Sites Have Motivation to Reward Poor Players. Period.

[jwvdcw]

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This post is stupid. This type of post should never be banned however.

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I disagree all of those people who are critisizing this guy's post. He isn't complaining about it being rigged; Hes just pointing out a fact. I do agree with him that they'd have some motivation, but it pales in comparison to the risk they'd be taking to actually rig something and have their whole business collapse if they got caught, so I'm 99.9% sure that its not rigged at all. I might be a little more suspicious of a smaller site.

[jwvdcw]

[ QUOTE ]
You make a good point.

You could also just as well say that all grocery stores have a motivation to empty your bank account or run your credit card up to the limit as soon as you buy with a credit or debit card. They have a motivation to actually charge you $2000 for $20 worth of groceries.

For some odd reason, they don't do this. I wonder why?

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But the difference is that online poker sites aren't nearly monitored by checks and balances as much.

[Scotty O]

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I'm a big fan of burritos.

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hmmmm....
Soft taco's are better!

[ebaudry]

"BTW, how do you get 300+ posts and then post this? "

That was the first thing i thought too.

Dude, its not rigged. You're paranoid or not a good poker player. Both are okay. Take a statistics class. pay very, very close attention to variance. Read TPFAP by Sklansky and take the test in the back. If you don't Ace it, never bother us again please.

I went to the mall today, and there is a newly added "Taco Time". Is this place worth checking out?

[Augie]

I don't know about other sites, but Stars is the most respectable and honest poker site around.

As for software being 'rigged', have you ever thought that perhaps the game of poker itself is 'rigged'?

What I mean is that every poker game is set up with a certain amount of possibilities based on probability, and that the most popular games have an enormous amount of 'luck' built into them. They are popular just for that reason. Many of the games where luck is not as much of a factor are almost dead, basically because skilled players would kill the weaker players too often, and clean them out too soon.

So we are left with games like holdem and 7stud where the probabilities of hands have a large luck factor (just think about some preflop holdem allin scenarios, even when you have way the best of it, your opponent usually has a 20-40% of winning anyway - if you don't understand that this translates into a lot of 'bad beats', then you don't really understand probability theory).

Throw a rake into these games with large luck factors, and what you get are games that require very high skill levels to beat over the longterm. Poker is not easy, because the various games that we play are 'rigged' with a large luck factor, and various rakes that cut into every players bankroll.

In fact, most of the games we play are so rigged with that damn luck factor, that there are quite a few bad players who have been winning for months or years, and conversely, a significant group of good players who are not winning over the same period (and probably many of those have given up on poker).

So, if you want to be a winning player:
1. Understand the nature of the game
2. Attempt to learn and play the game well
3. Play at reputable online sites with lower rakes (Stars)
4. And try to find the softest games (loose-passive players) where you can find many opportunities to get your money into the pot in spots where you have the best of it - the more opportunities the better, so that you can give the long-term a chance to exert itself as soon as possible

Alright, stepping off of soapbox now . . . I'm sure many have stated similar elsewhere.

The point - poker IS RIGGED, but not in the way you think it is.

Be good.

[parkerren]

Two bad beats does not a rigged online site make. I want to see a bunch of people submit hand histories from separate sites. So we get a history of 2000 hands from various people on various sites. These should be consecutive of course as oppose to picking various sets of hands each where a person may have a short-term loss or a pair of Aces appeared. This way people could examine the hand histories and check if the cards dealt occur in a reasonable amount of time for the various people playing.

Keep in mind the better you get at poker the more times you will get a bad beat. See as you get better you will have gone all in with the better hand more often and more chances to experience a bad beat. So your bad beats may be an indication that your getting better at poker, BE HAPPY. (LOL)

There are various ways for a person to be cheated. It’s not necessary that the online site is doing anything to cheat you. Playing online may leave you vulnerable to other players cheating. Some ways for this to occur are:


Collusion: Two or more players working together as a team.

They could use instant messaging to tell what hand they each have. So if they see a player going after a flush they would have better idea of the actual outs available to the player and can determine if it would be good for them to bet or not. So the player wonders why he keeps losing
Or they bet, raise, re-raise, and re-re-raise so often enough to drive others away, And before the river everyone of the team will fold to one of its members. They steal the blinds and all other bets made the people at the table. Assuming they steal enough to cover the rake.

Software:

Its has been suggested that you have a good firewall when playing online poker. Apparently software exists to back track the IP address of the other players at the table, and will essentially peek at the other player’s cards. But as long as you have a good firewall you don’t have to worry.

I suppose there are going to be other ways for a person to be cheated by other players it would be interested to hear about such ways.

[2easy]

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Apparently software exists to back track the IP address of the other players at the table, and will essentially peek at the other player’s cards.

