How random is a RNG?

This was originally going to start out as a hand analysis thread but turned into something else once I retrieved my HH's from Pokerstars. Now, many people have been complaining about beats and saying that hands are set-up against each other and the like and they tend to get shot down pretty quickly. But tell me if this analysis of my last 100 hands on pokerstars seems correctly distributed to you to be random.

Hand No. of times

AA - 2
KK - 2
Other PP - 8
AK - 4
A + Q,J,T - 2
K + Q,J - 4

Now that's 22 very decent hands in 100 (12 PP's?!). Now you're probably wondering how I wasn't the chip leader with so many nice catches, but you'll never guess what happened....

Now it could just be a freak occurrence, but I would request others to obtain their last 100 hands and analyse as above so we can get a better picture,

Compare this set of 100 hands against your previous 5000 hands and you'll probably see that you were just on a rush here

Did you randomly decide to look at your previous 100 hands, or was it because you felt that you were getting a lot of good cards?

Actually, like I said I was going to do a hand analysis thread along the lines of "Am I over-playing my big hands" because of the ways my stack got hammered and then busted out. I didn't actually register the number of pp's I had caught until I was sifting through the HH's to find the big hands I was talking about to post (the 2 KK's getting busted).

Before this I also played one of the most surreal games of poker on pokerstars 45p SNG's, we were at the final table in half an hour! I played about 5 hands and finished 4th!!

I want to see if this sample is a rush like you say. Just run your Pokerstars, request your last 100 hands and post your results like I did above. It takes 10 minutes to do. Then after enough samples we can see.

Just requested mine

AA = 0
KK = 0
QQ = 1
JJ = 1
88 = 1

Ace + K, Q, J, T = 0
King +Q, J, T = 0

Plenty of junk, plus A Rags, plus small connectors, some suited

Looks like in comparison to me Frenchie you were on a rush

Well, the odds of a PP is 3/51 or 5.88%. I don't know how to calculate the probability of getting 12 PPs in 100 (it would actually be 12+) without doing it experimentally. If I had more time I would write a simulation of this and simply run like a million sets of 100 hands to see what the percentage is. But if anyone knows how to calculate this theoretically I'd like to see what the odds are of that, probably higher than you think, since the expected amount is just under 6.

Rule #1 of randomness, random numbers do not look random. If you don't see runs and patterns, it was probably developed by a person trying to make it look random.

Definition of random from HS stat teacher: unpredictable in the short run, predictable in the long run. 100 hands = short run

Out of my 20,212 hands

AA - 93, expected = (4/52)(3/51)(20212) = 91.457
AKs - 76, expected = (8/52)(1/51)(20212) = 60.97

oh wow, the computer must have chosen me to win all those tourneys and given me AKs, how special I must be

But in reality, you'll see abnormalities no matter how high you go. The more hands though, the less likely you'll see abnormalities, but if you just had an amazing hot run, the computer doesn't see that and automatically give you a cold run to balance it sometime in the future. The only way to get the exact values is to play an infinite number of hands. Even so, I'm surprised the amount of times I got AKs is that far off from the expected after 20k+ hands, I did do that calculation correctly, right? First card can be any A or K, other one HAS to be A or K that's not the same card as the first one yet is the same suit (so if you pick up the A of spades, second card MUST be the K of spades to make AKs)

Yeah looks to me like a rush.....I mean I can remember hitting AA atleast 4 or 5 times ina an hour seriously...just the luck of the cards...then the next hour nothing so....the random cards are there just a good random set of cards lol!

I actually still remember the day where I flopped a set over a set twice within a span of about 15 minutes. That was a good day

You can use the binomial distribution.
If p=3/51, k=12, n=100

The probability of getting exactly 12 pocket pairs in 100 hands is equal to .8690%

The probability of getting 12 or more pocket pairs in 100 hands is equal to 1.4549%

Do you play ring games or MTT's?

100 hands is hardly a representative sample of anything. Your next 100 could look just like Wedgies, or worse. Sometimes you're the windshield, sometimes the bug.

What Dave said ^^^.

Why are we bothering trying to decide how precise an RNG is based on 100 hands?

Try in the 10s of thousands or 100k+.

I'm not asking you to am I. If everyone who posted in this thread had bothered to request and post their summary which is what I originally requested (which probably would have taken the same time as the writing the same tired responses, is it a conditioned response?), we would already have 700 hands. 50 posts is 5K hands. If you don't want to, then forward the e-mail to me and I will do it for you. I only want the last 100 hand histories from MTT NLHE play.

Sorry, it's just a silly way of going about it since we'll either not have enough hands for anything to be conclusive, or if we do get a sufficient # of hands, it'll be by some time next year

Why not just ask someone to post a larger sample size like zachvac did?

Here are mine from one of my bigger databases:

41,988 hands
AA 208 times
AKs 127 times
AKo 390 times
KK 192 times
QQ 202 times
JJ 186 times

I could go on, but those are pretty much the monsters.

Why only MTT hands? It's the same rng dealing out cash games and tournaments.. I don't have a sample available, just curious.

HEY FRENCH! This is easy to do if you have pokertracker! Look, Taylor was nice enough to do it for you. VVVVV

you luckbox chuck; AA more than the other premium pairs and JJ the least :P

from my newest and so far very small database:

8,202 hands

AA 28 times
KK 49 times
QQ 36 times
JJ 38 times

where the !@#$% did all my aces go?

Here's mine:

29,726 hands

AA 109
KK 147
AKs 91
AKo 282
QQ 113
JJ 140

I don't use Pokertracker or anything like that. But using those databases are you able to differentiate between hands you got from different sites and game types? or do they all get merged into one big db?

