After working so hard to make it on my top ten list Ed Miller seems to have posted something that I disagree with.
It’s the dreaded “online poker is rigged” argument again. Granted, Ed doesn’t say that online poker is rigged but he does stir up the pot a bit. He goes as far as saying that it can be done and an online poker site might do it. Here we have two different questions. The first is whether or not it’s possible and the second is whether or not a site would do it.
In taking on the second question, I’ve always approached this question from the standpoint of a medium or large site. If a player is going to get himself involved with some no-name poker room then it’s a crap shoot. Most people aren’t complaining about rigged games at no-name card rooms. The vast majority of online poker is rigged claims come from people playing on the top 10 rooms.
So, if we’re talking about a top ten room then I would say that the motivation for rigging the game favors not rigging it. As I articulate in a previous post there are so many other ways for a poker room to increase its profits from you that are entirely legitimate. And if you took the time to brainstorm a bit I’m sure you could come up with ten or fifteen more suggestions of minor tweaks the room could make to the game that would generate more hands per hour and/or more profits for the room. Until someone can answer for me why a room would go to all of the trouble to rig the game before having exhausted these other much more simple methods then I simply cannot buy this argument as being logical. Granted, a poker room might act in an illogical manner but if we’re to assume that all actors act in a logical manner then this doesn’t hold up.
The other part of Ed’s argument is that it’s even doable. Of course it’s doable but let’s put the caveat on there that you need to be able to do it AND not get caught. That caveat presents an entirely different problem.
Now, Ed is a man who isn’t exactly ignorant when it comes to software engineering. He has two degrees from M.I.T and used to work as a software engineer at Microsoft. So it’s deceptively easy for one to simply accept it as fact when he says creating a system that could do all of this rigging would be rather trivial. However, I’m not one to simply accept an argument simply based on the source. I put it back to anybody who claims that this would be trivial to at least outline how they would go about solving the problem without getting caught.
See, that’s the one thing missing from every argument from a software engineer regarding building such a system. There’s always some guy who says “I’ve been a coder for a jazillion years and this would be easy.” Okay then, tell me how.
There are some fundamental problems in designing a system that needs to escape detection. First thing off the bat is that such a system would need to follow certain rules in order to determine who to rig the game in favor of and how to rig the games. My theory here is that given a large enough sample size detectable patterns would emerge. So if it is trivial to design such a system then it should be equally as trivial to explain how one avoids creating patterns in the data.
One of the other factors such an argument fails to properly consider is that over 90% of poker players are break-even or losing poker players. So what exactly is a fish? How are you going to rig the game in favor of the fish when there are so many fish and so few sharks? How would you determine which players to rig the action for and which one’s to shaft?
These are the types of questions those who claim it is a trivial task never answer. I would love to see someone draw up a hypothetical model. That would at least be a step in the right direction for those who advocate that online poker is or can be rigged.
I’ll repeat a point I made in Ed’s comments. It is very easy to rig a single hand. It is more difficult but relatively easy to rig the game for a specific player. However it is far, far more complex to rig the game in favor of thousands of poor players.
Just think about the number of hands that have to be rigged. Every time you rig a hand you have to create one or more offsetting rigs so as not to create easily detectable patterns. Eventually, you’re rigging the outcome of every hand dealt.
I do agree that it is possible. I’m sure if you designed an entire system around rigging games it could be done. Like they say about almost anything in technology; given enough time, money, and resources anything is possible. The question is whether or not it’s practical.
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Hi, my name is Bill Rini and this is my poker blog. I've been blogging about poker and the poker industry since around 2003-ish. Like most people I started out playing poker as entertainment in home games whenever we wanted to sit around and smoke cigars, drink beer, and eat pizza, and needed a good excuse. I started playing online shortly after the first online card rooms opened and it wasn't long before I was playing 20, 30, or even 40 hours a week or more. One day I received a phone call about a program manager position at Tiltware which was the company that consulted to Full Tilt Poker on software development and marketing. After Tiltware I spent about 2.5 years working at Party Poker where I was the poker room manager.
{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
It always makes me laugh when people say poker is rigged. Some of the hands I’ve seen live are laughable but nobody accusses the dealer of shady dealings.
Good post, I will put away my tin foil hat for now!
Hiya, Bill!
This an example where I think Ed is serving the greater good, whether or not everything he says can be supported. I’ve thought about posting on this myself, but whether I do or not, I think Stars is in clear error here. One reason is technical and the other is philosophical.
Reason 1: There are clear guidelines for how triple draw is supposed to be dealt. I disremember if that game is in Lou Krieger and Sheree Bykofsky’s “The Rules of Poker” (that’ll be 50 cents, guys!) but I’m absolutely sure the printed rules are out there somewhere. So the “because we can” argument as stated by Stars is meritless.
Second, Stars needs to -not- do things that give any sort of mathematical credence to the “online poker is rigged” crowd. Mathematically, the effect of the change made will involve a very slight juicing of the results and will result in something like one extra player being in the pot maybe every thousandth hand in triple draw, and maybe a little more frequently in badugi. It therefore increases rake by some tiny, all-but-imperceptible amount. When it’s measured statistically, it’s probably down in the four- or five-decimal-point range regarding its effect on play. It’s negligible in triple draw because there are almost never enough players in a hand to bring a reshuffle into play.
