Yet another online poker rigged thread

[Fuchida]

This is a slightly unusual 'online poker is rigged' thread in that I am hoping for a battering from the forum that is sufficient to knock some sense back into me.

I am a part time but winning player, playing mainly Party and Bodog, and have consistently won several thousand each month for the last few months (about 30k this year so far). My intention is to go full time in August. I may crash and burn but I intend giving it my best shot and I will never know unless I try. I play mainly 3 or 4 NL Holdem tables, varying from $200 to $1000 buy-ins. Anyway, on to the rigged part.

I have had ups and downs, ranging from a 2k loss in one day to a 3k win and even several consecutive days of losses but the trend for the last 18 months has always been upwards. I have always been very sceptical of claims that sites were rigged, seeing any losses as natural fluctations.

Suddenly, three weeks ago it seemed I hit a brick wall. The losses break down into three major groups.

1) Every time I end up all in with the best hand I lose. Not just on the odd occasion but one after another and several that require runner-runner to lose. 2-3 card outers on the river are automatic hits. The bad beats are coming so thick and fast that I am now expecting to lose.

2) Cold decks happens several times per session. Set over set, losing with the best possible full house to quads, A high flush to straight flush, etc. Had about twenty of these in three days last week. I even began writing each one down, creating a diary of increasing disbelief.

3) Idiots (or apparent idiots) are calling stupidly and getting hitting almost every time. Just yesterday I had someone calling a pot size bet on the flop with 53 vs KJ4 then another vs the 6 on the turn and of course getting the 2 on the river. Calling with nothing but back door flush draws is common and runner runner flushes seem inevitable.

I have checked my play in poker tracker to ensure my percentages have not changed and I have even began recording every loss that I make on a per hand basis to identify any patterns. The vast majority of the losses are cold decks or outdraws though and I cannot see how to avoid those. However, an element of losses due to bad play are creeping in due to the tilt factor. Nothing ridiculous but the occasional pre-flop call with a speculative hand out of position or an optimistic call based on hopeful implied odds or perhaps a call on the end with a 'surely I can't have been outdrawn again' attitude when the betting pattern says I am beat. I am trying to prevent this small amount of tilt but I am only human.

Assuming I am playing reasonably and there is not some major flaw that has crept into my game that I can't see, then it comes down to three possibilities

1) I am just suddenly and incredibly unlucky. I could handle the usual 4-1 or 5-1 outdraws. Aces lose to smaller pairs all the time and idiots call with poor odds and hit their draws all the time. That is usual poker fare. However, when people are hitting runner runner outs at 20-1, 30-1, etc and it is happening several times a session for three weeks I am beginning to wonder. As an experiment I went on Ultimate Bet yesterday and everything instantly returned to normal. Occasional outdraw but I won at my normal rate. Went back on Party last night and I was Mr unlucky again. Couldn't hit a flop if it was driving past and I ran out in front of it. QQ beaten by runner runner 87 on turn and river by someone who called with an inside straight draw on flop. Large pre-flop raise with AKs. Called by 65o. Flop 655 and A on turn after flop checked. K9s on blind vs J4. I flopped a flush vs his top pair. Runner runner 4 4 on turn and river, etc. Back on UB this afternoon. Back to normal and won a thousand. Party this evening. Killed again. Am I just that selectively unlucky??

2) Party out to get me is possibility number 2. Why and how are my questions? The why may be because I take advantage of their points system by loading $500 per day to get the 1000 point reward. When I get up to $15k and 30,000 points, I wait 7 days, take it all off and repeat. A lot easier than playing hands but might be considered an exploit by party. Tenuous I know but paranoia is setting in. Another reason may be that party needs to keep the money circulating to prevent the fish losing all their money and leaving permanantly so letting the idiots win may be good for business. As to the how, I know that hand histories show that AA beats KK the right amount of times and draws only hit the right amount of times, etc but Party wouldn't be that obvious anyway. If the cards are dealt in the appropriate way, players can still be sucked in by doing the right thing. Its those cold deck situations that really concern me. The runner runner outdraws need a combination of deck-stacking and an idiot to call without the odds which seems unlikely unless you like possibility #3. However, if Party choose to penalise only certain players for some reason, the skewed number of outdraws would vanish in the great mass of stats. I could show my own hand histories for recent days but I would of course be told that my sample is much too small (and it is). Also, if Party isn't out to get me, why does reality appear to resume normal operation whenever I play on ultimate bet.

