poker sites "juicing" the game

[turaho]

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Right now, after 2 months I have 270 "dominated" hand samples recorded so that works out to 1620 for a year. I know that sample size is too small, but that's what I'm going to go with.

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As long as you realize that your projected sample size is still painfully inadequate to make any sort of conclusions on the reliability of a random number generator, then knock yourself out.

You will not be proving anything either way and any conclusions you draw will be based more on your a priori arguments than any sort of true statistical analysis.

Good luck to you!

[Toro]

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270 hands? hah.

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It's only 270 hands but it's confirming what I perceived was happening for 2 years. If the results hold up for a whole year, then I will use the data to my benefit.

At risk of getting flamed:

getting 100 or more "positive" outcomes out of 271 with an expected probability of 27% by chance has a probability of only 0.0159%

35 or more out of 60 with an expected probability of 37% has a probability of 0.05%

which despite the small sample size is statistically significant. (The second examle is about the same as 67 or more heads out of 100 coin tosses)

However, that does not make it rigged. Think variance. Perhaps things will even out after another 250+ hands.

Another thing to bear in mind is that there are any number of parameters you could measure (e.g frequency of getting pocket pairs, of hitting a set on the flop, suited, etc). The chances of an "anomaly" in two specific parameters over a small sample size is not in itself that surprising.

[MrDannimal]

It's going to take more than a year.

Assuming a standard rate of occurrance (150/month for #1 and 30/month for #2), after a year you'd have 1,800 trials from #1 and 360 from #2. Not nearly enough samples (esp. #2), even given the narrow range.

Someone much better at math than I (or at least, with more training, since I'm pretty good at the math I know) could probably figure out a # of instances you'd need to be confident in the result given the assumed win %s you're looking at.

[BIGRED]

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Let's assume you have to make a decision:
1. Perfect site, no rigging, after 6 months all sharks are laughing, all fishes are broke, after a year you are bankrupt.
2. Rigged, sharks still win, just not as much as they should. Fishes still lose, just not as much as they should.

As a businessman what do you do?


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So is that your excuse for not being able to beat the game?

[Quicksilvre]

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Mainstream businesses and corporations are known to be seedy and ruthless themselves, and have been caught taking all kinds of corrupt and suspicious measures to increase the bottom line. So to think that an online gambling site would be any different would be overly optimistic IMO.

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I agree. However...where's the evidence? A number of trustworthy people have collected millions of hands worth of data, and no inconsistancies that I know of have popped up. If inconsistancies do appear, then we can start a serious discussion on the integrity of the big sites...but we're only in the monitoring stage now, not the conclusion-drawing stage.

[obsidian]

I feel dumber from reading this thread.

[CORed]

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Further curious...if taking money from the site is a bad thing to be punished, why do so many people continue to take money from the site month after month after month?

Because online poker sites have created a new kind of player, the winning fish these players are poor players, but as they keep winning over the better players, everybody, including themselves, assume they are good. [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

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Yes it's true. I am a fish, but I'm winning. How do I know this? The people I'm beating keep telling me how supid I was. This usually happens after I call down somebody who had 93o, no pair, no draw with ATo, no pair, no draw, after they raised preflop and bet or raised all the way to the river for the fifth hand in a row, or after I semi-bluff, get called and catch my draw. I know the people who call me a fish are losing good players, who always win in live games but can't beat the rigged online games. At least, this is what they tell me and I'm sure they know what they're talking about.

[FlFishOn]

"You are much more likely to be cheated by other players than the cardroom."

This goes almost without saying.

Inside 10 years there will be books or similar detailing the fleecing of many poker players at the hands of dishonest site(s).

I've only been fleeced once so far. How about you?

[CORed]

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Party/Empire are suspicious.

UB, Stars, Paradise, FullTilt and Pacific(limited) seem legit.

I do not have enough data for definitive proof at this time, and your questions will be met with sarcasm and rudeness on these discussion boards.

The basic premise, I have is that the party network wants to be the most powerful player in the poker world. This is an easy assumption to make. To be the most powerful means making the most money and having the most influence. To do this you need to generate the most rake, and you need to get the most players. How to get the most players then? You need weak player to attract strong players. So, how do you get the most weak players? You keep them on your site as long as possible without busting out. How do you do this? You have a rating system, where the site rates the players based on their previous wins/losses, their rake generated, bonuses received, play frequency etc. Then when a player who is taking money from the site (which has a bad rating) is up against one of these weak players (who has a good rating), you make the poorly rated player lose to the highly rated player by having the poorly rated player win the pot.

This is a logical argument. It is extremely difficult to prove.

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A couple of years ago, when Paradise was the leading online poker site, all the tinfoil hat crowd was claiming that Paradise was rigged. I knew Party was becoming the market leader when "Paradise is rigged." changed to "Party is rigged."

It may be a logical argument, but it's still wrong. The fish don't have to be net winners to keep coming back. They just have to win sometimes. If this weren't true, slot machines, craps, roulette, blackjack, etc. would have dried up for B&M casinos a long time ago. As long as a poker game is structured so that the fish have a winning session every now and then, the fish will keep coming. Limit holdem is just about right for this as it is, with no rigging required.