Bill's Poker Blog » Is Online Poker Rigged?

Poker Bots

Bill Rini — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 04:40:26 +0000

A really good article/op-ed piece on Pokerati about poker bots Tim Chilcote. Tim sat down with Darse Billings of the University of Alberta Computer Poker Research Group, the folks who created the poker bot Polaris that played Phil Laak and Ali Eslami, to get some insight into what sort of threat a poker bot would be in the online poker environment.

One of the more interesting points from the article is:

Bots sound dangerous, and it would be easy to infer that their skill is only going to grow and that their dominance of the poker world is a forgone conclusion. But for online players who fear losing their bankroll to a robot opponent, Billings wholeheartedly dismissed their concern as ludicrous. “The amount of time and knowledge that would go into making even a mediocre bot,” he said, “makes them nearly impossible to run online.”

Billings also offered that bots are completely beatable, even suggesting that players should welcome bots. Part of Billings’ initial research for the Polaris project was to build a rock-paper-scissors bot that would consistently break even. The Polaris poker bot was an extension of this rock-paper-scissors design, and the bot plays poker exclusively to break even, only profiting when human players succumb to their own weaknesses. If you’re still worried, it’s worth mentioning that, despite fears, bots are not out fishing in multi-table tournaments; they’re designed to play heads-up limit games. So a strong limit player could, in theory, profit by playing bots.

I have written about this in the past. In fact, in this post “Poker Bots Can Bluff” there is a quote from a French researcher who has created a poker bot that can bluff effectively saying “Given the current state of poker bots, if you are losing to them you should be ashamed”.

I’m not in favor or poker bots. I find them interesting from a purely intellectual perspective. However, it’s pretty clear that some of the people who probably know as much about poker bots as anyone don’t view them as a credible threat at this stage in their development. The University of Alberta Computer Poker Research Group has been working on this with some of the best minds out there since 1995 and if they think there’s still a long way to go then I have my doubts about whether some guy is going to sell you the ultimate winning poker bot for $79.95.

The biggest problem with creating a realistic poker bot that can beat the game is that it’s expensive to develop. If your goal was simply to make money it would be far more profitable to set up a very basic, non-thinking, break-even bot and collect the rakeback. Then you set up 50 poker room accounts and let them run wild at relatively low-stakes tables. That’s basically what a lot of bot software vendors sell today (though most are crap). You tell it how to play under a variety of conditions, how aggressive or passive you want to be, etc and then let it go play some break-even poker.

But anything that’s programmed to play by a set of rules, rather than to think for itself, will be pretty easy to figure out if you’re even a little observant. If you notice that the suspected bot never 3-bets pre-flop without a certain range of hands then when you get 3-bet you know exactly what range of hands you’re up against.

Certainly some level of complexity could be introduced by the bot author(s) but you still have a bot that doesn’t really think. It’s playing by some set of instructions that tell it what to do. You can try to randomize things as much as possible but too much randomization of how it plays would cause it to lose.

When you look at some of the recent bot busts that have been in the news they typically employ very crude tactics. Many even seem unable to beat the low-stakes games and thus collude in order to win.

The biggest problem that poker rooms have today is that they aren’t doing a good enough job keeping even these very obvious bots off their sites. Very few sites devote any real level of money or resources for identifying and combating bots. Many would be picked up just by improving the automated collusion detection on the site.

Another Rigtard Email

Bill Rini — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 05:57:32 +0000

I constantly get a stream of emails from rigtards. Some I post but 99% of the rest go in the trash. I don’t know why they feel the need to write to me. For instance, my Proof That Online Poker is Rigged parody posts has 250 comments. Here are some of the gems from that thread:

WHAT A MORON! Online poker is rigged and you try and make light of it using stupidity? What a baffoon

ur stupid and probably dont understand poker
PROVE ME WRONG i am DARING U!!!FAGGOT!

you’re a faggot with way to much damn time

Bill Rini you suck big penis!

What makes me laugh even more than the angry people are the ones who can’t figure out that it’s a joke.

Excelent con, if anyone took the time to enlarge the original picture you will see that thos cards have been added in. The first give away is the different resolutions. Now whos trying to defraud people. Anyone with slight knowledge of Photoshop could add extra crdas in, and do a better job at that this idiot!!!