But even if it’s an unnoticeable juicing, it’s still a juicing that exists in the mathematical sense, and can therefore be used as a mathematical “proof” that the game is rigged to increase rake or whatever. It’s the wrong tool to hand to the wrong crowd.
I have no clue which big-name pro came up with the idea, but famous players can still have bad ideas and this one should have been deep-sixed. Was the unknown player on any of the rules committees that have sprung up to promote rules standardization, like Jesse Jones’ WPA? I’d guess not. Hachem’s been on that board, IIRC, so he’s probably not the pro that floated this one.
I’ll skip the rest of the tinfoil hat portion of the discussion.
Stars’ handling of dead blinds is wrong, too. That’s a much greater issue in terms of play because it can affect strategy at the table, but it’s not a “Rigged!” issue that can be used against the site and against online poker in general. That’s the key difference.
Bill,
I’m curious what you think of the other half of Ed’s post in which he talks about a way in which the PokerStars did “rig the deck” by ensuring no player would receive a card he had drawn before after a reshuffle. They didn’t do it because they wanted more rake, but because they thought it was a better game.
I think it would be trivially easy. You just 1) figure out which players you want to shift money from and which you want to shift money to, and 2) Shade things a small amount that will avoid detection.
For 1) there are many ways to figure out who you want to get the money. Simplest might be to rank order a given table based on who has the highest ratio of money in their account per big blind at the table. You maximize rake if no one ever goes busto
For 2) Everytime one of the richest players gets dealt AA-QQ, you simply redeal everyone else at the table to not get dealt AA-99/AK/AQ. Or verytime the poorest players see a flop with 2 suited cards you specify the first flop card must be one of their suit. Fine tune things are there are a thousand things like that to try.
You don’t need to worry about them misplaying hands, or statistical metrics catching things. Just given them a small, difficult to detect edge and let the law of large numbers work its magic.
Okay so you don’t think online poker sites will rig the cards or that they don’t rig the cards. Fine thats your opinion. Now think about this. If the fish continue to lose at poker they will stop playing so what will the site have left playing in cash games? They will have all the pros playing so tight that there will be minimal rake made because as we all know that most ring games no flop is seen. When no flop is seen the poker site doesn’t make any rake and therefore wouldn’t make as much money. Now there are no fish playing because they have lost all their money, so there are only good players left to play so everyones winnings decrease including the poker site. The number of players greatly decreases so the site is out millions of dollars. I started playing online poker and stopped because I was sucked out on so much that I couldn’t stand it any longer and will never play online poker again. When you flop a boat and lose to runner runner boat 60 percent of the time or you get dealt qq 108 times and 100 of those times someone else at the table has aa or kk something is definitely wrong. I know that suckouts happen as I have been sucked out on and sucked out on during live play, but its the frequency that it happens online that is troubling. I understand that the amount of hands played online is greater, but there should be no more runner runner suckouts per number of hands played then there are at the casino and the odds don’t change. It is almost like the cpu is setting up hands and skipping over cards that the people don’t need. Having aa and losing to a lower pp is not uncommon for me as it happened at a 60 percent rate. Or flopping a set and losing to a runner runner flush from the person who had the aa and hit their flush on the river using one card happened at around 40 percent. Just rediculous odds. If only the tight aggressive players played ther would be no action or very little and therefore very little rake. If everyone playing knew that they don’t make a call without the proper odds what a boring game it would be and the site would have greatly reduced profits. So there is definitely incentive to rig the cards. I am not a programmer, but video games can rig things to your advantage or the cpu’s advantage so why couldn’t the online sites? Thanks for listening to me ramble and good luck to all you people playing online poker.
of course poker is rigged
sites have been caught
people always cheat for more profit
look at the stock market and bushs elections
to say it isnt rigged, must take a lot of cash from poker companies. i hope u get paid well bilL!
Terry,
Actually, if you read what I’ve written on the topic I say that rigging a game is when the house alters the natural state of the game in order to profit.
UB and Absolute were cases where a malicious employee (or consultant or ??) went in and modified the game for his own gain. That doesn’t fit my definition of rigged. That’s simply cheating and I’ve never said that someone can’t cheat the game. In fact, I’ve written the ways that the game can be cheated online and off.
Bill
Terry - Side note: I think it really detracts from taking your argument seriously when you somehow try to connect Bush and Absolute / UB. It makes you sound like a paranoid, tin-foil hat wearing, lunatic who when he isn’t going around and posting on internet websites is down at the mall talking to himself.
Much better to keep your argument to the facts being discussed.
I agree with Pud. Some of the hands that you see when you’re playing live are horrendous.
quote” it is far, far more complex to rig the game in favor of thousands of poor players.”
Do you know how much money Full Tilt have ???
