Sites Have Motivation to Reward Poor Players. Period.

[webmonarch]

So, one day I decided to send what I will call a "bitch e-mail" that effectively asked about a string of bad beats to Pokerstars (by the way, Stars is just the example, I refer to all Sites in this post) support to see what kind of response I would get. Here is their response.

<font color="green"> " I can assure you that it makes no difference to us who wins. Why would we not just set it up so that you were just losing when you were behind and never give you a badbeat. Can you see where I am going with this. You see, if you look for certain things then you will find them.

Losing to long shots are a part of poker and if you are a good player and tend to only get involved with stronger holdings, then you will suffer more badbeats. That is all there is to it. The thing is that we tend to forget all the times that our good hands held up because that is suppose to happen. We simply have selective memory. When things happen the way they should, we disregard it. When you cross the street without being hit by a car, or when a meteor fails to fall out of the sky and go through your window, or when AA holds up, we simply fail to remember it. There's no reason to, it was supposed to happen that way. When something bad happens though (as it well should from time to time, for if it didn't, you might have good reason to be suspect of our RNG) it stands out.

Believe me, we've heard it all. Software that rewards poor players. Software that rewards short stacked players. Software that rewards large stacked players. Software that penalizes old users, winning users, new users, and software that REWARDS all of the above. People who've cashed out, people who've just deposited, people who haven't deposited in a long time, people who haven't cashed out in a long time. Good luck and bad luck switches: everyone has a story for why they aren't getting the cards they deserve. The bottom line is that none of these stories are true." </font>

OK. Let's talk a bit more about these things.

First, Stars claiming that "it makes no difference to them who wins" is laughable. It DEFINITELY makes a difference to them who wins.

The Sites maximize their earnings when they have players that are as evenly matched as possible playing as many hands as possible. If the sites had their perfect utopia we would all start with, say, $500, and play heads up for hours and hours until the rake would have eaten all of our money, save for a couple cents won by whoever won the last hand.

The Sites do NOT want to have say, Paul the Pro and Fred the Fish sit down at a NL table and have Paul take all of Fred's money in one hand. Why? First, the rake is less. Second, Fred just lost his money and may not want to return/reload at the site, etc. Both are bad for the sites.

So, what to do? Easy. Level the playing field. Give Fred a little bit extra on the odds, make sure Fred gets AA a little more often, etc. A rational Site would create the most even playing field possible, so that they reach the utopia I set out above. If done in a minimal and random way there would be virtually NO chance of players picking up on the modifications.

Simply put, a Site claiming that it "makes no difference to them who wins" is a laughable, misleading and completely untrue statement.

Finally, let me be as clear as possible when I say this: <font color="red"> I am not accusing any site of engaging in these "playing field leveling" acctivities. </font> What I am doing is pointing out that any site that claims it is indifferent to who wins on their tables is either (a) painfully ignorant or (b) lying.

Whether they do it is up for debate. Whether they have the motivation to is not. They do. Period.