WOW!!! I DID THE SAME THING AND ZOOMED IN it looks like that imagine ware can edit to…there was no card in his sleve even if there was it wouldnt be able to be used and it proly would be hidden better…

You are a damn idiot. The CIA doesn’t sell any kind of software on ebaY, much less “classified” vector digital imaging software for $50. By the way, do you even know what that means? You would have had to take vector calculus with some advanced computer science courses to even begin to comprehend how that stuff works, and judging from your rambling, I would guess you struggled to graduate high school. Putting this bullshit in your story completely discredits anything you said.

The guy with the “the CIA doesn’t sell any kind of software on ebaY” had me laughing more than my original post. In fact, I’m laughing right now as I write this because I can’t believe someone is that thick.

Anyway, as I mentioned, a lot of the hate and insanity comes via my contact form. People feel compelled to email me and share their thoughts about online poker being rigged. I’m not sure why. Do they think they’re going to convince me? Here’s one I got the other day.

Thanks for the hand history program that was suppose to tell if poker was
rigged, Y.F.D. Since You work for one of the rigged sites(full tilt) It’s a scam
just like you!!! That site couldn’t deal a fair hand if it had real cards played
in every hand. It’s a fracken joke just like you. It’s set up for the fricken
donkies to win and the donks to make a profit off of it, just like you. Why it’s
not rigged take that advice to the dumb azz donkies that believe that a fen 37
will win most of the time over an A A and tell him to come see me in a live game
and ill take a 100 dollars a hand every time against his sht hand in a live deal
instead of the sht rigged full tilt stuff!!!! So Bill I think that you can take
your hand anlizer and put it somewhere the donkies hang out near your azz
because it’s bull sht that the best hand doesnt hold upthe greater percent of
the time on that stupid site(full Tilt) and in real life it holds up about 75%
of the time vers the fen donkie take your bs and put it where the sun don’t
shine!!! Thanks for the Bs hand generator it a joke like u. Thanks Scott

It appears that he found my site via the RT Hand Analyzer for Rigged Games which is another humor related post where I invite people to input their hand history and it will tell them if the hand looks suspicious. All it actually does is make them wait and then it tells them that they’re an idiot for thinking online poker is rigged. So I guess I can understand why he’s pissed off.

Still makes for a good laugh though. I love the raw anger and emotion they put into their responses. Many are very creative in their insults. I mean, “I think that you can take your hand anlizer and put it somewhere the donkies hang out near your azz” is just gold.

Good work, rigtards. Keep ‘em coming. You guys make my day.

Playing the Lotto: ZOMG It’s Riggedz

Bill Rini — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 02:51:42 +0000

I was reading an interesting article about a two year old study that shows that poor people spend approximately 9% of their wages buying lottery tickets. I’ve always felt that this was the cruelest joke in the online gambling debate. Everyone who knows anything about the lottery system knows that poor people are the biggest purchasers of lottery tickets. And best off, the government runs the numbers! The same politicians that say stuff like “click your mouse and lose your house” are perfectly happy to also say “buy a quick pick before they evict.”

Anyway, I wasn’t writing to rant about the lottery system but one of the comments had me rolling. Greg said:

I found out from a state lottery employee that half the time the lottery is rigged so no one wins. You see the computer knows every combo played so they easily know what numbers to draw. She said about half the time its rigged. I said arent you worried telling me this I will tell and she said no one will believe me anyways so go ahead you have no proof. Basically she said they had no choice the state budget is so broke and playing the lottery honest didnt bring in enough money but rigging it increased profits big time to balance the state budget. So if you read this and still play the lottery you are an idiot.

So they’re rigging the lottery now too? 200,000,000 to 1 odds wasn’t good enough for them so they felt a need to make the odds of winning even worse?

I’m 99.99999% sure this guy is full of sh*t but it just goes to show that when people can’t win something they think they should they automatically assume that there is some conspiracy going on. I mean, if you ran it legit and then rigged it, wouldn’t some academic or consumer protection watchdog not notice a huge spike in profits on relatively flat sales?

Sigh: Online Poker Still Isn’t Rigged

Bill Rini — Mon, 31 May 2010 11:51:05 +0000

Someone just posted a comment on my 2005 post about why online poker is not rigged and I think it brings up some interesting points I haven’t necessarily covered before. So instead of responding where it will be buried in a 5 year old post, I’ll respond to “duh” here.

