online poker is a lot of whoey

I have been gambling for most of my 50 years on the planet earth, from Jai Alai, dog track, horses,casino gambling and poker. I have been playing holdem (small stakes) limit and no limit sit and goes. I have been playing these types of holdem for several years now in various poker rooms in the Miami area.
I always play tight with a few exceptions and usually do okay.
I decided one day to see what all this online poker stuff was all about so I started playing at pokerstars where I just started out playing the "free" game. I did pretty good so I decided to make a deposit and play for cash.
I stared playing 1-2 and did well for a short time and then whammy some of the worst beats I have ever seen playing poker. I was amazed how fast my cash was gone so I made another deposit and whammy again some of the worst beats I have ever seen. So naturally I start thinking online poker is a scam and wrote pokerstar to tell them so and they wrote back telling me what nice people the are and they have no reason to cheat. I never said they cheated me.
I started surfing and reading and most places say that the online rooms are good places and that I was a bad player. Well since I know I am not a bad player I decided to try another online poker room. I tried full tilt this time because all the poker guys you see on tv all where their shirts ,hats underwear, etc.
I made my 50$ deposit after playing free to understand their format and started playing. well again I started out well winning a few but all seemed okay and then WHAMMY again I was being beat like never before and it wasn't the fact that they were all bad beats, they were just better hands but hands that usually needed runner, runner to win on the river.
I had never seen anything like it before in my life. I cant remember being beat like this with hands that were bet and raised correctly only to be beat in an incredible way. So I wrote full tilt as well and the letter the sent back was very similar to pokerstars.
I was in shock but I still went online to read as much as I could because surely all of these "poker pros" you see on tv would never put their reputation on the line for something thats crooked.
So after reading and trying to gain more info I decided that I would try 1 more place. I went to UltimateBet,played for free before making a deposit and started playing. Again at first I did okay. I was playing tight tight tight. I was winning some and holding my own before those amazing beats started showing up. I stoped 1/2 way through my money , wrote the UB and told them that something was not right but they wrote back assuring me the shuffle is good and bad beats were part of the game and that they try to emmulate a fair shuffle. So I stopped my crying and went back to playing. I lowered the stakes at this point to 1.00-.50 and continued playing and playing tight continuing to keep it to top ten and A suited starters. I was doing okay but still going down that an amazing thing happened. I held a quad hand that won, and then 10 minutes later another quad hand that won and within another hour another quad hand that won.
None of these hands won much because there were no bets going on and when I did bet people would just fold so there was no big win on any of these.
But I sat back and laughed at myself at being such a fool for playing online. I have played countless hours of poker in poker rooms and have never seen 4 of a kind 3 times in less then A day . I have never seen the same guy get 4 of a kind 3 times ever. I never saw beats that I saw online ever. So I will never play online again not because they cheat..why would they with so much at stake<snicker> but the shuffle is suspect thats for sure and although I did not play in any tounaments I dont think I ever will.

I have high hopes for this thread

best 1st post ever ??

If your playing micro-limits at these sites, then I have some news for you.
You will suffer the worst badbeats, the trick to online at the micro levels is bet heavy with your premium cards, have the disipline to fold your PP when there is 1 over on the board or your set when there is a flush/straight draw on the board to any large raises.

You actually WROTE to Pokerstars, Full Tilt and Ultimate Bet telling them they were rigged? That's not really something to brag about

$50 isn't enough for $1/2 is it?

Ship the cliff notes version ->>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

i watch alot of poker on tv etc u see guys hitting two outers on the river and bad beats ok its gunna happen online and in llife so,, regarding the pros people like ivey and hellmuth they all play online all the time they play against people from all over the world , phil gordon said recently hes had a string of not cashing online in sitngo's well it happens ups and downs thats poker but hes not claiming it rigged,and they dont all endorse sites so , guys like john vorhaus who wrote "killer poker online" make a living online and they always stress bankroll management, i dont think they have had the same pattern playing online as you and do well for the most part like hundreds of others , tell people making money be it ups and downs its "alot of whoey "

Personally, I think real life is poker rigged :O

/sarcasm

Here watch this YouTube - 2004 USPC - Corkins vs D'Agostino

I dont mind getting beat or slammed but I quess the point of the post was in the end of the story where I made quads 3 time in such a short period of time..that to me makes it suspect. Most of what I have read online says that I suck at playing and I know that I am at least an okay player.
I would agree that 50 bucks is not enough for the 1/2 swing but I was just checking the waters.
and for Rob I dont think I wrote those 3 sites and told them they were rigged . I dont even see the word "rigged" in my post. I did tell them that I was suspisious of thoses beats and they way they came. All the sites said their shuffle was good and they stood by it. I am not braging I am just stating fact.
If I wanted to brag I would tell you about other things not associated with poker
I welcome any points of view and help. I am willing to give it ago again.

