Seems to me, and so many other people think the same, that freak occurances are common place in the internet poker arena. Things like, two players both being dealt AA on the same hand, three players with AA, KK, QQ etc. Can anybody reliably comment on whether there is any truth to this or is it just another selective memory thing? I suspect the latter but i must admit it’s a pretty strong illusion.
Related to the above, can anybody calculate for me the odds of what just happened to me? KK four times in one game, on one occasion on consecutive hands. Say about 50 hands played. Must be pretty slim i’d have thought.
Anybody know anything about the random number generators these sites use? I guess it makes little difference but just out of interest, do they ‘shuffle’ a virtual deck and then deal or do they generate a random card each time its required? Anyone know how these things are regulated and who by?
And lastly, when watching on TV it’s common for the % chance of each hand winning being shown as the action plays out. Does anybody know if these are the general odds, i.e. the odds that the player could in theory calculate of his hand winning against any random cards, the specic odds, i.e the odds that each player would be able to calculate if they were in an ‘all-in’ cards up situation and therefore able to see each others hands, and do they adjust the odds to take into account the cards that other players have mucked (being known to the TV guys through their under table cams)?
not going to calculate the odds of KK you presented as others are much better than me here (OK will try tomorrow if no one else does), but will only say that humans are good at finding patterns where none exist. E.g you noticed the unusual KK patterns, however it could have been 22, or AA etc instead. Or next time you will notice AK come up more than usual. Or hands where it went A2, then 3,4, then 5,6. E.g given any sequence it is possible to find an interesting pattern somehow. Thi s is the key mistake numerologists make with biblical codes.
As to the random number generator, I remember when a university team showed it was possible to predict and crack the sequence used by one online poker site (it use a time based random number generator. However in that case it wasnt that the numbers werent “randomly” generated, it was just that given the sequence, the next number could be precalculated by the team in advance of the poker site, and the deal revealed. The site changed their programme I should add
Depends on which show it is. Some like the WPT and PPT calculate those odds based on all known cards, including those mucked by other players. Which is why the commentators will sometimes say things like “normally this would be a coin flip but we already saw two of his outs get folded.” Others just do a flat calculation based on the cards held by the players involved.
They shuffle a virtual deck, before the game. The sequence of cards for one game is fixed at the start of the game just like real life. Regulation/auditing depends on the site. Have a look here for some more info.
On-line poker sites make waaaay too much money to risk scamming their users, why cheat when you have a license to print money? You have a bigger risk from other people playing in teams or poker bots (and even then I tend to think the risk is fairly small and easily mitigated).
The freak occurances you’re seeing is just a bit of Confirmation Bias mixed with the fact that you only see the big showdowns when other people hold the cards, the times everyone folds to your KK you tend to forget. Also with internet poker people tend to play a lot of hands, try working out how many hands you’ve played in that day/week/month/year whatever and then asking how many freak occurrences you see.
If I’m right your chances of getting KK on any one hand are 1 in 221. So it’d be unlikely to see 4 in fifty hands, but not unreasonable – games of chance work that way, each hand is unrelated to the last. So it’ll happen somewhere, sometime. It happened to you and you remember it. Just one of those things.
For what it’s worth, if you really think a site is on the take then don’t play there. There are plenty of options, I’m sure you’d get a dozen recommendations if you asked.
While in LV recently, I played a bit of video poker, and some machines had a 4 of a kind bonus, i.e. 4 A’s paid 400x, while 4 6’s paid only 200x. I got several 4 of a kinds, but all were of the lowest paid kind. On more than a couple of occasions I was dealt three A’s, but never hit the fourth. Is video poker random, or are the machines programmed to “tease” the player with good starter hands that don’t pay out?