Warning a lot of sarcasim
The numbers you see in this post are mostly fictional but I hope u get my drift
@ gavin

You actually believe pokersites are happy with 1 mil as opposed to 100 mill. OK sure I believe you, but only because you said it.

My common sence tells me that without fishes you dont have a pokersite or at least not one that makes money. All you have are some regs playing other regs obviously a pokersite is more than happy with that.LOL

Because on any of the big sites, playing cashgames with all regs at your table is why we play poker. We dont want to play weaker bad players, rather loose/flip money with regs.

The only way a pokersite can keep fish not losing their entire savings, mortgage etc etc to regs is to rig the deck. I mean cmon where’s your common sense, luck plays a part thats why regs lose too often, suuuuure. Its funny though that these fishes never seem to be lucky when playing live, yes they might win a few hands down to luck but beat me or shall I say kill me the way they do online NEVER.

Actually, it wasn’t until recently that many card rooms figured out that you make money on the fish, not the sharks. In fact, some rooms still haven’t figured that out. I guess I was fortunate to work at online poker rooms who got it very early but I still talk to people who work at poker rooms and various affiliates and they still don’t seem to understand how the poker ecosystem works.

So, if you’re telling me people too dumb to figure out how the poker money flows through the system would then be smart enough to rig the game in favor of the fish, I find that rather hard to accept.

And even though we’ve seen countless examples of poker rooms letting serious bugs slip through the system (awarding the pot to the wrong player, security/encryption flaws, etc) how is it that nobody has been caught rigging the game for the fish? Billions and billions of hands dealt and not a single person has been able to find any abnormalities.

In fact, when I worked at Party we were contacted by a world famous economist who wanted access to a few billion hand histories because he wanted to prove that poker was a skill game. We were in the process of discussing details when another big name poker room stepped in and offered to supply the data. Now, why would two poker rooms get into a pissing contest over supplying their hand histories if they were rigging the game?

And before anybody talks about UltimateBet and Absolute, they were not rigging the games to favor one player over another. They were allowing players to cheat. That’s different from rigging the game. The outcomes were not changed to favor any player. They did have a backdoor that allowed players to see their opponent’s hole cards but the cards were still dealt as they normally would.

It’s not impossible to rig the game but a lot harder than most people think. Maybe there is some no-name poker room rigging the games but the larger the room (in terms of players) the less likely it is.

I litterally dont stand a chance when playing online agaisnt the weakest of players. Why is it that they always wake up with a hand, always and i mean always have what they are drawing to if a 3 flush comes and they bet they show suited connectors, if the board pairs and they bet the river its a boat. When you’ve seen as many hands as i have(over a mill)you cant help but to become suspicous.

What I think of online bingo I mean poker, its TV poker all I seem to see are huge hands, isnt it suppose to be hard to hit a pair let alone constant sets, straights and flushes. Always one hand over an other. Iam scared to get it in with aces because I know im only a coinflip vs any 2. Live im licking my chops as I know its hard to make something. Online though pokersites wants me to have aces becuase the fish cant fold k8o to an allin bet.

Actually, one mistake I see very often with players is that they think they can play the same level online as in a live casino. At The Hustler in Los Angeles I had no problem sitting down at the $25/$50 fixed limit. In fact, I would normally crush the game. But there’s no way I could play at that limit online. The highest limit online where I showed a profit (and not even a healthy profit) was $10/$20.

Why do sites rig the deck this way, well for obvious reasons. What I see a lot of people overlook is the fact that by doing this not only do fish continue playing on their site, the site makes a hell of lot more money than one would think. Take Stars as an example 300k players, 10% regs and 90% fish. If fish stop playing Stars are left with 30k regs might aswell stop doing business as its not profitable for them no longer.

That’s actually a pretty interesting point. It’s true that about 90% of poker players are net losers. So isn’t it funny that so many people consider themselves winning players? I’ve never met anybody who’s ever admitted to being a losing player.

You know where I’ve also seen that? When I was a stockbroker. I never met a client who lost money in the stock market. I never met anybody who ever admitted to losing money in the 1987 market crash. None. Everybody felt the market was too high and pulled out just before the crash.

I even had guys who would trade with me and tell me they were up trading for the month and I would go over their trades and they were down. Way down.

