Online Random Card Generators

[CORed]

I think your brain is just engaged in it's natural activity of finding patters. The human mind is so good at finding patterns that it finds patterns that don't exist. Yes, clusters of good hands and bad hands happen frequently. So do periods of fairly even distribution. You just don't notice the periods of even distribution because this is what you see as "normal" for a random process, even though clusters are really just as "normal" as even distribution.

[edpsu92]

I think the most obvious reason people INCORRECTLY become suspect of online card generators if the simple fact that many more hands are played per hour and if you factor in multi-tabling, the amount of hands over brick and mortar per hour is HUGE. The same "bad beats" and "odd cards" as the poster says occur in B and M too. Most people just arent at a B and M table to see 1000 hands in a session like I do each night in just a few hours.

[Rudbaeck]

Actually take notes and you'll see that the ups and downs don't match up more than chance dictates. The human brain is hardwired to find patterns, if none exist it makes some up.

Finding patterns is a great benefit to survival. It's crap at dealing with totally random series.

[kowboy]

Wake up I understand probablility and randomness, but given the fact that online play and live play seem different when played equal amount of hand I feel that there may be something to say about differences in the two. I don't have a limited memory and I can differentiate between live and online play. Black and White sometimes makes Grey. [img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img]

[benfranklin]

[ QUOTE ]


Does anyone have any thoughts on random card gens? I know basically we see at least double the number of hands per hour as a b&m but I still seem to see odd match-ups of hole cards, extreme river beats and odd strings of wired cards etc.

[/ QUOTE ]

Time to once again dust off this old RGP post by Paul Phillips:

[ QUOTE ]
Some of you know that in a past life I was a programmer and a manager
thereof. In mid-1997 our company acquired an online game site called
playsite that had a decent population of people playing classic games,
one of which was backgammon. The codebase was something of a mess though,
so we undertook a complete rewrite and released it in early 1998.


After we released the new code, we began receiving email from people
and hearing chat online that there were unusually many doubles being
rolled in the backgammon games. That sounded unlikely but I took a
look into the code, and it was as straightforward as could be, no room
for a wacky error. The server picked two random numbers from 1 to 6
in the normal java fashion.


The java random call is a simple wrapper around the C library function.
We were seeding it in the normal ways. Everything was fine. But the
complaints were unrelenting, so we took increasingly extreme measures
trying to figure out what was going on. First we incorporated a java
RNG to avoid the C library. When this didn't "help", we started
logging all the die throws and did statistical analysis on tens of
thousands of logged rolls.


What we found was that doubles were being rolled at precisely the rate
one would expect. There was absolutely nothing surprising in the stats.
We communicated this to the complaining players, but it still didn't do
any good. You could go into a backgammon lobby anytime and you'd
rarely have to wait more than a couple minutes before chat would emerge
that "everyone knew" that too many doubles were being rolled. It had
entered the realm of known facts, and there was no getting around it.


We closed the dozens of filed bug reports involving our loaded dice and
moved on with our lives, but I've never forgotten the certainty with which
people asserted that our dice were not rolling right. And the point, of
course, is how similarly that certainty is echoed here when people talk
about online poker being rigged for this or that result.


I see three major factors contributing to this misplaced certainty.
The three are the same whether we're looking at original vs. rewritten
playsite, or B&M poker vs. online poker. Much of this has been
written before by myself and others, but I include it here to help
illustrate how similar the backgammon and online poker situations are.


1) SPEED. We build an unconscious model of how often noticeable events
take place, but it's largely rooted in time, not in number of events.
When the number of events per unit time increases (the rewritten playsite
was of course faster, just as online poker is faster than B&M) then we
are surprised to observe more noticeable events.


2) SELECTION BIAS. We notice quads. We notice doubles. We feel like
we know how often they happen because we know that we notice them, but we
do not know how often unnoticeable events take place. We therefore lack
the necessary data to do analysis, but we have so much faith in our brains
as pattern recognition machines, we try it anyway.


3) MEMETICS. This is in some ways the biggest one. When you're
surrounded by people who have become convinced that something is true,
it's difficult not to start believing it's true yourself. Online chat
environments make it very easy for people to share their feelings about
the injustice of the randomness, and it's such a seductive idea anyway,
it's not hard for it to gain followers. Read "The Tipping Point" for more.


In closing, here is one quote I found in my old email. I wish I had
the whole file so you could see how widespread the certainty was.


Message: your dice are throwing doubles again---CALIBRATE THEM! get
your act together

A message to online poker sites: Your decks are dealing bad beats
again. CALIBRATE THEM!



[/ QUOTE ]