3) Possibility #3 is that other players know what cards are coming out. This would either be through hacking of servers without Party's knowledge or someone with a slightly improved version of the official client software. Yes, I know that sounds incredibly unlikely but I am paranoid remember. It would explain the calling of pot size bets on flop and turn when you need runner runner to win, which has happened an amazing number of times in the last three weeks.

Evidence I hear you cry! Where is your evidence for these ridiculous claims? The only evidence I have is 18 months of winning poker followed by the poker equivalent of the Ten Plagues of Egypt. Perhaps there are some poker playing Jewish tribes locked in the house somewhere and I need to let them go. Maybe I am expected to sacrifice my first born to the poker gods like Abraham did (although the bible reported it slightly differently as I recall).

Anyway, I digress.

Please heap scorn upon my poor, misguided beliefs and convince me that poker sites aren't fixed in any way and that you have all had months like this one and I should just pull myself together, get on with it and stop complaining about a little bad luck (well, massive amounts of bad luck actually).

I will be on Ultimate Bet in the meantime.

Fuchida

[bandfan]

variance?

[EliteNinja]

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variance?

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luck!

[Fuchida]

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variance?

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Its certainly that [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

Its just after 18 months of 'normal' variance I get this sudden huge hole in the road. If a few people come on here and tell me that's normal and I have just been lucky not to have had this happen sooner, I will probably feel better about it. From August poker will be paying the mortgage (I hope) so I need my recent paranoia sorting out fairly quickly [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

Fuchida

[silkyslim]

sounds like you got nervous because poker will be your only source of income.

[Fuchida]

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sounds like you got nervous because poker will be your only source of income.

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I think that is probably true but I can't see any change in my play and I have done a LOT of analysis. In the last few days every dollar lost is being accounted for and the reason for losing it. (Unnecessary bluffs and bad calls account for some of it but the vast majority is after getting my money in with the best hands or apparently doing the right thing and getting burned.

I may be playing badly without realising it but I am running through the hands with poker playing friends and they would have acted similarly. Also, why am I doing fine on UB and atrociously on Party when I appear to be playing in the same way?

I suppose one possibility is that on UB the standard seems a little higher so players are less likely to call with draws and bad odds but I haven't experienced the same amount of cold decks.

Fuchida

[Voltron87]

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sounds like you got nervous because poker will be your only source of income.

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I think that is probably true but I can't see any change in my play and I have done a LOT of analysis. In the last few days every dollar lost is being accounted for and the reason for losing it. (Unnecessary bluffs and bad calls account for some of it but the vast majority is after getting my money in with the best hands or apparently doing the right thing and getting burned.

I may be playing badly without realising it but I am running through the hands with poker playing friends and they would have acted similarly. Also, why am I doing fine on UB and atrociously on Party when I appear to be playing in the same way?

I suppose one possibility is that on UB the standard seems a little higher so players are less likely to call with draws and bad odds but I haven't experienced the same amount of cold decks.

Fuchida

[/ QUOTE ]

online poker is not rigged, it's called variance, and you talk about all your analysis but you have no numbers to back it up. you're on tilt and your mind is seeing things that don't exist.

[Orpheus]

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variance?

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Its certainly that [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

Its just after 18 months of 'normal' variance I get this sudden huge hole in the road.

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What is "normal" variance?

You didn't say how long you've been playing or how many hand. You did say that you have been winning the past few months, but not how many tens of thousands of hands you played before that. I'm not sure anyone can have a genuine sense of what is and is not "normal variance" with less than 50K-100K hands at a given level/site (especially since one's play, and hence one's results, should be constantly changing in the first 50K hands.

I know a lot of people -myself included, at one ploint- who have gone through long deep dry streaks, but can't point to streaks of "undeserved winning" of the same length and intensity. In my case, I concluded that those streaks had occurred, but they were part of what I called "normal" -- i.e. the more I learn, the more shocked I am at how bad I was. I'm not saying that you're not as good as you think you are, just that you may have been geting better than average cards without knowing it.