[/ QUOTE ]

how "apparently" and "essentially."

i dont think so.

[jman220]

[ QUOTE ]
Two bad beats does not a rigged online site make. I want to see a bunch of people submit hand histories from separate sites. So we get a history of 2000 hands from various people on various sites. These should be consecutive of course as oppose to picking various sets of hands each where a person may have a short-term loss or a pair of Aces appeared. This way people could examine the hand histories and check if the cards dealt occur in a reasonable amount of time for the various people playing.

Keep in mind the better you get at poker the more times you will get a bad beat. See as you get better you will have gone all in with the better hand more often and more chances to experience a bad beat. So your bad beats may be an indication that your getting better at poker, BE HAPPY. (LOL)

There are various ways for a person to be cheated. It’s not necessary that the online site is doing anything to cheat you. Playing online may leave you vulnerable to other players cheating. Some ways for this to occur are:


Collusion: Two or more players working together as a team.

They could use instant messaging to tell what hand they each have. So if they see a player going after a flush they would have better idea of the actual outs available to the player and can determine if it would be good for them to bet or not. So the player wonders why he keeps losing
Or they bet, raise, re-raise, and re-re-raise so often enough to drive others away, And before the river everyone of the team will fold to one of its members. They steal the blinds and all other bets made the people at the table. Assuming they steal enough to cover the rake.

Software:

Its has been suggested that you have a good firewall when playing online poker. Apparently software exists to back track the IP address of the other players at the table, and will essentially peek at the other player’s cards. But as long as you have a good firewall you don’t have to worry.

I suppose there are going to be other ways for a person to be cheated by other players it would be interested to hear about such ways.

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[quote Apparently software exists to back track the IP address of the other players at the table,]

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How do you think this would be possible without hacking the client? You're not connected to other users at the table, you're just all connected to the site.

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So, one day I decided to send what I will call a "bitch e-mail" that effectively asked about a string of bad beats to Pokerstars (by the way, Stars is just the example, I refer to all Sites in this post) support to see what kind of response I would get. Here is their response.

<font color="green"> " I can assure you that it makes no difference to us who wins. Why would we not just set it up so that you were just losing when you were behind and never give you a badbeat. Can you see where I am going with this. You see, if you look for certain things then you will find them.

Losing to long shots are a part of poker and if you are a good player and tend to only get involved with stronger holdings, then you will suffer more badbeats. That is all there is to it. The thing is that we tend to forget all the times that our good hands held up because that is suppose to happen. We simply have selective memory. When things happen the way they should, we disregard it. When you cross the street without being hit by a car, or when a meteor fails to fall out of the sky and go through your window, or when AA holds up, we simply fail to remember it. There's no reason to, it was supposed to happen that way. When something bad happens though (as it well should from time to time, for if it didn't, you might have good reason to be suspect of our RNG) it stands out.

Believe me, we've heard it all. Software that rewards poor players. Software that rewards short stacked players. Software that rewards large stacked players. Software that penalizes old users, winning users, new users, and software that REWARDS all of the above. People who've cashed out, people who've just deposited, people who haven't deposited in a long time, people who haven't cashed out in a long time. Good luck and bad luck switches: everyone has a story for why they aren't getting the cards they deserve. The bottom line is that none of these stories are true." </font>

OK. Let's talk a bit more about these things.

First, Stars claiming that "it makes no difference to them who wins" is laughable. It DEFINITELY makes a difference to them who wins.

The Sites maximize their earnings when they have players that are as evenly matched as possible playing as many hands as possible. If the sites had their perfect utopia we would all start with, say, $500, and play heads up for hours and hours until the rake would have eaten all of our money, save for a couple cents won by whoever won the last hand.

The Sites do NOT want to have say, Paul the Pro and Fred the Fish sit down at a NL table and have Paul take all of Fred's money in one hand. Why? First, the rake is less. Second, Fred just lost his money and may not want to return/reload at the site, etc. Both are bad for the sites.

So, what to do? Easy. Level the playing field. Give Fred a little bit extra on the odds, make sure Fred gets AA a little more often, etc. A rational Site would create the most even playing field possible, so that they reach the utopia I set out above. If done in a minimal and random way there would be virtually NO chance of players picking up on the modifications.

Simply put, a Site claiming that it "makes no difference to them who wins" is a laughable, misleading and completely untrue statement.

Finally, let me be as clear as possible when I say this: <font color="red"> I am not accusing any site of engaging in these "playing field leveling" acctivities. </font> What I am doing is pointing out that any site that claims it is indifferent to who wins on their tables is either (a) painfully ignorant or (b) lying.

Whether they do it is up for debate. Whether they have the motivation to is not. They do. Period.

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You owe me 3 minutes of my life back