How Random are Cards Really Dealt?

[Scooterdoo]

I have always believed that online sites are fair and the random card generators the sites use work as advertised, however last night I had a few situations that seemed just a bit too coincidental.

I was playing two tournaments at the same time on Party. Within one hour these three things happened:

1) I was dealt AJ of clubs on both tables at the same time
2) I was dealt KQ of diamonds on both tables at the same time
3) Within two minutes apart an opponent at each table was dealt QQ and then flopped four of a kind.

Now I guess we can chalk it up to 'if you play enough hands anything can and will happen', but his was very weird.

Thoughts?

[gumpzilla]

You're going to need more convincing evidence than this to get anybody here on the "Party's rigged" train, methinks.

[slickpoppa]

So what is exactly is the benefit of Party dealing you the same hand on different tables. Do you think they make the deals non-random just for the hell of it?

[Scooterdoo]

I wasn't suggesting that it was 'rigged' or 'fixed'. Heck, I won big on both my AJs hands. Just wondering if perhaps the random nature of the random number generator is not quite working as advertised. Just thought it was very coincidental; it's not like you see QQQQ come along too often within a few seconds of each other at the only two tables you are playing.

[Tim H]

any computer generated card dealing program can never be random due to the nonrandomness of the RNG (random number generator), in fact alot of the slots in a casino are not random as well due to RNG in the IGN? boards.

[gumpzilla]

[ QUOTE ]
any computer generated card dealing program can never be random due to the nonrandomness of the RNG (random number generator), in fact alot of the slots in a casino are not random as well due to RNG in the IGN? boards.

[/ QUOTE ]

This is a bit of a red herring. Yes, they use pseudo random number generators, but they feed these things with huge, huge seeds that ARE generated randomly. Paradise has an interesting section about how they do it. Unless the RNG is broken by design, I think the true randomness of the enormous seed to the RNG is enough to get the job done.

[Tim H]

yeah it is a nice smoke screen [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]
honestly, anything from a computer can never be truly random

[etgryphon]

[ QUOTE ]
yeah it is a nice smoke screen [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]
honestly, anything from a computer can never be truly random

[/ QUOTE ]

Not entirely true...Computers can use certain hardware peripherals and/or hardware considerations to produce "true" randomness.

True Random Number Generators

-Gryph

[gumpzilla]

[ QUOTE ]
yeah it is a nice smoke screen [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]
honestly, anything from a computer can never be truly random

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm not super knowledgable about this, but I'm pretty sure you're wrong. If this were true, where are the random seeds coming from? There are lots of approaches to this kind of thing. The least significant bit in a timer between keypresses is supposed to be a pretty good source of entropy. "Shot noise" in the guts of the computer - something I know nothing about - is also reputed to be random. If you google Lavarand, they talk about a lot of these kind of things, if I remember; the name Lavarand comes from an early implementation that actually used pictures of a lava lamp to generate truly random seeds, though that's not how they do things anymore.

As for why poker sites don't use truly random number generation if it's an option, my guess is that it's impractical in its intense usage of the entropy sources they have compared to the almost identical solution of generating truly random seeds for a pseudorandom number generator.

[Tim H]

that's the part of the problem with it ... the seeds
you are correct that nowadays the seeds can use so large a number versus 20 years ago that the generator can appear random, but it is still not truly random due to the fact that the seed number is finite.

Having said all that, randomess and rigged are 2 different arguments. And MTTs are unique in that you will see more hands than playing ring games and might notice some things that really might get you thinking wth is up with all this.

I would love for the casinos (online) to open up their historical hand databases and see if the winning hand distributions are among the generally (precomputer days) accepted "norms".