I've had moments where I doubted them (when I was on the bad beat side) but all those doubts go away as soon as you're on the winning side raking in a huge pot.

OP plays $200NL with a quarter of a buyin, repeatedly goes bust, obviously this is because online poker is rigged.

Clearly the 'live vs online' poker debate deserves more discussion.

Chester, I suggest you spend some time here reading articles about online poker. It is covered here more than live play.

Read the reviews on a book several of us recently reviewed. "What No One Else Is Saying About Online-Poker" by Carl Varrone. Find it here; http://www.cardschat.com/f13/what-no...-author-86684/

Your situation actually makes this book something you might benefit from.

chester,
i have been playing only for about 2 years now online, but, as i tend to be a little obsessive, i routinely play 4 to 16 hours a day. my background education is in the hard sciences so i tend to be data/statistics driven when i evaluate anything. about 3 months into play, (i was on a steep learning curve as i was not a poker player prior to this...reading everything on the subject i could get my hands on as well), i grew increasingly suspicious of the apparent large volume of monster-hands/suckouts/bad-beats i was seeing because it did not jibe with what i had read. so i began playing at brick and mortar casinos to get a feel with real stuff in front of me and i saw that the play was a whole heckuvalot more like i expected from what i had read. so then i began reading up a little on RNG and what the mathematicians and programmers had to say about it and the common thread of concern regarding RNG was that it was not truly random as patterns always seemed to emerge (like, oh i don't know, multiple super monster hands to the same player in a very short period of time). i have heard it argued that you see these situations in televised poker tournys all the time to which i respond that out of the tens of thousands of hands dealt at a major tourny they are going to televise only a small percentage and what are they going to pick, the dull and boring or the "oh my gosh i can't believe he caught the runner/runner" exciting hands? i did a little experiment a while back where i tracked my pocket AA versus any random 2 cards for a month...i only included those situations where i managed to isolate the hand to heads-up because statistically AA should hold up against any 2 random cards about 4/5 times...in my little test AA held up 1/5 times, right around 22% of the time...chew on that for a while. i just adjust my play according to where i am playing. i find myself on final tables every week and of the sites where i play cash ring tables i am up in 4/5 of them.

How many times were u dealt AA in that time period? In the last 3 months I have been dealt AA 17 times and won every time, obviously I am lucky they have held up that many times, but if you have a large enough sample AA will not hold up only 1/5 times, lol

Little better than 1/5

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What is that^^^^?

AA is about 80% against any random hand... like so-

equity win tie pots won pots tied
Hand 0: 85.204% 84.93% 00.27% 10689050508 34206936.00 { AA }
Hand 1: 14.796% 14.52% 00.27% 1827970020 34206936.00 { random }

Don't know where you got that 31% .

Woops, those are the odds being calculated on a 10 person table if everyone goes in. lol

In heads up....

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Chester, try some $10 to $20 1 table SNG's, play your normal game, pay attention to the other folks at your table & you will likely do fine.

hi bw07507,
only 17 times in 3 months? and you won all of them!! dang, i wish i was so lucky, but apparently i cannot even depend on random chance. oh well, i kept track of AA 27 times and lost 21 in the course of about one month...i only included hands where pre-flop raising isolated the play to heads-up. i realize this is by no means a large enough sampling to be statistically significant, but my point was that in my own little world this was hugely and disappointingly anomalous...so my "faith" in RNG is guarded, and so i adjusted my game.

Live poker is a lot of whoey. Check out Terrence Chan, getting back-to-back quads. i rai. - $1500 Limit Hold'em shootout

I had a dealing gig about two months ago, and in three hours I dealt quads four times. Live poker must be rigged.

As or the AA tracking, if you were serious about it you would get PT or some other software, play about 100,000 hands and then report back. I have had AA 86 times out of 17,824 hands (an admittedly small sample), with a win rate of 86%. Seems about right to me....

this should help you out chester...... http://www.cardschat.com/f13/online-...igation-70058/