Full Tilt is obviously rigged. If you havn’t lost big yet im sure you will do soon. Im sorry but there are way to many suckouts. Read the forums. We know when weve been had and the only way is to not play because you can’t beat their system whatever it is !!!
Full tilt makes a joke out of people who want to play real poker
Online poker is definitely rigged. The customer base is not infinite and many site will even give away money to gain players. It is a must for any site to keep the money spread around and the action constant. If not, the good players will eventually win all and the rakes and business will die. Any player who have played both live and online know it is rigged. I don’t get how you can HONESTLY say you believe it is not. They have lied over and over saying how its impossible for someone to see your hole cards and “superuser accounts” don’t exist. Obviously they do. What else are they lying about? In an industry where money is king and deceit, bluffing and trickery are the order of the day, the possibility that online poker is completely fair and random are worst than the odds of winning a lottery. How can you so strongly defend that position? Unless….
You’re not thinking straight, especially not in light of the UB scandal (perpetrated by the previous owners, who by some accounts — see 2 + 2 boards — remain the current owners, behind the scenes. The past owners, specifically Russ Hamilton, reportedly cheated players out of millions.
The argument should actually be this: THE BEST WAY TO MAXIMIZE PROFITS is ultimately to maximize the rake. The problem a poker room faces is that its customer base can never be large enough (there’s always more money to be made), and that in poker the reality is that the big fish eat the little fish. At each level, eventually, large chunks of the customer base get eaten up by other players, and as these players attempt to ascend the betting structure ranks, they in turn “donate” to the bigger fish in the ascending levels. The money keeps moving up the food chain, and at the lower ranks — where the greatest number of players are — the fish keep getting eaten up and eventually busted (or at least beaten until they don’t want to buy in again).
The most profitable strategy — not taking ethics or fairness into account — would be, then, to assist the weaker players in some way, or if you prefer to assist the LOSING players in some way, so that the maximum number of players are in action at any given moment, and so that the rake is maximized at all times.
This is simply the math of it. The customer base is not unlimited, as sites are finding out, and they have to compete for customers. This is, for example, WHY SITES ADVERTISE (duh). The size of the rake does not vary in any given ring game according to the amount of chips any given player has; it varies in the cardroom according to the number of players in action. So, again, the most profitable situation would be one where as many players as possible are in action. This is why THE PROFITABLE MOVE (in an unregulated industry) would be to automatically assist losing players so that more players stay in action longer, maximizing the rake.
Kahnawake, as their UB handling has proven (if you don’t already acknowledge that they’re not a legit regulatory agency, since no legitimate regulatory agency would depend for its own income on providing services to the businesses they regulate, so that the regulatory needs the businesses to prosper for its own success), cannot be seriously considered a presence that makes the gaming industry deserve to be considered anything but unregulated.
It is entirely possible to generate completely random deck shuffles, and then distribute cards in an unrandom way (favoring, for example, weaker/losing players over stronger/winning players), so that aggregate data on cards distributed show random card patterns, but where actual distribution isn’t in fact random (or is in reality “rigged”).
The strongest argument for the games being rigged is (1) that rigging them (to help weak players) is the most profitable way to run an online cardroom, (2) programming the software to do it is not difficult, (3) there is no effective regulatory agency in place to prevent such a manipulation of the software program, (4) and that the industry is populated by the types of personalities who would not avoid an ethical breach if there were not accountability in place to prevent it.
As far as “4″ goes, there is a certain type of person who tends to gravitate toward starting an online gaming site. Russell Hamilton isn’t unique in being a person of that type. There was Dutch Boyd, there are many others. There is honor among thieves, on occasion, but it’s the honor of…well…thieves.
The most rational analysis argues FOR the likelihood of games being rigged, not against. It’s EMOTION and DESIRE that make it FEEL like the opposite holds.
There absolutely are sites that are rigged, and running bots, etc. Sunshine-Poker was one (I think I’m remembering the name correctly, it might have been Sunrise-Poker), for example, with almost no through traffic, but that always had some full tables that played like the biggest fish imaginable, and then if you had the poor judgment to deposit funds and play they suddenly turned into the biggest rocks on earth, and played as if they could see your cards.
That is a documented one, if you go back through RGP threads.
There absolutely have been rigged online sites. But it’s not a question of whether there’s one type of rigging or another, but of what one would expect reality to dictate. Reality tends to argue for the existence of some form of “rigging.” Belief, of course, is a function of desire, however, for most people
Apologies: those last two posts were mine, and were directed to the original article’s author, not comment writers.
The question is asked, “who is OL poker rigged in favour for ?” and “how do sites rig OL poker for some and not others?”. well that’s pretty basic. OL poker is rigged for the site and for no-one in particular (on the software side of things), but the fish do benifit from this in the long run. “Action pots” do this. by creating action pots ie. top pair Vs flush draws post-flop, bigger pots are played (benifiting the site in rake) and making the game statistically more “luck”, which definitly benefits fish. In a game where no-one hits the flop, generally a top player has the advantage and will slowly win a game.
Reason for sites to do this - Well….. If a site could double the rake on every table increasing profits %100……mmmmmmm, well lets think about that.