Comments on: RT Hand Analyzer for Rigged Poker Games

By: Bill Rini

Bill Rini — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 21:33:58 +0000

@Kent: Since you decided to shower us with your wisdom on this topic. . . You do know that most live casinos have prop players, right? That would pretty much be #1 in your list without the ability to see your hands.

And I do make a distinction between the games being rigged and people cheating. It’s one thing for Ultimate Bet or Absolute to have players who cans see the hole cards of other players and another thing to say that they rig the hands for action flops or whatever.

Technically, it’s very easy to give a “super user” access to all the data during the hand. Riggging the game is an entirely different story. To rig the game so fish lose less and good players make less requires a level of sophistication that no poker room has displayed yet. They can’t even hide blatant cheating with super-user accounts, what makes you think they have doom switches and all sorts of other traps built in to punish winning players?

The cold hard truth is that if you are a loser at online poker, chances are you are not that good of a poker player. At one of the biggest poker rooms in the world, we ran a study of poker win/losses and 92% of all players lose money. Do you really think you’re in that 8% that breaks even or makes money?

And if you think you are . . . I’ll go back to one of my original arguments that why do the most respected winning players on sites like 2+2 never claim the game is rigged? If these doom switches and such existed wouldn’t these players be the target of them? These are guys who take hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars off of the site a year. Do you really expect the world to believe that PokerStars rigs the games so you don’t make $50?

By: Kent

Kent — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 21:08:31 +0000

Logically no reason it shouldn’t be rigged, no regulations means there is no repercussions for rigging the software.

Below is legitimately 100% allowed in online poker by the companies:
1) Having employees pose as players with the ability to see and or control hands
2) Having hands play out that would result in games ending fast leading to more games be played, as once a game ends players are most likely to start another

Other play not legitimately allowed but very easy to pull off:
3) Sharing information with other players by any means such as phone or instant messagers (run 3+ ring games at once with 2 others doing the same while sharing information)

In short would you: go to a casino ring game and sit at a table with 3 other people employees from the casino, 3 other people that are openly texting information to each other on the table, and the deal randomly flipping over players cards and shifting cards around until a certain hand is on the table. Wait, you won’t be live casino poker is regulated by legal bounds.

Casinos play by the odds to make money, only poker plays by foul play to make money. That simple.

By: scotty

scotty — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 11:18:59 +0000

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.

By: Mashup Monday: Funnies From the Past — Bill's Poker Blog

Mashup Monday: Funnies From the Past — Bill's Poker Blog — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 11:05:12 +0000

[...] of course, no list would be complete without the RT (Rigtard) Hand History Analyzer for Rigged Poker Games. I know, many people have wondered what the RT stood for. Now you [...]

By: Bill Rini

Bill Rini — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 05:41:01 +0000

Nothing ever will, Mark :-)

By: Mark

Mark — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 00:28:11 +0000

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.

By: Bill Rini

Bill Rini — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 18:21:24 +0000

James,

Much appreciated. A big fan of your blog.

Cheers,

Bill

By: James Devlin

James Devlin — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 05:04:53 +0000

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.