Why it is probably all legit !!

[bernie]

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In fact, why play poker? Couldn't I just bust into a game with a shotgun and take all the money?

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By law you would be more accountable for that than someone screwing with a poker site. Someone did that up here in seattle long ago, to a degree. The wah mee massacre in chinatown.

b

[DocHollyday]

I play on Party myself and I think it is fair and no way it is rigged. But assume the following:

You start an online pokersite and to get customers you manipulate the software in a way, so that every player breaks even in longterms, means a bad player will put for example put as many badbeats on a good player in the long run, so that he at least will break even. In the end, the only thing the players do, is paying rake to the casino.

Ok, now go a step further, meanwhile your casino has become popular and you've got somewhat like 10000 customers. You could easy earn shitloads of dough, even if you would change the programm to fair (distribute the same amount of hands to everyone etc.), but why changing the system if it works? No one will ever come behind this and within years everyone will lose his money slowly....you see?

I'm really sure, that Party is cool, but it's internet and you can never be 100% sure that no one is cheating or hacking or whatever. As long as you're a winning player it may not matter too much, but to be a 100percent sure of honesty there's no way around livepoker and even there keep your eyes open, the sharks are lurking!

GOod luck fellas!

[MicroBob]

when i play in a live game how can i be SURE that a couple players aren't colluding or that the dealer is a mechanic of some sorts.

obviously you can't.


if a site were to try to 'rig' the games....they could try the 'everyone breaks even' approach which seems impossibly complicated if you ask me (not to mention that we would all have easy proof of this if they actually could pull this off). i'm not really sure this would work very well anyway.

OR - they could set up the cards so that their automated house player in seat-7 pulls in an extra $60-hour or something winning 1 or 2 hands. which to me seems slightly more realistic.

but it still wouldn't be worth the hassle or the potential reprecussions to try it.
the ultimate reprecussion being that players stop trusting the site.


when acquaintances ask about my internet-poker 'career' (as it were) one of the first things that always comes up is 'well...cant the site just set up the cards so that you always lose??' or something like that. the fact is, MOST people don't really trust the legitimacy of the deal very much and that is why MOST people don't play with real money on the internet.
the poker-sites have every incentive to prove that the deal IS legitimate because once that is accepted it means more and more players.

more people trust websites like this now then previously simply because more people are getting comfortable letting their money fly around in cyber-space.
trusting the legitimacy of the deal is very similar.

with online purchases there is still a very large segment of the population that asks 'well, how do i know that they won't take my CC# and use it for something else?? i could get really screwed here.'
they don't seem to realize that the lady at the mall that runs it through the machine can do the exact same thing....but since they are seeing that person they tend to trust the process more (btw....a lady here working at a counter somewhere was recently convicted of stealing a lot of the customer CC#'s).

the same thing tends to be true of the deal....people just don't trust it because they can't see it. but just like online purchases are more and more common because of trust....so is the general acceptance of the online deal of cards.

[DocHollyday]

Good points Bob. I just wanted to show, that there may be reasons, why something could be rigged. Let's say I trust online poker enough, that I'm willing to wager my dough there. And of course in live poker there can also be colluders. The only thing I wanted to say with my reply was, always keep your eyes open, you never know, there may be falling a piano on your head this second! [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img] On the other hand if you're too chicken you'll never be able to go out of your house anymore! No risk no fun! [img]/images/graemlins/smirk.gif[/img]

Good luck fella!