[shummie]

I like the argument that it is so profitable having a legit online poker room that business owners would never dare of trying to cheat the players. This makes a lot of sense to me.

However, I do see some weight to the argument "if you could rig the RNG to keep players playing longer, and no one would notice, why wouldn't you?" acompanied with "casinos have cheated before."
I have another argument against the idea that online poker rooms cheat:

Besides thinking that online card room owners wouldn't want to ruin such a sweet deal, as a person with a degree in Computer Science I think it would be a dificult engineering problem to rig a RNG in the ways that are suggested. There are numerous problems that would have to be solved. How do you handle a table with 10 new players? How do you handle a table with 10 old players? How do you keep the non-random RNG from appearing non-random (and I mean how do you hide the non-randomness from "clown-scientists" doing real studies on the statistics or serious players with 100k+ hands in Poker Tracker...not the people who are usually "whining" on message boards)?

My initial thought (not backed up by any research or testing) is that it would take a lot of computational and human effort to create a good rigged RNG for online poker. Maybe it isn't though. If I get some free time, I might think about this some more. Maybe I'll try to simulate some rigging of RNG. Maybe I can come up with a good algorithm that I might be able to sell to some of the shadier online card rooms.

FYI, I'm only half-kidding about this...

I'll let y'all know how things come along with this research.

- Jason