Which isn’t at all what I said you were saying. Next time you cash out, buy a clue.
It was definitely just a streak of bad luck. I’ve seen two straight flushes within half an hour in live play. It happens. You need to play for way more than an hour or two, it’s actually more like 100 hours, for things to average out. Don’t you think that if they were going to rip off their players, they would wait a bit. If every player got bad beats like that right when they started playing, they wouldn’t have any players left, not a very good business plan. How is this “baffling”?
Poker can be very frustrating but if you are prone to irrational thoughts like PartyPoker possibly cheating a new user on microlimit table, you should probably stay away from the game.
I’m honestly not trying to be mean when I say this, but the fact that you reacted so strongly to an improbable bad beat means that you’d probably do well not to play real money poker online at any site.
Many people confuse randomness with uniformity, i.e. if you play 100 hands, things with 1% probability will happen exactly once, things with 5% probability will happen 5 times, etc. A random distribution is not a uniform distribution, however. Clusters of improbable events are part of a random distribution, but are often assigned more weight as these are the events that people remember and tell stories about. Picking out specific combinations of events and calculating the odds of each specific combination occurring after the fact tends to make things seem more improbable than they are – try doing it with completely mundane hands and you’ll see what I mean. What are the odds of dealing out ten hands and five common cards in one specific configuration?
In this case, he was jumping to irrational conclusions, but I wouldn’t say not believing the honesty is really irrational. I, for example, have hundreds of hours of online poker experience and am up tens of thousands of dollars, but the more I play, the less I trust it.
I can easily imagine players colluding or otherwise playing dishonestly, but I can’t see why any successful online poker site would ever run anything other than an honest game. Online poker yields a continuous river of money for these guys, and there are a hundred other sites waiting to take their place if they fuck up. Why risk a guaranteed source of money to skim a little bit extra? There’s just no incentive.
It could be very hard to detect if programmed correctly. Already anyone who posts on poker forums saying anything about sites being rigged is laughed off - so what’s the real danger of exposure? Let’s say someone does some analysis and finds out that underdogs suck out 10% more than they should - is this information going to be disseminated to everyone who plays on that site? No way. On poker forums, it probably won’t even be accepted there by many because so many are very resistant to the idea that it’s dishonest.
So even if it was rigged, and someone knew it, that doesn’t mean that they’re going to go under the next day. The bulk of the players would never even hear about it, and those that did probably wouldn’t listen much - I’d guess that if some definitive proof of something funky going on were to surface, the sites might lose, oh, 10% of their players at worst.
It may not be a matter of being “a little bit extra” - a large part of the base of these poker sites are bad players who are kept strung along because they lose just slowly enough to entice them to keep playing, at least in a lot of cases.
Think of it this way: What’s an online poker site’s dream scenario? A lot of equally skilled players who couldn’t beat each other but would instead keep passing money back and forth all while getting raked.
When you have consistently winning players who withdraw money from the system, you screw with that. Any money taken out is money that can’t be raked. When a better player beats worse players for significant amounts, not only do you have money being taken out of the system, but the worse players may be discouraged to redeposit if they get a severe ass whooping.
I used to be one of the people who trusted online poker simply because it seemed like it’d be too high risk/little reward for them to rig it. And I’m not saying now that it is rigged, just that I don’t trust it not to be. I’ve seen some pretty ridiculous and consistent patterns that affect my online bankroll enough times that I’m suspicious. It could be me seeing patterns in nothing, so I’m not saying declaratively that there’s anything fishy, but I certainly don’t trust that there’s not anymore.
In any case, now that I see how much the idea that online is anything but honest is blown off in poker forums and such, I realize that the risk of exposure isn’t nearly as high as I once thought it might be. There’s no way you’re going to be able to contact the majority of people who play on these sites to even make your case to them, and those you can are resistant to the idea that it’s rigged. There’s not going to be some whistle blower scenario covered on all the major news programs that suddenly make everyone stop playing, or whatever scenario you imagine that they’re risking. So the risk of exposure is pretty low.
And the benefits are pretty apparent. If you aid/protect weak players and punish good players, you not only keep more money in the system by preventing it from being withdrawn, but you also add more money to the system in the form of encouraging bad players to redeposit who wouldn’t redeposit if they got slaughtered rather than slowly lost.
Again, I’m not saying that it is rigged, just that I personally don’t trust it, and the “there’s little incentive” standard reply doesn’t really cut it with further analysis.
How is online poker different than card club or casino poker in this respect? People do get whooped yet they still come back for more. Real world poker has survived forever that way, so will cyber poker. Cheating people just isn’t worth it. It’s killing the golden goose.
It’s hard to compare. It may be, assuming it’s rigged to protect bad players, that 30k of the 40k of people playing on party every night would be there regardless of how badly they lost, but the extra 10k wouldn’t, except that they’re protected. In other words, there would still be people playing there, but maybe not as many as the massive number you see currently.
That’s true, and I’m not saying that even if it were totally honest, there would be plenty of people who got stomped and came back. But without an alternate reality simulator, we can’t know if, assuming something was fishy, if the site would only have 75% of the people it has now, or whatever.
Well, alright. I can’t really prove that notion wrong, I can only contest that the risk isn’t nearly as big as one assumes it to be after really looking at it analytically, which I detailed above, and if, like in our hypothetical example, a dishonest protection scheme boosted players by 25% and lowered cash outs by good players and such, it would certainly be worth a lot in monetary terms.