poker sites "juicing" the game

[Nigel]

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My understanding is that poker tracker can store to many standard databases.

Learn SQL and you can do all the custom queries you want.

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I know SQL quite well. I just assume since you and all the others already have seen the data, maybe you could just share it with me.

[Neil Stevens]

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My understanding is that poker tracker can store to many standard databases.

Learn SQL and you can do all the custom queries you want.

[/ QUOTE ]

I know SQL quite well. I just assume since you and all the others already have seen the data, maybe you could just share it with me.

[/ QUOTE ]
I don't have such a database. What I do know is, I've been consistently winning at a high rate, a rate that couldn't be sustained if the site was rigging suckouts against me. I also know there are so many people with poker tracker databases, who have looked at the numbers and compared with each other, that any anomalies would be noticed.

[benfranklin]

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I assume you're a winning player.

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I thought that everyone who posted here was a winner. [img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img]

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As a winning player would you continue to play if you had evidence that too many flushes make and too many dominated hands win?

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If I had such evidence, I would probably continue to play as long as I continued to win. Possible reasons to continue include:

1. Perhaps I have already subconsciously adjusted my game to such irregularities.

2. Such evidence, if widely known, would cause the sites to correct their software.

3. If such evidence was not widely known, this knowledge might give those in the know a bigger edge.

But the point remains that there is no such evidence.

[Nigel]

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[ QUOTE ]
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My understanding is that poker tracker can store to many standard databases.

Learn SQL and you can do all the custom queries you want.

[/ QUOTE ]

I know SQL quite well. I just assume since you and all the others already have seen the data, maybe you could just share it with me.

[/ QUOTE ]
I don't have such a database. What I do know is, I've been consistently winning at a high rate, a rate that couldn't be sustained if the site was rigging suckouts against me. I also know there are so many people with poker tracker databases, who have looked at the numbers and compared with each other, that any anomalies would be noticed.

[/ QUOTE ]

Maybe you're the one doing the sucking out. [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

Seriously though, your first post made it sound like you have tons of evidence. A few people in this thread have pointed out all the evidence that exists if you have PT. I'm still waiting to see any of it.

Besides pre-flop card distribution, it's a fairly complex process to get more info from PT.

Nigel

[2easy]

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I can say that it is amazing how many flushes and straights are completed on the river, not the turn. I think Party should make flushes a lower ranked hand just because they happen so often on its site.


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Sigh

Flushes are seen more often than straights, because many players will play junk hands if they are sooted.

If you ran several hundred thousand simulations of 10 handed play, where evey hand was played to showdown, you would see more straights than flushes

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actually, if you're implying that more straits would complete than flushes, as the true "odds" come into play, i think that is opposite of what would happen.

9 cards to complete flush draw, 8 to complete strait draw.

perhaps a bit nitpicky, but thought in the interest of accuracy, this bore pointing out.

[benfranklin]

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The problem, and it is not isolated to you, is that many people's perceptions of a site's fairness are created by ... individual hands they remember

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Exactly. I guess it's time once again to trot out this classic RGP posting by Paul Philips:

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Some of you know that in a past life I was a programmer and a manager
thereof. In mid-1997 our company acquired an online game site called
playsite that had a decent population of people playing classic games,
one of which was backgammon. The codebase was something of a mess though,
so we undertook a complete rewrite and released it in early 1998.



After we released the new code, we began receiving email from people
and hearing chat online that there were unusually many doubles being
rolled in the backgammon games. That sounded unlikely but I took a
look into the code, and it was as straightforward as could be, no room
for a wacky error. The server picked two random numbers from 1 to 6
in the normal java fashion.



The java random call is a simple wrapper around the C library function.
We were seeding it in the normal ways. Everything was fine. But the
complaints were unrelenting, so we took increasingly extreme measures
trying to figure out what was going on. First we incorporated a java
RNG to avoid the C library. When this didn't "help", we started
logging all the die throws and did statistical analysis on tens of
thousands of logged rolls.



What we found was that doubles were being rolled at precisely the rate
one would expect. There was absolutely nothing surprising in the stats.
We communicated this to the complaining players, but it still didn't do
any good. You could go into a backgammon lobby anytime and you'd
rarely have to wait more than a couple minutes before chat would emerge
that "everyone knew" that too many doubles were being rolled. It had
entered the realm of known facts, and there was no getting around it.



We closed the dozens of filed bug reports involving our loaded dice and
moved on with our lives, but I've never forgotten the certainty with which
people asserted that our dice were not rolling right. And the point, of
course, is how similarly that certainty is echoed here when people talk
about online poker being rigged for this or that result.



I see three major factors contributing to this misplaced certainty.
The three are the same whether we're looking at original vs. rewritten
playsite, or B&M poker vs. online poker. Much of this has been
written before by myself and others, but I include it here to help
illustrate how similar the backgammon and online poker situations are.



1) SPEED. We build an unconscious model of how often noticeable events
take place, but it's largely rooted in time, not in number of events.
When the number of events per unit time increases (the rewritten playsite
was of course faster, just as online poker is faster than B&M) then we
are surprised to observe more noticeable events.



2) SELECTION BIAS. We notice quads. We notice doubles. We feel like
we know how often they happen because we know that we notice them, but we
do not know how often unnoticeable events take place. We therefore lack
the necessary data to do analysis, but we have so much faith in our brains
as pattern recognition machines, we try it anyway.



3) MEMETICS. This is in some ways the biggest one. When you're
surrounded by people who have become convinced that something is true,
it's difficult not to start believing it's true yourself. Online chat
environments make it very easy for people to share their feelings about
the injustice of the randomness, and it's such a seductive idea anyway,
it's not hard for it to gain followers. Read "The Tipping Point" for more.



In closing, here is one quote I found in my old email. I wish I had
the whole file so you could see how widespread the certainty was.


Message: your dice are throwing doubles again---CALIBRATE THEM! get
your act together



A message to online poker sites: Your decks are dealing bad beats
again. CALIBRATE THEM!



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[benfranklin]

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actually, if you're implying that more straits would complete than flushes, as the true "odds" come into play, i think that is opposite of what would happen.

9 cards to complete flush draw, 8 to complete strait draw.

perhaps a bit nitpicky, but thought in the interest of accuracy, this bore pointing out.

[/ QUOTE ]

You are saying something completely different. You are saying that given a straight or flush draw on the flop, the odds of hitting the flush draw on the turn/river are better than the odds of completing an open ended straight on the turn/river. This says nothing about the relative odds of flopping a 4-flush vs. flopping an OESD. It also says nothing about the likelihood of a player seeing the flop with 2 to a flush vs. 2 to a straight.

The previous poster is correct that starting from zero and dealing random hands to the river, you will get more straights than flushes.

[jman220]

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[ QUOTE ]
My understanding is that poker tracker can store to many standard databases.

Learn SQL and you can do all the custom queries you want.

[/ QUOTE ]

I know SQL quite well. I just assume since you and all the others already have seen the data, maybe you could just share it with me.

[/ QUOTE ]

There have been posts here, with screenshots of very large pt databases, looking for the kinds of things you are talking about. I know the search function on this site sucks, but they are there.

[theben]

you are a moron

[masse75]

I've found that if I wear an aluminum cap while multitabling, Party cannot scan my brainwaves via satellite to discern my tendencies.