The vast majority of people who tell you they’re winning players are liars.

Face it companies like this are dependant on their fishes, if they dont rig the deck fishes will lose everything to the regs, smarten up and leave. Stars cant afford not to rig the deck.

Or they could spend millions upon millions on marketing.

This whole argument is so flawed it’s hard to know where to start. This argument only works if one believes that the size of the poker market is fixed and finite. But we know that’s not true. One has only to look at Poker Scout to see that the overall market size is still increasing.

To the people that do not believe that unfair, greedy, shitty, no morals or standards people exist who blatantly steal your deposits(the pokerroom owners etc etc)prob the mafia. I say I too believe in fairytales and Superman is real. Heck even God almighty himself came to me and told me himself that I am the only person that can prove he exists.

Anywayz the bottom line is online poker cant be rigged because, they just wouldnt do it. If you can make 10 mill a year, why on earth would you want to make 10 billion a year. You just wouldnt risk it to make that little bit more.LOLLLL

Again, another faulty argument. First off, many of these companies are publicly traded. PartyGaming, 888, etc would all have a hard time explaining a sudden windfall. Likewise, any company who wasn’t rigging the games would be screaming bloody murder because they know what your expected ROI is.

That doesn’t mean that there isn’t some shady dude sitting in a shack in Costa Rica ripping people off but why would you pick poker? You can use hand histories to prove that a game is rigged. Why not casino? People will pump money into a slot machine forever regardless of the payout. And there’s no hand histories. Or blackjack. Or any game where the odds are in the houses favor.

One of the other major flaws in this argument is there are so many legitimate ways the poker room can make more money. Shortening the time to act by 1 second would translate into millions for PokerStars. They can change how the rake is calculated (e.g. instead of .10 on every $1 make it .01 on over .10). I could list at least 50 completely legitimate things a poker room could do that would translate into huge profits.

The beats/cold decks etc etc seems so surreal to everyone except a handfull of posters. I went through a number of blogs that have this discussion, what i have realized is that the people that say it isnt rigged are always in the minority.

And after having had this conversation more times than you’ve read blog posts about it I have yet to see a single person offer any proof.

Or let’s go back to the 90% fish to 10% “regs” numbers. If only 10% of the players are winning players and they’re the ones getting cold decked, why would the majority of people claim that it’s rigged? Are the fish complaining because they’re winning too much?

Wouldn’t it be faaaaaar more likely that there are a lot of players who aren’t as good as they think they are and use the crutch of the site being rigged to explain why they can’t beat the game?

And finally if I had a fair deal I probably would have been up more than triple to what im up now( yes iam a winning player who thinks online is rigged to fck).

Like I’ve said before, I’ve never met someone who thinks online poker is rigged who admits to being a losing player. Yet, of all of the professional players I know, all the way from 12-tabling micro-limits grinders to high stakes players, none of them think it’s rigged.

Taking away an allin pot of you is worth double, if I start with 100 and ship 20 allin and win i make 120 if i lose im on 80 difference in my roll is 40. Some people tend to forget this and say well i lost 1 buyin, actually you lost 2 buyins.

I guess that’s one way to look at it if you were a 100% favorite to win and still ended up losing. I mean, this logic just sounds so whacky. It assumes that you are guaranteed to win when you get your money in ahead but you also get full credit when you get your money in behind and suck out.

Incredible Odds

Bill Rini — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 07:10:31 +0000

I had the pleasure of meeting a local musician here in Bangkok the other night. Actually I had seen him playing over at Moonshine’s once or twice but he stopped in to say hello to my friend Jack and we were introduced formally.

Tony is an older American guy. How old, I don’t know but he’s got a look that says he’s been around before. Nice guy though and always quick with a laugh.

Several months ago Jack told me an incredible story about Tony that I wanted to share. It was a few years ago and Tony was playing a gig in one of the local bars in Bangkok. During the set he noticed a young guy sitting in the audience wearing a US Army fatigue top with the same unit patch as his old unit in Vietnam.

Obviously the man was too young to have been a vet (at least a Vietnam Vet) but it intrigued him so when he finished his set he went over to the young man’s table and introduced himself saying that he had served in that unit during ‘Nam. As the man stretched out his arm to shake his he saw that the nametag on the top was the same as his last name, which he mentioned to the younger man.

