflict of interest. I doubt a company like PWC is going to ruin its reputation for an online cardroom while having existing contracts with huge corps. Some also argue that independent consultancies like PWC don't have the technical knowhow to ensure dealing fairness. Well I work for KPMG and I can safely say that any of the Big 4 Consultancies have experts to deal with safety software for nuclear power companies so they can definitely deal with this issue.
Just remember...online you see more hands, thus experience more beats, and you multiply these beats in your head to make it seem like the game is rigger.