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Is The Deck Stacked Against You? Not Likely.
Poker prop article posted August 5th, 2006If you've played any amount of online poker, you've undoubtedly come across conspiracy theorists who claim that the websites you're playing on are rigged. Some will try to convince you that if you cash out too much money from your account, the site will penalize you by dealing you bad hands and bad beats. Others will tell you tales of supposedly rigged "action flops" designed to get good players to pump money into pots with solid hands, only to leave plenty of outs for fishy callers to suck out (the implication being that it's more profitable for a site to reward weak players to keep them playing rather than letting the better players beat them into submission, never to return). Then, of course, there are those hands where multiple players are dealt pocket pairs and everybody thinks the system has got to be suspect. What do I think? All these conspiracy theories are just a bunch of nonsense invented by players who are either inexperienced or delusional.
The inexperienced players just haven't logged the thousands of hours it takes to see enough wackiness at the table to truly be convinced that bad beats, even horrible ones, are an inevitable part of the game. It just so happens that the bad beats are the hands we remember more vividly and the ones that have a bigger emotional impact on us. The human mind is wired to seek out patterns and draw conclusions based on limited information; it's how we survive as animals. Let's say you're hiking through the woods when a hairy beast you've never seen before (as opposed to your ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend) jumps out from behind a mulberry tree and mauls you. If you're lucky enough to survive, you can bet that your brain will have drawn several conclusions. Some may be true, e.g. "monsters can hide behind trees" (and "my ex was a hairy beast"), but many conclusions will be falsely drawn based upon a lack of data, e.g. "mulberry trees = danger". Our minds come up with these conclusions more quickly when the stimuli are emotionally charged, in this case, getting attacked by a wild animal. In poker, bad beats are the emotional equivalent of getting mauled. If it happens once, it's bad, if it happens twice or more in a session, then your mind is going to tell you that this site is a hairy beast.
The delusional online player is a different beast altogether, so to speak. She or he thinks they're way more skilled than they actually are. They have a delicate ego and need to believe that the site is rigged against them in order to relieve themself of the responsibility for their losses. It's embarrassing to watch a player like this rant and become indignant when they fail to convince others that they're really not a bad player, just the victim of the rigged system.
The problem with this line of self-consoling reasoning is that it fosters laziness. If you always think that you're just unlucky because you always get sucked out on, you're not going to be actively looking for holes in your game and ways to improve. If you get emotionally devastated by bad beats and suck-outs, maybe the right play for YOU is to accumulate your chips by playing small ball, taking down little pots, and never risking big portions of your chip stack no matter how far ahead you think you may be pre-flop. It isn't glamorous, but it can work. But if you are one of those players, before you put your chips in play, you'd better know the guys at your table and who might call you down with crap. For most of us, we want that fish to call. But if you can't handle the suck-outs, don't try to steal or buy pots from these guys.
Look, if it's the first level of a major tourney and the guy to your left has been moving all-in over the top with trash, maybe you do want to bet your AK hard pre-flop, but you gotta respect the consequences. If you're gonna gripe and moan when he or she comes over the top again, you decide to call, and they suck out with their KQ, then I say shame on you. Did you really want to go all-in heads up without a made hand in the first level of the tourney? Do you even think about things like that after you've just gotten knocked out, or do you just chalk it up to a rigged website and do the same thing again next week? At a bare minimum, you have to accept responsibility for putting yourself in the position to get sucked out on, don't you?
Even beyond all that, there's the technology issue to deal with. Sure if you're playing on a tiny little site with no reputation (and probably no players), then yes, I concede that there's a possibility that the system is not really random, or that it might have been programmed to do devious things. But on the bigger sites that can handle loads of players, as a technology guy myself, I can tell you that it just wouldn't be practical to do something like that.
First there's the sheer technical complexity of it all. It's hard enough to develop something that behaves properly under normal poker rules and heavy loads, no sane person would make things harder for themselves to develop by adding in their own additional rules for how to screw certain players.
In the real world, things like that don't happen without a reasonable business case being made and an iron clad how-to-screw-someone algorithm being proven to be profitable. The fact is that any attempt at such an algorithm just produces too many possible scenarios for holes in logic which in turn make for more difficult coding and testing. It also creates a greater likelihood that someone else can figure out and game your system, or worse, the possibility that your algorithm will actually lose you money in the long haul. Nobody smart enough to put together a gaming site would also be dumb enough to pursue a design which is that inherently risky.
I don't expect to change anybody's mind on this subject, but if you happen to be on the fence, just think about the things I've mentioned here. Then go back to the online tables and try to just observe what you see objectively, not as somebody with vested interest in the outcome. Just sit there and witness and take notice of how many hands go by that are totally uneventful. Think you see a bad beat? Take note of the exact hands in that race situation and keep track of how often it comes up again later. When you accumulate enough data, you can then calculate how many times the underdog wins that race. If you do that I'm confident you'll agree, poker sites are not rigged, Lee Jones is no Lee Harvey Oswald and no, that isn't your ex behind that mulberry tree... It's Big Foot.
- Poker Article written by MoneyMoy
The above poker prop article was posted on August 5th, 2006. If you have questions about Mad Poker Props or poker propping please contact us.