Why do I want to do this? You should know my views on internet casinos and gambling, if not check out the Absolute scandal thread. I think that should have been a wake up call to everyone as to the possibilities of fraudulence that we risk playing these sites and to start taking our heads out of the sand. I suspect that Pokerstars uses 'set-up' hands in large field MTT's (freeroll-$4 range) in order to eliminate players quicker by putting loads of good hands up against each other. There, that's my cards on the table.

Quicker eliminations=quicker tournaments=more available players to plough more money (+rake) into something else. I have one small sample of 100 hands that shows this is a possibility. I would like more to validate and I will take the time to sift through it and report back so you know where you stand too. If it turns to be clean then fair enough, I will put money there and play. But I need to see the proof for myself and I for one don't think that the word of site operators and 'independent auditors' or the KGC (of which Pokerstar's is affiliated to) can be taken as re-assurance. I would go even further to say that after I complete this I would also like to repeat the test on other sites and see where we stand on them too. I mean is nobody doing anything like this already? we have truly no safeguards in online poker at the moment. But we have the data to monitor and flag things (like with the Absolute rigging scandal).

Please assist me in accomplising this by:

1). requesting your last 100 MTT hands (Pokerstars)
2). send to me at BigFrench1@gmail.com

here at cardschat we're getting cheated out of AA. I added up the totals of everyone who posted the # of hands and # of times they had AA, got 100,128 hands, AA 438 times. Expected # of AA is 453.0...

Or maybe the sample is flawed, perhaps the people who come to a forum for help are the ones who are card dead.

nothing on a computer can be TRUE random. google RNG.
this instance is nothing more than a rush, just a long wave up and down and up and down you go

It can be random in that it is indeterminable by any of the clients (I know pokerstars uses mathematical pseudo-randomness, server entropy, and client input).

There are many, many people who have analysed millions of hands between them and come up with nothing.

The Absolute threads demonstrate that if something weird was going on then it would get spotted by the number crunchers pretty quickly.

Here's my numbers (for Party Poker)

41,649 hands

AA 179
KK 174
QQ 185
JJ 198
TT 187

wtf I'm being ripped off with the AA and KK!!!!

AKs 110
AKo 420
AQs 131
AQo 386

So we've got over 150k hands between us here and you'd rather have 100 at a time?

Man I swear as of late the poker gods have not been kind at all to my bankroll. Im starting to feel like Daniel Negrano when he calls out hands only I see bad beats coming instead.. LOL It's been tough lately and I to wonder how random everything is so I think this thread is a good way to test that theory. I do agree though that you have to run analysis on like 10s of thousands of hands atleast to see how random something is. There will always be good runs of cards just like there are bad runs plain and simple. I just try to put myself in good odd situations and hope my cards hold up. Good luck on the mathematical statistics everyone. Best of Luck at the tables!!!

throw the ole bell up there and lets see what ur sample and dist. looks like....

Just quoting this for emphasis.

In theory, within a large enough sample size, there will be a stretch where someone, at some point, will be dealt AA 5 hands in a row, and they will be cracked each time. Basic probability ldo.

That sample size would have to be, uh, very big. The probability of being dealt AA 5 hands in a row is 0.00000000019%

If your poker tracker contains roughly 526.3 billion hands then on average it should contain one instance of 5x AA in a row. Of course, getting them all cracked is a different story still

[quote=Irexes;642746]There are many, many people who have analysed millions of hands between them and come up with nothing.

The Absolute threads demonstrate that if something weird was going on then it would get spotted by the number crunchers pretty quickly.


Is it just people doing this individually or can you point me to any websites where the numbers crunched and results can be perused?

Obviously, all the comments about sample size are correct, but at the same time if you only observe large samples you are also going to miss events at the micro-level. For example, If I run an analysis on 10,000 slot machine spins I might conclude that the machine has a 70% payout rate, but if I take the same sample and examine it in slices I might then see that at some stages the machine paid out 90% while at other times it only paid 10% but this would never have come to light when analysing the large number. I don't think its ever going to be easy to catch a site out because they can deal in very small margins (like we do as players). The other thing in their favour is what you all love to term as 'variance', I'm not denying its existence but what I'd like to point out is that as far as computers as concerened it is a programmable variable, and even shifts of small percentages away from the norm are going to make significant differences to site profits. And the biggest beauty of it is (if you are a site operator) is that you can (potentially) alter it when you want, or like the slot machine programme a floating variance (they pay out more when empty and less when full). At the moment it is all about trust, but you people seem to grant them that blindly yet are so analytical and questioning about other things. I find it a strange contradiction.

This is what we call variance.

If you're flipping a coin, and it happens to land on heads 10 times in a row, is this because the coin is rigged? Of course not. It's because of statistical variance.

The really weird occurrences will happen an infinite number of times if you run infinite hands. If you run millions of hands, they will happen within the boundaries of statistical variance. The smaller the sample, the greater the variance will be. If you lose one hand with AA vs KK it doesn't mean a damn thing.


Slot machines have been proven to be programmed. Have poker sites? Nope. Sure, it's possible, but the fact that everyone's databases run within the boundaries of statistical variance means that we're nearly %100 sure they aren't programmed.

I mean no offense here, but I'm not sure you understand variance. Read wikipedia's page on it here.

Why would someone rig a site in such a way that long-term expectancy is exactly the same as if the site were not rigged? What could a site possibly have to gain from this?

heh, that too^^^

Chuck's spot on with the coin analogy. In 100 tosses you will usually get a run of seven in a row, doesn't mean the coin's rigged like he says.

Taking 100 hands is just as bad.

This is just patronising to a number of people here who have a very good understanding of stats and probability.