does anyone ever find themselves wondering if a site is rigged?

[RiverDood]

if you play thousands of hands, some 1:1,000 things will happen.

On Stars, I lost AA three times sequentially in one afternoon, h/u at the flop each time. . . I went 25 hands at a short-handed O/8 table without winning even half a pot. . . . I played 45 hands of holdem without touching a pot -- not even having the blinds folded to me.

All of these are roughly 1% prospects. But they happen. Occasionally we win five pots in a row. Or we take down a 1-outer on the river. Those things happen, too. It's just random flutter.

Look at pi over 10,000 digits and you'll see some digits repeated in strings (3333, 44444, etc.) Odd, but not a lot of folks are posting about pi being rigged. In general, try to play poker for stakes where you can regard the periodic weird card runs as random noise in your monthly win rate.

[ClockWyze]

[ QUOTE ]
if you play thousands of hands, some 1:1,000 things will happen.

On Stars, I lost AA three times sequentially in one afternoon, h/u at the flop each time. . . I went 25 hands at a short-handed O/8 table without winning even half a pot. . . . I played 45 hands of holdem without touching a pot -- not even having the blinds folded to me.

All of these are roughly 1% prospects. But they happen. Occasionally we win five pots in a row. Or we take down a 1-outer on the river. Those things happen, too. It's just random flutter.

Look at pi over 10,000 digits and you'll see some digits repeated in strings (3333, 44444, etc.) Odd, but not a lot of folks are posting about pi being rigged. In general, try to play poker for stakes where you can regard the periodic weird card runs as random noise in your monthly win rate.

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Well said.

But try calculation the odds of a 400-500 BB downswing for a player who wins 1BB/100 (which would be very low for those ultra soft interpoker players)

This isn't 1% or even 1 in 1000

The other alternative is there is no cap on fixed limit raises on intercasino - maybe the poster capped away 400BB-500BB on one hand.

[eisanm]

[ QUOTE ]


Look at pi over 10,000 digits and you'll see some digits repeated in strings (3333, 44444, etc.) Odd, but not a lot of folks are posting about pi being rigged.

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What? I didn't know pi was actually rigged! I have to tell my friends! This explains things...

In SSHE, there is talk about people's minds assigning patterns to random events. I have a tendency to internalize everything. When I get sucked out on, I look for every possible thing I did wrong. Could I have checkraised the turn and had him face two bets cold? The reverse would be to externalize, ie the site is rigged. The truth of the matter is that neither of these are true (well, sometimes I could have checkraised the turn). Variance happens AND the human mind remembers the bad things. Other day my wife was driving and said she hits every redlight...Only about 2/3 were red, but that was enough for her to forget about the green ones.

Sounds like a session at Pokerchamps.

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p.s. down about 450-500 BBs over a short time.

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hint. losing 450-500 BBs in a short time isn't a downswing. it's a sign of you're terrible.

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Oh c'mon. Nobody any good has ever lost $1,000 bucks short-term playing 1-2/2-4? I've won considerably more than that, so I don't feel too bad.

Fact is, this thread HAS helped me look more critically at my game in a way I probably wouldn't have had I not posted it. I think I've figured out the flaws in my game and I've posted two winning sessions in a row now (it's a start).

Thanks to everyone for listening/responding.

I'll agree the site probably isn't rigged. [img]/images/graemlins/blush.gif[/img]

[SheetWise]

I would be very surprised if there weren't game situations where you were facing opponents who had more information than you think they have. It would be fairly simple for any site to separate the RNG from the game software and have it delivered by a 3rd party in real time -- yet I don't know of any site that has gone through the effort. I've written several sweepstakes games where the client has had to purchase a policy for cash prizes, and we used RNG data from a provider who was contracted by both myself and the insurer -- it's fairly simple. The only tests I've seen done on poker sites are for randomness, which doesn't address the issue of when the information is available and to who.

I've never seen a game that was controlled by a single party that was not exploited at some time. Maybe online poker is a first.

I used to worry about things like that until I learned how to play.

[solucky]

Winning money mean not the site is fair and loosing not it is rigged. For myself and my stats only one site offer fair games. Added you have something like bots...teamplay...calculators...trackers.......so you can say poker is one of the most not fair games online. Sure if you use bots calculators trackers and any promotion you make good money with cheating [img]/images/graemlins/smirk.gif[/img]