Jan 12, 2016 Players have been debating for years whether or not everything is on the up and up when it comes to online poker, with much of the conversation on poker forums focused on PokerStars. As the industry’s top online poker site for almost a decade, it’s no suprise that PokerStars faces allegations every now and again from disgruntled players who swear that they’ve been cheated. Fixed Limit Holdem. From a personal point of view shorthanded fixed limit texas holdem (what an awkward and long name for a poker game.) is the funniest poker game to play on the internet.
Since the birth of poker on the internet, allegations have been widespread that “online poker is rigged”. Such accusations generally come from poor poker players, or those with insufficient experience to grasp the concept of variance. But yes, history has shown poker sites have rigged sites in almost every way imaginable. There’s only few I would trust anymore, and IgnitionPoker.eu (previously known as Bovada) will continue to be the best until dozens of state ran sites take over which will be awhile.
But let’s discuss the answer that more players feel they’ve been “robbed”. Say you go all in with big slick (Ace-King), and are called by Ace-Queen. You’re a heavy favorite, but on average you’re still going to lose 23% of the time. Even when you go all in pre-flop with pocket aces, someone with a smaller pair is going to beat you about 18% of the time. What many players can’t get their minds around is that little factor called variance, or the statistical measure of how your results will be dispersed. In plain English, the odds may say one thing, but it’ll often take a large sample size for those odds to truly even out. You may be a 77% favorite, but you could still lose that play two or three times in a row. Winning players understand odds and variance, and the difference between them, whereas fish just assume the site must be rigged in somebody else’s favor.
The reason most poker players lose is due to poor bankroll management. Let’s say you had $100 to your name, and I offered to flip a coin. I take 100% of your wager every time it lands on tails, but I give you a 120% payout if heads comes up. It’s a 50/50 proposition, but you’re getting an extra payout every time your side comes up. Surely this is a great deal that every poker player would jump on?
However, what if I told you that you’d have to bet $33.33 on each bet? With only a $100 bankroll, and despite the large advantage I’ve given you, it would be foolish for you to continue. That’s because there is a 14.3% chance that I’m going to win the first three bets, and you’ll then be broke.
Even if you happen to win the first bet, I’ll win the next four 6.7% of the time. If you win that first bet, there is a 3.2% chance I’ll win the next five. And if you’re up three bets on me, there is still a 1.59% chance I’ll win the next six.
This goes on and on and on. But the crucial point is that if you’re a skilled poker player who goes bust often, your failure probably isn’t down to you being unlucky. It’s because you don’t understand odds and variance, and are not properly bankrolled for the games you’re playing.
Do Poker Sites Need to Cheat?
Now that we’ve covered the reasons explaining why so many falsely believe that online poker is rigged, let’s look at the reasons why it isn’t (considering you only play at top ranked sites).
Let’s start with the world’s largest online poker site, PokerStars.com. This company is licensed and regulated by the Isle of Man, a British Crown authority. It was purchased for $4.9 billion in June, 2014, by the Amaya Gaming Group, a well respected Canadian gaming company. PokerStars also operates a live card room in Macau, China, and makes billions of dollars in annual profit without cheating. All regulation aside – and it’s pretty hard to simply discount the stringent regulations that govern these sites – why would a company risk these billions of dollars in revenue just to set up a rigged game? The answer is pretty simple – they wouldn’t.
Smaller poker sites, especially those new to the market, have everything to lose by attracting serious allegations from their players. It’s always important to do a quick search on a prospective poker room, just to look for any player complaints or issues. For that reason, we only have a few left who have realized it’s more profitable to run a legitimate business than rip off customers.
For example, a room called Pitbull Poker cheated players using “superuser” accounts, allowing certain users to see other players’ hole cards. The room only made it through a couple of years, and was dealt a fatal blow once the cheating allegations hit. Pitbull operated out of Costa Rica, a country that doesn’t require online gambling licenses from companies based there.
With larger sites, the risks usually outweigh the rewards of cheating, but that isn’t necessarily the case. Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet, two rooms that made up the Cereus Poker Network, had a similar scandal years before PitBull’s. The details of this scandal are still not fully known, but there are many indications that management was working in tandem with the cheaters.
Cereus, along with Absolute and UB, went down in the “Black Friday” indictments of 2011, when the US Department of Justice busted several large poker sites – including PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker – for UIGEA violations. PokerStars and Full Tilt (via a PokerStars buyout) repaid their players, but Cereus did not. The company is insolvent as of 2014, and owes players an estimated $50 million.
While the above examples might scare players off, the online poker world has come a long way in recent years, as have the fraud prevention and security teams. The era of superusers and cheating scandals orchestrated by operators are likely behind us. However, players should still be alert and watch for suspicious activities by operators.
So What About Cheating? Can an Online Poker Player Cheat?