The young man explained that he had purchased the fatigue top at a small market on some side street in Bangkok just that afternoon. He thought it looked cool and was able to bargain down the price to something fairly cheap so he bought it.

Tony said, “Well, can I ask you a small favor? Can you open up the jacket pocket and see if there’s anything sewn inside the pocket?” The younger man obliged and there was Tony’s name on another nametag sewn inside the pocket.

Tony had sold all of his gear to a military surplus shop when he finished his military duty after Vietnam and had been traveling around the world since. But somehow his fatigue jacket had followed him around the world and ended up in the same bar he was playing a gig in.

The reason I bring this up is so many people argue that online poker must be rigged because something with a low statistical probability occurs to them. Maybe they have been dealt aces three times in a row or whatever. To them that proves the game is rigged.

But anytime the probability of something is greater than 0, given enough trials, it is expected to happen.

If my math is correct, getting dealt pocket aces three times in a row should happen approx every 1 in 2,385,443 hands. That means that the chances of it happening are still greater than 0. And if you take a room like PokerStars and let’s say they deal a billion hands per year, it is not unusual for that to occur 419 times a year.

So, your opponent catching pocket aces three times in a row has a low probability but it’s expected to happen to 419 people per year (assuming 1 billion hands dealt). Does it prove anything about whether or not the game is rigged? No.

I mean, what are the odds that Sammy Farha with AT would flop AAT against Oliver Hudson with pocket tens in the very first hand in the WSOP main event at the featured table? I’m not even going to do the math but it’s not very likely.

But because it’s live people are willing to accept that it’s just poker. When it happens online many of those same people assume it’s because the game is rigged.

That’s one of the reasons when anybody says something like “You never see anything like that ever happen in a live game,” I immediately dismiss anything else they’ve said or are going to say. Because I can post YouTube videos all day long showing highly unlikely events occurring during televised programs.

And out of all of the hands played how many have been televised? A low percentage to be sure. So if you can see these low probability events occurring from a rather small sample size then people saying they’ve never seen it in a live card room either aren’t playing very many hands or their experience is the true statistical anomaly.

photocred to Steve Snodgrass

Data Mining – Does Isildur1 Have a Case Against Brian Hastings?

Bill Rini — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 08:42:48 +0000

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, the big news in the nosebleed stakes poker circles these days has been Hastings cleaning Isildur1 for over $4 million in one session. It’s since been revealed that Brian Hastings, Brian Townsend, and Cole South spent some time combining their hand histories against Isildur1 so they could formulate a strategy to beat him.

Many, like F-Train, have sided with Isildur1 that this was a clear violation of Full Tilt Poker’s T&C which state:

“The use of shared hand histories provides detailed information on opponents a player has little or no personal experience playing against, and is deemed to be an unfair advantage. Violating this policy is subject to the maximum penalties for prohibited software use?”

Meanwhile there are those like Change100 who liken what the boys did to nothing more than a group of players sitting around and comparing notes on an opponent.

Who’s right? Well, they both are . . . sort of.

The first thing about this though is that we have to understand the difference between the spirit of the law and the letter of the law. The rule quoted above was intended to put a police in place to prevent rampant data mining. Players would simply fire up Full Tilt and leave it on for days while it watched 12 or more tables and they would just mine all of those games into PokerTracker so the next time they sat at a table they would have background data on nearly every player at the table.

Obviously, this creates an unfair advantage since none of the other players are aware that their play is being tracked and players can amass huge databases of playing information on their opponents without revealing any of theirs.

So that was the spirit of the law. Did Team CardRunners violate the spirit of the law in what they did? In my opinion, no. They took their collective knowledge of this one particular player and as a group analyzed his play. Isildur1 played against all three opponents and knew that all three opponents were part of CardRunners and it would actually be stupid to assume that they were not at least discussing strategy with each other.

The spirit of the law is attempting to deal with indiscriminant data mining. Even in the wording it says it is to prevent players from having detailed history on players they have little or no playing history with. But Isildur1 and Hastings have played together before. And being so high-profile it would be somewhat naïve to assume that all three of the pros had not watched each other play against Isildur1.

