How do online poker sites determine cards?

[Accident]

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We have a home game in the KC area where a friend of mine brings his monkey over to deal the cards for us. For the most part its random. If he starts drinking though it gets bad. We usually end up calling it a night when he starts flinging his poo everywhere. To win the poker chips you have to guess the monkeys favorite beer. Send your answers to me with a $5.00 money order. Drawing will be held on Oct. 31. Friends and family of the monkey are not eligible. In case of a tie the chips will be split among winners. Thank you for playing.

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Whenever poo comes out involuntarily, just spank your monkey to stop it!
Accident [img]/images/graemlins/club.gif[/img]

[D.H.]

Here are some more details about the Random Number Generator used by PartyPoker:

http://www.partypoker.com/about_us/rng.html


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Does the computer then burn a card before the flop, turn, river? etc.

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Implementation details like this are really not interesting. As long as there is a randomly shuffled deck they may just as well pick card number 4, 16 and 47 for flop cards. It doesn't matter.

[laja]

Start each hand by having a spectrum of hands in which each opponent could have, which will start out very large, and then by the way the play you will continue to narrow this spectrum. The plays you make should be based off of what will do the best versus the biggest portion of the spectrum.

After a good amount of experience you will do this even just naturally withouth trying and you will develop a certain instinct which sometimes you just know what hand they have.

ps. poker tracker can help greatly in reading players as it can provide a plethora of stats on them

[laja]

lol sorry posted that last one in the wrong thread

[PokrLikeItsProse]

This is how I've been told Full Tilt Poker does things:

They have a hardware random number generator (background radiation counter) and additional entropy (randomness) is created by action at the tables. Bet amounts, time taken, I'm not sure what exactly goes into it, but since it uses data from every table in play, there's no way that anyone can predict what happens.

The deck is "continually shuffling" until a card is needed. What this means is that your actions on the hand affect the randomness, but because all tables affect the randomness, you can't use your actions to try to game the system because you can't predict what others are doing. Basically, this means that noone can crack the server and figure out the next card before it comes, so it is (supposedly) more secure than any system that sets the deck. (It also means that if you had called a fraction of a second earlier, maybe the other guy wouldn't have hit runner-runner for the flush to beat your flopped set.

[Nilloc1204]

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It also means that if you had called a fraction of a second earlier, maybe the other guy wouldn't have hit runner-runner for the flush to beat your flopped set.

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Ok, that's gonna make me lose my mind. Thanks a lot!