Well, now we’re on to a topic that might have some substance to it. If you’re not careful with your computer security, a hacker could get access to your hole cards. Such a situation is highly unlikely, and would entail the hacker accessing the data stream from the poker site to your computer, and cracking the poker site’s extremely secure encryption in the process. In all honesty, if you were advanced enough to pull off such a feat of hacking, you’d be more likely to target the World Series of Poker, rather than picking on some poor schlep in their front room. Nonetheless, we can’t totally dismiss the possibility.
We would recommend not playing on public wireless internet connections. Using a secure wifi network from your home is highly advised. In truth though, even here, the chances of being hit are relatively low. The main concern would be that a hacker could access your password before it was streamed to the site, or could possibly get visual access to your monitor. It’s highly unlikely, though, that anyone capable of cracking SSL is going to be concentrating their efforts on poker.
In recent years, hackers have taken to more drastic methods. Thanks to laptop theft, high-stakes players at a 2013 European Poker Tour event in Barcelona were left with computers infected with malware. There was another incident during the World Series of Poker, a year later, where players had laptops and cash stolen from their hotel rooms.
Of course, these players were targeted due to their reputation for playing at higher stakes, but their story should be a warning to all players to be aware of their surroundings. Password protect your computers, and safeguard your poker accounts. If you begin playing at higher stakes, and become even slightly well-known, take extra precautions to avoid becoming the victim of theft or hacking.
What About Players Chatting on Social Media or the Phone?
This is called collusion, and it is the one area where cheating in online poker is a moderate concern. Online poker sites take collusion very seriously. Sites such as PokerStars.com have several security methods to prevent collusion. One of these methods is a charting system, where they log how many hands you’ve played with the same opponents.
If you’re playing with the same opponent more often than the mean, this may cause your account to be flagged by security. Your hands involving action with this opponent will then be run through anti-collusion software, to see if your plays were logical.
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If the plays made little sense, and deviate from the norm – as well as from your usual style of play when not seated with this opponent – your account may be locked, and a manual review could follow. At most poker sites, if the audit reveals there is a high likelihood you were cheating via collusion, you can more or less kiss your ability to play at that site goodbye.
If found guilty, you may be subject to fines, and could potentially lose your balance and past profits. Depending on the amount taken, some jurisdictions will bring criminal charges against players for cheating at online poker. Civil suits can also be expected.
In the legally-regulated online poker markets such as Delaware, Nevada, and New Jersey, sites can choose their punishment for the player depending on the situation. The penalties can be light, but cheating at online poker site can range from a small fine to a class B felony. The latter comes with a potential prison sentence of up to six years.
Not all collusion will be automatically picked up on, though. If players only engage in collusion a small percentage of the time, such behavior may fly under the radar. If ever you feel you’re being colluded against, stop playing, and email the site telling them of your suspicions.
If it is found (either now or in the future) that these players were colluding, and that you were the victim, any online poker room worth its salt is likely to refund your money. Your chances of getting compensation will be vastly increased if you’re polite, so write your email using a friendly, non-accusatory tone. Also bear in mind that it can be hard to conclusively prove collusion, so don’t assume you’ll be successful. Just be sure to leave a game once you believe collusion may be occurring. Poker sites are doing their best to keep the games safe and free of cheats, so leave it to them to take care of these matters.
Which Online Poker Site Is Not Rigged?
All in all, collusion should not be much of a concern unless you’re consistently being taken apart in high-stakes games by a team of professional cheaters. In the vast majority of cases, it won’t take long to catch these guys.
Most people who conspire to cheat or collude against other players are also bad at the game. The most common type of collusion involves players sharing their hole cards via instant messaging applications. While this is wrong, and still amounts to collusion, it doesn’t provide them with much of an advantage. Many cheats will resort to such behavior only once they’ve tried and failed to win legally. For the most part, they’re harmless.
If you’re looking for info on which sites are the safest to play at, you can read about that in our article Safest US Poker Sites.
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You hear it all the time whether it is during the conversations with your closest friends or in some topic on the poker forums ' online poker is rigged!' It doesn’t matter the site or the network, for many of us, when we play online, we sometimes have the feeling that the software is actually targeting us, forcing us to give up all of our bankroll. Beli chip luxy poker pake pulsa. We see countless bad beats, coolers, or just situations where our foe miraculously comes from behind and takes down a huge pot and we slowly start to feel helpless.
So what do we do? We avoid looking in the mirror and start blaming something or somebody else. In the case of online poker, it’s definitely the Random Number Generator - basically the program that shuffles the deck of cards - a.k.a the RNG. But is the RNG really to blame for our poker misfortunes? Is online poker rigged? And if it’s not, why are there times in which it feels that way?
To start things off in a proper, interesting manner, let’s say it has to do with both our human flaws or the way our memory works and the very different nature of the game in the online environment. Not convinced just yet? Then start reading the next lines and be prepared to see this debate from a whole different perspective.