So the question is, did combining their hand histories give them any particular advantage that they might not have gained anyway simply by doing their own hand history analysis individually and the coming together and comparing notes? Because, that certainly would not be in violation of the rules. Players talk about other players all the time. To compare notes would not be unethical nor violate any stated or implied rules.

If you believe that combining their databases gave them an advantage then you probably believe Isildur1 was wronged here. If you believe they would have spotted the same flaws in his game comparing notes of their sessions against him then one has to conclude that they were within the spirit of the law.

Now, did they break the letter of the law? I think they did. I’m not even sure they were aware that the rule was that strictly worded but ignorance of the law is no excuse.

I think Full Tilt’s 30-day suspension is an appropriate punishment for the CardRunners team. It demonstrates that even though the letter of the law was broken it was not so severe as to warrant severing their pro contracts or anything else of that nature.

It’s been reported that Isildur1 is going to file a complaint to Full Tilt now that he has become aware of the CardRunner’s rule violation. On one hand I don’t think he’s entitled to anything since the rule violation was more to the letter of the law rather than the spirit of the law. On the other, I think it would be a goodwill gesture if either Hastings or Full Tilt staked Isildur1 $1 million with makeup and limiting him to more sane stakes until he’s recouped some cash and has the bankroll to play the nosebleeds again (similar to what Dwan has been forced to do).

What we should take away from this is that online poker is in many ways a different beast than live poker. Players can and will have hand histories at their disposal. But more importantly, the poker rooms need to write better T&C’s. Am I violating the one player to a hand rule if my friend is watching over my shoulder and says, “Dude, check raise that fool”? Am I violating the English-only T&C’s if I type “Adios, amigo” in the chat-box?

I know these sound like silly examples but what’s to stop the next player who loses from complaining that I was in technical violation of the T&C’s and seeking his money back? At the lower limits, it’s probably common sense since the CS rep will tell them to go pound sand but here we’re seeing it at the highest stakes which means that the card rooms need to write their rules much more clearly so these types of situations don’t occur again in the future.

photocred goes to Hoggheff aka Hank Ashby aka Mr. Freshtags

Online Poker and Data Mining

Bill Rini — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 06:08:12 +0000

Paul Nobles from Bluff takes a rather interesting look at the whole data mining brouhaha that’s been going on of late. I started to leave a comment on the Pokerati site but my response started to get a little unruly in terms of length so I thought I would just direct you there to read the original and then give some of my thoughts on the topic here.

First off, I think Paul hits the nail on the head. His analysis of the situation is very good. The reason I chose to respond is that I think there are some additional lines of thought that are worth exploring as well.

Okay, you read my blog, which means you’re probably too lazy to read the entire post over at Pokerati so I’ll summarize Paul’s post by saying:

TableRatings and similar companies are in violation of the T&C’s at many poker rooms by collecting table data and sometimes even hand histories. And although the poker sites say they are against it they haven’t done much to stop it (with the exception of Cake).

First off, having seen this issue via the operator’s perspective, it’s really a matter of priorities and whether or not you want to draw attention to the problem. In many ways it is similar to the problem rooms have with poker bots.

All rooms agree that bots are bad for business but only insomuch as they are bad if people are aware of them. If your average players aren’t aware of poker bots you don’t want to be doing too much to draw attention to the fact that there was a problem to begin with.

This is also one of the reasons so few poker rooms took to sticking the knife into UltimateBet or Absolute during their cheating scandals. The vast, vast majority of players don’t read 2+2, PokerNews, or much other poker media other than poker television programming and such. Crowing that your site can be trusted while UltimateBet and Absolute cannot makes people aware of a problem that they might never had even suspected existed.

So, the average player out there doesn’t even know these data mining companies exist. Should you make too big of a deal about it and bring attention to something that you might not be able to prevent anyway? That’s the million dollar question.

Stuff like this will always be a game of cat and mouse as long as there is money to be made. As soon as any of the rooms makes a change the data collectors will counter. The only thing you can really do is make it too expensive for them to keep up and thus remove the financial motivation to offer such a service.

But, how big of a priority is this? How many customers does TableRatings actually have? How much is it really impacting the game? How noticeable is it to the average player? Will addressing the problem bring unwanted publicity that is more harmful than the actual problem?

