How to rig on-line poker?

[Paul2432]

It has been a contention of mine for a while that the fact that no one has proven on-line poker is rigged is strong evidence that it is not rigged. This contention relies on two assumptions:

1) That it is not possible to rig on-line in a way that would be undetectable to a competent observer with hundreds of thousands of hand histories.

2) Competent observers with hundreds of thousands of hand histories have tried to prove on-line poker is rigged.

I feel more strongly about assumption (2) than assumption (1). My question then is, can on-line poker be rigged in such a way that it would be undetectable? If so, how would that be done?

Paul

[magiluke]

I don't see why they would want to rig the game anyway. Real casinos make plenty of money off of poker, and I'm sure the online poker sites do too.

Besides, how would they go about rigging the game anyway? Give people a better chance at getting high cards so there is more action? I, for one, know that they aren't doing that (I see plenty of 2's and 3's).

That seems to be the only thing that they can do, is give many people better hands to induce bigger pots, and therefore bigger rakes. That doesn't even work in tourneys.

[Iceman]

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That seems to be the only thing that they can do, is give many people better hands to induce bigger pots, and therefore bigger rakes. That doesn't even work in tourneys.

[/ QUOTE ]

Even if they could artificially deal more big hands, they wouldn't want to, since hands with lots of action are much slower and they would collect less rake overall.

[BettyBoopAA]

I believe that has been covered before but the rational for wanting to rig on-line poker is to make sure they continue to collect maximum rake. Online poker is filled with bad players who would go away and play no rake unless the game was rigged to help the bad players win more than they normally would. This could be done by actions flops and miracle rivers. I'm not saying I believe this, but that's the argument.

[lionguy]

The problem I have is if a team is on -- and they are Instant Messaging back and forth. Knowing what two or three people at a table have is a huge advantage

[Viscant]

Player teaming has been done before and is the easiest way to cheat. I believe that Stars just caught a case of collusion not too long ago. This is the best way to rig a game of poker. If 2 (or more) players are raising through the roof and you're caught between, unless you have the nuts or no brain, you're going to kick it in. The way the scam goes is, they convince you to lay down and on the river one folds to the other or on the chance that one of them actually has a hand, they get to show down a winner.

Now, theorize for a second that this scam is done by the sites themselves. That the site has plants to come on and through collusion (hell if we're theorizing, let's say it's even a step higher...SMART collusion while knowing hands on the board) and in that way, they can cheat.

That's probably the most likely scenario for sites cheating. The theory of "action flops" and miracle river bad beats would have been proven statistically by now were there any truth to it.

For the record I believe in no way that any sites are cheating. It just makes no sense to do so, when being caught would absolutely filet you.

[mmcd]

I don't see why they would want to rig the game anyway.

Think of how many absolutely atrocious players you have seen on Party.

Now of all of those players, how long do you think it will take the "average" one to go broke?

(Some of the players at the 15/30 level are so bad that if they played semi-full time for the whole year I'm sure they'd lose at least 500k)

They would want to rig the game to keep bad players in action longer, giving them more players overall (many of whom are bad), thereby attracting even more players to the site...

I'm not saying this is happening or anything, just that the motivation is there.

[magiluke]

I can see where you are going with that (Even though I don't play on Party), but how does a poker site know who to rig it for? How do they tell who the "bad" players are? Do they go by their bankroll? Do they keep exhaustive, Poker Tracker caliber stats on everyone? What if the person they were going to give a miracle river to folds, do they switch the cards and give the game to someone else?

[mmcd]

If I were put in charge of rigging a site like this, I'd simply have hands that have 5 outs or less hit more frequently than they should. No need to figure out who's good and who's bad or any of that nonsense. Bad players are more likely to stick around with nonsense "draws" so making those type of hands hit more often would obviously benefit bad players and as a result they'd lose less than they should and stick around longer.

[SA125]

I think it'd be pretty easy for a program of a shuffler to be coded to keep players on a site and still have some win more than others. It would be programmed to deal each player winning hands in cycles that change so as not to be obvious.

Take a fixed amount, say 100 hands, and deal each player X amount of winners. Then just change the amount on a programmed basis to provide swings.

I'm not saying it's rigged. All I'm saying is that we send rockets to the moon, but couldn't do that? If they did that, everyone would get a definite amount of winning hands, regardless of how bad they were, and they'd be able to keep playing.

To say it's impossible to do because of the volume of players, hands, tables, etc, just look at this. Look at the amount of players, thousands and thousands, who move from table to table, game to game and their amount on deposit changes instantly with them, no matter what. If you and your money can be tracked so accurately and precisely like that, the hands that you're dealt couldn't be?

There seems to be a catch-22 with online and live. On the one hand, online will say that you can't compare the two because of the amount of hands played is so much more online. Yet when talking about true win rates, 20K is scoffed at. 50-80K is the minimum amount of hands needed. If that's the case, how long would a pro have to play live before they can accurately determine if they're true winners or not? It doesn't make sense.

I believe there's enough people who swear it's legit and making loads of money from it that proves it doesn't cheat you. But if they wanted to program it to keep everyone in, I think it could be easily done.