Theories on how online poker is rigged?

[hackmage]

I'm working on a project for my Stats class, and I decided I was going to take a look at those claims of online sites being rigged. Personally I don't believe they are, the casinos have almost nothing to gain by rigging the sites, they win whether you win or lose.

The problem is finding a hypothesis that's fairly testable, so I was looking for the most popular theories the conspiracy theorists have. The other problem is that I can't keep track of the beginning hands because too many will be mucked. Another unknown is how long a player has been playing on the site, which seems to be a leading theory, the cards always fall for the newbs.

So my only thought is to record flops, and see if there is a substantial amount of low cards. That is when compared, to a completely random generation of flops using Minitab. The idea behind this is that beginning players play too many hands, and thus to help them out sites would give them more low cards on the flop, thus increasing their chances to flop a pair. This won't take into account whether they win or not, but just that new players maybe enticed to keep playing those low cards, thus reinforcing bad play. That's the only theory I could think of that would actually be testable. Any input would be greatly appreciated.

Matt