Online Poker Isn't Rigged, But Perception Is Everything

[shipitfish]

Having just this weekend had a chat box conversation with someone arguing that the river cards in the NL HE games on Absolute Poker are doled out carefully to “make sure the site makes the maximum rake every time”, I was glad to get a link from nick_marden to a blog post that expressed, more or less, the same thoughts I had about the so-called “rigging of online poker”.

(Although I don't have any links handy,) I should mention that I've seen some folks on LiveJournal doing statistical studies of their Poker Tracker databases to show that they are receiving a statistically expected distribution of starting hands, flops, turns and rivers in HE. Everything I've seen comes back on the up-and-up. There is no way to “prove” that the cards are distributed in a statistically fair way, but I suggest that a preponderance of evidence has already been collected. Therefore, this will probably be my only post ever about this, so I'll make a clear statement: there is no chance online poker is intentionally rigged. Occam's razor alone should tell us that, anyway.

My fear, however, is that there are subtle bugs in the random number generators in use. Such bugs probably don't impact anyone very much; probably something that is no worse than a dealer who shuffles a bit too lazily. I do, however, have a strong feeling that eventually such stories of mildly buggy random number generators will come out, and there will be a mass exodus from online poker.

Being a Open Source and Free Software weenie, I tend to think the best remedy to this would be for online sites to proactively publish their source code. So far, only one site, written by some friends of mine, has done so, and they are still in beta. Even if the client software isn't made fully available, at the very least these companies should be publishing the code of their random number generators for public audit and review. It would go a long way to dispel rumors and boost confidence.

Of course, they are unlikely to do it. I've found that the money-obsession in the poker world and the Free Software ethic don't usually mix. Indeed, to drive the point home, I note that almost all of the software developers and executives (a class who are generally receptive to the idea of software freedom) whom I've met in the poker world have been anti-Free Software. The self-selecting class of software people who like poker tend to be the most anti-software-freedom, pro-Microsoft ones. No wonder that it took a bunch of radical French Free Software developers to write the first poker site that releases the source to its client and server.

That being true, I'm sure that there will someday be a leak from one of the more buggy and pathetically programmed poker sites. Such a hypothetical leak will probably turn out to show the random number generator was a little less random than it should have been. When that happens, alarmists will probably clamor enough to kill online poker. That will really suck for those of us who are picking up lots of easy cash playing online. On the bright side, it might launch a new era of interest in poker sites like Pok3d, where the sources are available. If only my buddies could get out of beta and have real money games!

Anyway, I don't usually mix my Free Software politics with my poker blog. As a treat for my readers who have tolerated this rant, I'll point you at the most amusing blog post about rigged online poker I've ever read (also thanks to nick_marden).

Comments

Perception

[(Anonymous)]

It's likely that online poker just seems rigged because you see so many more hands than B&M games and so see a lot of bad beats/crazy hands.

-Karol at http://ihadouts.blogspot.com

Re: Perception

[shipitfish.livejournal.com]

There's no question about that. However, people who are unable to perceive the arguments I made in the post about why online poker isn't rigged intentionally — namely, that's in the site's best interest to run fair games — are surely not introspective enough to consider the idea that their perceptions are skewed due to hand volume.

These are the people who are dumping the money into online games and making it easy to pick up serious levels of cash easily by beating those players. My key worry is that these are the very players who will not understand that &mdash when the inevitable bugs are exposed — those bugs never really impacted the outcome of any of the hands they played.

In other words, I believe that all of online poker could go from aquarium to shark pool overnight because of a minor bug that never really impacted the odds anyway.