Kooks and Computer Coders needed for experiment.

[lorinda]

Okay,

I believe that the distribution thing can be solved, but I need the help of kooks and computer coders.

The experiment runs like this.

Could the Kooks please post which things they would expect to be rigged, Im not talking "The number of Aces on the flop" or "The number of times a player is dealt Kings" because all but the toughest of conspiracy experts have seen enough evidence to the contrary of this...surely.

However, what we need is a list of distribution occurences to look for.
A couple might be Kings vs Aces dealt, set vs set and top two vs flush.
However, I would like the sceptics to provide examples.

What I hope someone can code (I hope it's not a very long exercise) is a poker program that shows us how often these occurences should happen, and then maybe someone could post how often they DO happen.

Unfortunately I have no coding skills, no tracking ability, and If it is ME that presents the test cases, then no credibility will be given to the case.

Any chance we could organise this?

Lori

[XlgJoe]

Lorinda

I really doubt that the larger sites are using crooked deals. But, if they were I would do it just as Terry mentioned in his post somewhere below. Just deal a true random shuffle. But on a random basis give the player that has lost the most money, the winning hand. The scond worst player the next best hand and so on.

The winning hand could be 32o and folded(or played by some maniac. The point is the distributions would be random, but the poor player would get some preferential treatment. And the deal wouldn't be manipulated every hand just some percentage from 10-25% of the time. I doubt you could determine that type of rigging.


Like I said I don't believe this is happening just saying how it could.

[Miah]

How would you account for the looseness of the game? Surely a very loose game is going to have a lot of set over set/flush over flush beats, as well as people sucking out their cards on the end.

I'm not trying to bring this to your attention as I believe you already are well aware of this factor. Rather I am asking how would you account for this in such an analysis?

[lorinda]

How would you account for the looseness of the game

I had totally overlooked this aspect, I'll get back to you when I have thought it through more carefully.

I am still sure it is a viable experiment, but I need to work out what I am talking about first [img]/forums/images/icons/blush.gif[/img]

Lori

[Bubmack]

I think a good test would be a comparison of all-in bets and calls when the second best hand before the all in bet wins. Although I dont know what to compare it to since the hand that is a dog will have varying chances to win. Like a four flush is more likely to beat a set than KK is likely to beat AA.

I would still like to know the % though.

Bubs

[zooey]

Here's the main problem: These are all very easy to calculate and test for if you have data that is independant of strategy: i.e. you get to see everybody's hole cards and pretend that they went to the river every time.

But in real life play, where you get to only see shown down hands or possibly one player's and the shown down hands, you need to model both the probabilities (easy) and the strategy used to determine whether there's a show down. (very hard)

If the kooks would make a strong precise claim, i.e. set of set is happening with a frequency of 5 standard deviations greater than expected, then ok, you can make some very rough assumptions and "prove" that it is not in fact outside 5 S.D.s. But proving that eveything is right (to within the measurement error of your sample size) is dauntingly difficult.

(If you could model playing decisions accurately enough to calculate this, I'm guessing the work would be much more valuable as a poker player than as a validity test. )

And as I have yet to see a kook with a strong enough mathematical bent to appreciate my arguments here, I think your project is laudable but DOA. [img]/forums/images/icons/frown.gif[/img]

BUT, if you want, I'll entertain you with any probability calc, like set over set, you need, they are fun little puzzles.

Just my opinion, btw, if the project goes, cool. [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

Best,

zooey

P.S. Great play in the last Zoo tourney, btw. Sure you caught some luck, but I really liked all your decisions that I saw.

[Bubmack]

</font><blockquote><font class="small">In reply to:</font><hr />
with a frequency of 5 standard deviations greater than expected

[/ QUOTE ]

Yikes - are we looking for statistical certaintity or a reason to just avoid a site. 3 STD are good enough for me.

Bubs

[zooey]

lol. it was just example. I doubt we'll ever see someone stick their neck out and make a testable claim.

The reason I picked 5 SDs is it would not be unusual to take a data set, and find something in it that's 3 S.D.s off. 3 SDs is like 1:1000, so if you test for 1000 things, (and maybe that's what your brain, pattern finder/creator extrodinaire, is doing as it skims a data set looking for something interesting) you would almost expect to find something wacky. Finding something 5 SDs off would be a lot more challenging.

But if one makes a claim independant of the data, and then we go get some random data and test it, then sure, a repeatable 3 SD claim is quite damning.

Best,

zooey

[crazy canuck]

The only thing pretty much left to test for are the independence of hole cards (since it has been shown that board cards are random). It really pisses me off people who really belive that a site is rigged don't test for this....it's not that hard.

Another theory says that everything is roughly random but good players get a few hands that they lose a lot of money on. This could be tested by weighing the occurance of a hand by the pot size...this would require a lot of numbe of hands tho.

[BBill]

I think this would be an interesting experiment. The thought it brings to mind for me concerns:
But in real life play, where you get to only see shown down hands or possibly one player's and the shown down hands, you need to model both the probabilities (easy) and the strategy used to determine whether there's a show down. (very hard)

Have these statistics / distribution occurences ever been perfomed in live games ? I am no expert in this but I am assuming that statistics of distribution for live play have been determined through mathmatical expectation of what should happen with a deck of 52 cards dealt to 10 players. We accept these results as we certainly can not prove they are false unless we analyze 1,000,000+ hands dealt live.
The nice thing about playing online is that the precise results can be collected with minimal error.

bbill