I don't know how many hands you play in a day, or if (e.g.) your money management style runs to what Mike Caro calls "manufactured win streaks", but losing streaks of up to three days seem like just the tip of the iceberg, according to everything I've read

You can try testing the bulk statistical properties of several 10K of hand during your "normal" periods, but that would only be suggestive. For example, a "winning streak" can result from having less than the expected number of "terrible runs". Heck, if we always got "a reasonably normal distribution" of hands/boards, the variance of the game would be a lot less, the risk of ruin would almost vanish, and it would be a lot easier to profit consistency. Ruinously bad luck is part of "normal"

MNny other subtle statistical and psychological effects that can arise, and even some of the most basic statistical ones, you need a surprisingly large database of played hands to get anything like a definitive answer (e.g. where the 95% confidence interval doesn't include zero) If you have that many hands in your PT (or equivalent) database, you might take the problem to the probability forum. If you don'thave enough clean data for a computer to analyze, then you only can't possibly have more than an intuitive guess at what "normal" is, and if you are departing from it or returning to it. Intuition is remarkable --even the greatest math genius makes 99%+ of their daily decisions by implicit intuitions under the rubric of "empirical experience" (no one analyzes everything completely; it would be paralyzing) However, intuition can also be misleading, even when we're "seeing things with our own eyes". Each of the greatest minds of the past were completely certain of something that we currently believe can be completely disprove -- and many of the things we believe science knows today will turn out to be completely wrong. My background is in medicine and molecular biology, and I could fill books with basic "proven facts" from the 1970s in those two fields that we now know are wrong. I've seen "the finest medical practice" become "blatant malpractice", and I'm relatively young.

Again, I don't know anything about you, so I can't address your situation. It's just a simple mathematical fact that the required sample size for many firm conclusions in a permutation pool as large as poker's is going to be a huge fraction of a human life (or more.

There are roughly 600 million completely unique hand/board combos in TXHE--multiplied by over 2000 for each opponent's hand in a given situation. Even after you factor out the non-relevant order and suit permutations (and often such permutations are VERY relevant), that's still a lifetime of 16 monitor multitabling -- possibly a redwood's lifetime, considering that the behavior of the cards may take several cycles of this huge number to average out.

Maybe someone in the Proability forum would be interested in analyzing your PT database. Statistically analyzing other people's hand histories is interesting. Analyzing your own can be scary.

[Fuchida]

Thanks for the very informative reply. I have been playing for about 18 months and except for the first and current months have won every month, although I have had several losing weeks. I have 4 PT databases because of size restrictions and have around 150k hands but at different limits.

When I started I played 1/2 limit then increased the limit as my bankroll permitted up to 15/30. I also experimented with SnG in the 20+2 to 50+5 range, playing about 300 with a 50% ITM and 50% ROI. I won a 650 player 30+3 multi-table last year and had a couple of other final tables from maybe 30 played.

About 7-8 months ago I changed to no-limit because I felt my advantage over weaker players would be more pronounced. Again I started at the low limits with $25 buy-ins and worked my way up as I gained confidence. I now play mainly $400 with the occasional foray on the $1000 buy-ins. However, I think I am too concerned over the amount of money involved to play as effectively as I would like on the $1000 tables so I am staying mainly with the $400s for now (unless I see some players I like to play against on the $1000s). I have about 75k hands in NL Holdem but again spread over several levels

I have consistently won at every form of holdem I have played for 18 months, limit or NL, ring or tourney and at every level I have played. Although I have had variations and localised losses, they are always made up fairly quickly. I am not trying to be big headed here, just trying to provide the background as to why the current situation concerns me. I don't try to manufacture winning streaks but try to play a set number of hours per day.

Trying to look at this month objectively, I am in reality only $2200 down ($1400 after today) but I have a $9k target for each month to support my full time plans by August and I regard breaking even as a serious state of affairs. To be down and in the second half of the month is quite worrying.

On reflection, it probably seems I am getting worked up over fairly small scale losses because they affect my plans for later in the year and I am therefore becoming uncharacteristically worked up over the bad beats and cold decks in the last 2-3 weeks. As a percentage of recent winnings, the dip is probably statistically not that big a deal but I am not used to losing and the closer to August I get the more magnified the situation becomes.

I have found the posting of my original message plus replying to the various posters has clarified the situation in my own mind. Yes, I have taken a lot of bad beats and cold decks lately but the impact has not been massive in terms of losses, just in terms of the absence of gains (if that makes sense).

I will put my negative thoughts behind me and try to keep the vagaries of fate and fortune in their proper perspective. However, I will take an axe to the Party servers next time someone calls with 22 against my TT and the board is 662/2/T (that happened about 2 hours ago). [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

Fuchida

[Guthrie]

I heap scorn on your poor, misguided beliefs.

Or maybe Party is out to get you.

Nice first post.