The Bad Beats Are Easier To Remember
It’s definitely not news when we state that we have a much easier time in remembering the bad things in our lives. There are many scientific studies that can confirm this undeniable fact. One study says that this is the result of evolution: negative emotions like sadness and rage trigger increased activity in the part of the brain linked to memories. Our emotional brain is also overloaded with information. In other words, we have to remember such things to try to avoid making the same mistakes later.
Unfortunately, as compared to real life situations, the game of poker is a different beast. In poker, if the outcome is negative, it doesn’t necessarily mean we made a bad decision. We actually may have made the right decision but our brain can’t quite process that. So naturally, we tend to remember things like bad beats and unlikely situations in which our foe won easier than the times we suckout our opponent. In fact, the times when we came from behind to win a random poker hand are blurry and not as distinguishable as a bad beat. And that’s why we tend to believe we witnessed countless numbers of bad beats and not nearly enough suckouts.
Are Online Poker Sites Rigged
What we can do, however, is be honest with ourselves and take a long look in the mirror. Start tracking our online poker history with different softwares like Poker Tracker and Holdem Manager and just look at the times when we suckout. It does look different than the way we remember it, doesn’t it?
Faster-paced, Means Greater Chance To Run Into Big Hands
Besides our obvious flaws, we need to take into consideration other aspects that have to do with the dynamics of the game. Remember, online poker is quite different than your average home game or live casino game. Why? First of all, online we can play much more hands than live; we can multi-table and see thousands of poker hands on a daily basis. At a casino game, the action is slow, and the shuffle takes longer so the volume can’t quite compare with the online business.
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So what does it mean? Well, it means we can accumulate more experience in less time as compared to the live green felt. We don’t have to play for years like the pros of old to truly master the game. We can literally play over one million hands per year, inconceivable in the past when there were only a handful of poker tournaments and not that many opportunities to play cash games. But it also means is that we have a much greater chance of running into big hands. Since we see that many hole cards and community boards, expect to see quads and even a straight flush more often than live. This is not to mention situations in which our foe will outrun us even though he was way behind when the poker hand started.
Poker is still a game of chance and very few things are certain. The bullets - pocket Aces - have 85% chance of winning at showdown preflop versus a random hand. So given a big enough sample, that can easily be achieved online. At least one time - if not two - out of ten we will have our Aces cracked. This is not because of some rigged software, it’s a matter of probabilities and statistics.
Different Online Game Dynamics
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The speed is just one facet of the online game that makes it different from live, the game dynamics are another difference. We can look at them from two different perspectives.
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Let’s talk about the micros first. At the lowest stakes, we may encounter players who enter the pot with many unusual and what we call unplayable poker hands. The reasons behind those decisions may not have to be rational; many of them simply want to take a garbage hand like 72 offsuit only to crack someone’s Aces or outrun a premium hand. That’s their thrill, and since we’re talking about the micros, they can afford to do it. As a consequence, the game dynamic changes dramatically as compared to live where the stakes are much higher thus it is much more expensive to think like that.
We also have to take into consideration that that tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, are playing online from all around the world on a given poker site so you’ll see many players entering the pot with garbage, especially at micros. That’s why you have to expect your very good hands will be dominated by some crappy hands from time to time. It’s just the nature of the beast.
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The other perspective has to do with the higher stakes, where the games are pretty much reg-infested. Compared with live, the online play in this situation is much cleaner. We will find many TAGs - tight aggressive players who play ABC poker at the low and medium stake. People who play many tables and not so many actual hands. That’s why, against them, we will have a greater chance of running into big hands and coolers. Again, it has nothing to do with the fact that the RNG hates you; the game dynamic is built in such a way that you will experience more coolers and nuts vs. second nuts situations than live.
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Conclusion: Online Poker Isn’t Rigged!
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So after all the analysis, is online poker really rigged? Of course it’s not, it’s just different than live. Basically, they may be regarded as two different games that require different set of skills besides hand reading, value betting, and bluffing.
And next time you’ll try to convince yourself it is indeed rigged, be honest with yourself. Try to see the truth past your own emotions and be critical of your game. Maybe you did some things wrong, maybe you have leaks in your game that cost you money and increase the variance, or maybe you just need to take a break. And if you’re still not convinced, why do you think there are winners at every known stake in the online poker world? W hy are there regulars and grinders who play certain games online for a living? How can they win and you can’t? Doesn’t it have to be rigged for all the players? Or is it fair just for chosen few - which makes the whole rigged statement even more nonsense?
In other words, the more we dig in and use our logic, the clearer we can see the truth that is online poker isn’t rigged. It hasn’t ever been and won’t be in the future. It’s as simple as that, but why are we losing then? That’s the one-million-dollar question isn’t it?
What do you think? Why does it feel online poker is rigged? Do you really believe it is rigged? Then please share your reasons why you think in such a way in the comment section below.