These are the kinds of questions card rooms will ask themselves before invest resources in fixing the problem. Believe it or not, despite the massive amounts of money being made by online poker sites, most are woefully understaffed. They only have the ability to focus on a certain number of priorities and where an issue like this ranks for them will be a function of a combination of the personal philosophy of the decision maker and business realities.

Nobles does mention a possible solution of allowing players to change their screen names which is an idea that I know has been kicked around inside the online poker industry for years. The obvious argument against is that your high-raking players will move onto a site where they can maintain hand histories on other players.

Personally, I support frequent screen name changes. Lee Jones, formerly of PokerStars fame and now card room manager at Cake Poker (who, does allow screen name changes) came out in favor of this some time ago, if I’m remembering correctly.

The major problem with this solution though is that it would be very hard for most existing rooms to shoehorn into their existing software. First they have to build the ability in and then they have to rewrite portions of all of the backend tools. That’s actually not as simple as it sounds (if it did sound simple).

Many rooms don’t officially allow name changes as part of their policy but under extreme circumstances will permit a name change. I would guess that at a minimum they have a manual process in place to do it but they either don’t want to open it up to the public for fear of the repercussions or it’s not automated enough or reliable enough to do on any sort of massive scale (perhaps even as crude as opening up a second account and importing all the data and balances over).

There’s also the issue that this does make certain types of fraud easier to commit. Nobles downplays this risk but I think he underestimates the potential based on the argument others are making. Yes, the problems at Ultimate Bet and Absolute Poker were internal issues but that does not mean that every poker room has state of the art collusion or fraud detection. UB and Absolute might have been the absolute (no pun intended) worst but look at what it took to catch those players who were OBVIOUSLY cheating.

Additionally, now you’re going to have players who say that they are absolutely positive that Player A is Player B because of some convoluted association they’ve connected together and thus based on their combined stats are cheaters. Poker rooms will end up facing regular accusations of fraud going on on their sites and since poker rooms tend to not release much in the way of details into their investigations it gives the tin-foil hat wearing crowd more ammunition to proclaim that online poker is rigged.

So again, you end up right back at the question of the priority of addressing the issue. Is it worth the costs? Does it create more problems than it solves? Is the company willing to skip features in the next release or two in order to implement a solution?

Each room will make their decision on a case by case basis but up until the last few weeks I’ve only ever heard it talked about as a philosophical debate within the industry. It’ll take a lot more pressure from players before this works its way into the spotlight.

photocred to NIOSH

Even Play Money Poker Is Rigged!

Bill Rini — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 06:23:05 +0000

I’m not even sure how I ran across this but somehow I found this posting on Facebook.

Claire Frampton (Portsmouth) wrote53 minutes ago

my son was new to playing so i watched and helped him out but was noticed on quite a few occasions he ended up losing most of his chips coz all the money went to a non winning hand wher as my son had the winning hand ( i think most of u have experienced this i know i have)..anyway he wasnt getting anywhere by this keep happening.. i only had 1 mill at the time so i gave him 250k to boost him up coz of there cheating.

we both got warnings about this my son was alowed to continue with just the warning but i not only got a warning but my chip total would go down to just 10% of what i had if i would like to continue…

well i politely told em where to stick there game i won my chips fairly and if i wanted to give them to my son i will….

We are willing give you another chance and restore your account but with your chip stack returned to 10% of its previous total (up to a maximum of 1,000,000 chips). If you agree to these reinstatement terms, please follow instructions below to immediately return to active status on Texas Hold’em:

By reactivating my account, I agree to follow the Terms of Service going forward and understand that a second offense will result in my account being permanently banned.

i havnt agreed to this too continue playing but they took my chips anyway
utterly pathetic whoever owns zinga needs to find there dummy again pretty quick b4 they loose every1

I would be curious to know if the Facebook poker software actually is miscalculating the winning hands but my guess is she and her son are misreading the board as her writing and other comments don’t inspire me to believe that she’s all that quick.

And then she chip dumps to her son and complains that if she wants to give chips away nobody is going to stop her. Priceless. :-)

Photocred to Andrew Mason

Losing Wasn’t My Fault

Bill Rini — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 06:45:59 +0000

Someone sent a link to this to me. If this is your pic, please ping me and I would love to give you credit for it.

RT Hand Analyzer for Rigged Poker Games

Bill Rini — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 11:08:02 +0000

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.

Crazy Rigtards

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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