Over the last several years I’ve done several posts refuting the argument that online poker is rigged. In fact, I’ve gone as far as make fun of people who insist that online poker is rigged in several posts.
Dear Mr. Online Poker Is Rigged
But in the end the biggest hurdle in arguing for the legitimacy of online poker is that it’s difficult to prove a negative. Just because there is no evidence that online poker isn’t rigged doesn’t mean that it isn’t rigged.
That got me thinking and so awhile back I began doing some research into whether or not it could be proved that online poker was rigged. Without trying to draw too much fanfare I began contacting experts in statistics and mathematics and asking them for help on devising a method that could definitively state whether or not a game was rigged.
Unfortunately, in all of our research we were unable to come up with a model that was 100% accurate. The best we could do was devise a method that would give us a probability for a game being rigged.
So I went back to the drawing board and attempted to put together a tool that would rank a room or a hand for it’s “riggedness.” The more likely it was to be rigged the higher the score. After consulting with the experts who helped me devise this model we all seemed to agree that anything from 80% certainty on up was very likely rigged.
The next step was to get a certifying agency to validate our results which took a lot of time but I was eventually able to do. With certification in hand I made the rounds at leading online poker rooms and pitched the idea of offering refunds if our tool identified a hand as potentially rigged. Unfortunately with new rooms springing up almost daily it doesn’t seem fair to say who said yes or who said no as omission or inclusion on any list could potentially be construed as an endorsement or condemnation.
So I took the model, some programming, and put together the tool that I’ve named the RT Hand Analyzer for Rigged Games. I’m making it available for free for the time being but I may charge for it at a later date if I find that people are using it successfully to obtain refunds. I mean, I did all the work. Why shouldn’t I get a little of the honey?
It’s still in beta stage but I invite you to give it a try and let me know your results.
RT Hand Analyzer for Rigged Games
photocred goes to laffy4k
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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.
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Love it, love it, love it.
One source of hard to data to prove the absence of rigging in online poker would be hand history aggregator sites such as sharkscope.com, officialpokerrankings.com, thepokerdb.com, pokertableratings.com, and so forth. For example, when sharkscope.com asserts that approximately 1/3rd of SNG players are winning, it’s difficult to seriously make the argument for rigging.
At the same time, given the lack of due diligence and regulation in the online gambling arena, I don’t think it’s ridiculous to assert that some site, somewhere, has been rigged for some amount of time. There will always be the bad apple out there, the rogue employee, and so forth. I call this the “Ultimate Bet phenomena”. Of course that wasn’t rigging per se. But it was malfeasance.
Great (and funny) post.
James,
Much appreciated. A big fan of your blog.
Cheers,
Bill
That pretty sweet man, seems like a ton of work went into this so kudos to you. However Im sure you already know what Im about to tell you… it’s not going to make a difference in people’s perception of the game being rigged.
Nothing ever will, Mark :-)
Well it may or may not be rigged. During my many years of play what I have found raises my eyebrows. Heads up for example. If you start with a lower chip stack I have found the cards to favor the player with more chips. Next is the betting patttern, aggressive play with the higher chip stack will be awarded. The cards at different limit levels seem to vary, more hands dealt with multiple players entering. You can agrue that you have better players as you go higher. Try testing, if you can a 6 handed table and check throughout, you will be amazed at the cards that are dealt.