Rigged: The AA test

I know we're all sick and tired of the on-line rigged debate. I've been trolling this site for 3 years and it just never seems to end, and the recent Absolute fiasco hasn't helped matters, never mind that what happen there actually had more to do with inexcusably loose security measures rather than actual RIGGING.

The logic behind the belief that the sites rig the game is ALWAYS the same and NEVER backed up by any facts. The belief is that the sites somehow profit from increased rakes by pitting big hands against eachother.

"Now why is it rigged...well like many people here have said, its because of the amount of rake they get...now alot of idiots dont know the bigger the pot, the more they rake...they also dont realise if there are MORE MONSTER HANDS ie, AA, AK, KK, there are going to be more all ins, the more all ins, the more you deposit once again..."

This quote is from a recent thread, but really, it's just one of hundreds and there's nothing unique about it. What surprises me is that this belief persists despite the fact that due to programs like Poker Tracker, these inane assertions are easily verified or dispelled.

So lets test it. Let's keep it simple though. I'd like any of you who actually track their HH with some sort of software like PT or Poker Office to post the number of ring hands you've tracked (no rake in tourneys right?) along with the number of times you've been dealt AA. Also, to sort the cheaters from the honest we should break the numbers apart by site. If the argument holds water then we should all be seeing hands like AA or KK more often then expected. I think the chances of being dealt AA or any pair is like 220:1 or about 4.5%

I'll start.

Site: Full Tilt
Number of ring hands: 16,901 (I've actually played about 3x that number but I lost my DB about a year ago)
Dealt AA: 68 (a little low)
Expected: 77
I am dealt AA: 1/248.5 hands = .402%

Site: Poker Stars
NRH: 5323
Dealt AA: 36 (a little high)
Expected: 24
I am dealt AA: 1/147.86 hands = .676%

Total
NRH: 22454
Dealt AA: 106 (a statistical bullseye)
Expected: 102
I am dealt AA: 1/211.83 hands = .4545%

I put alot more info in here than we need.
Just put the hands and times dealt AA and I'll do the math. I'll try to keep a running tally going, but I don't plan on being around much in the next few days so anyone may feel free to update it.

Cheers and Merry Christmas.

This is fantastic. I'm going to sticky this so that is doesn't get lost in the shuffle. Come on guys, let's see those stats!

Just AA data, and just pokerstars data but here you go.

6312 hands
dealt AA: 29 times
Expected: 28.6 times


looks pretty good to me

Minor correction, your odds are correct but the decimal is off a point in the percentage .

Should be ~ .45% chance




Great post, keep it going people!

What a brilliant idea - it won't shut the conspiracy theorists up, but at least they'll have to think of a new angle / excuse!

I've got 15,997 hands available at present. I created a new database when I made a fresh start at poker a couple of months ago. I have however got ALL my old hand histories archived (perhaps 50,000 more) so when I have time, I'll create a new db and load them also. For the moment, the results from my current db are:-

AA - 69 times (win 82.61%)
Expected - 72 times
Pretty close to expected

KK - 57 times (win 63.16%)
Expected - 72 times
Rather low, but not suspiciously so

The above is on the iPoker network.

Not sure what the win % should be expected (and it's probably not relevant to this thread) but my aces seems rather higher than I would of expected.

you can work out the percentage to be sure

hands dealt: 12972

AA: 57

Site: Pokerstars
Number of ring hands: 72,635
Dealt AA: 314
Expected: 330
I am dealt AA: 1/231.2 hands

Site: Pokerstars
Number of ring hands: 33,252
Dealt AA: 158
Expected: 150
I am dealt AA: 1/210.5 hands
Won: 87.97%

Here is a similar thread.

Site: Pokerstars
Number of ring hands: 116,766
Dealt AA: 535
Expected: 528
I am dealt AA: 1/218.3 hands

Oops thx for the fix.

Switch, is this Full Tilt?

Site: Pokerstars
Number of ring hands: 31,216
Dealt AA: 137
Expected: 141
I am dealt AA: 1/227.85 hands

I think you are making two mistakes here. One, I don't think it's a given that rigging would apply to ring games but not tourneys. Two, I don't believe that rigging would be to get more rake for the casino. In a way, though, that's just two different ways of saying the same thing.

For these two reasons, I think it would be a mistake to spend too much time studying AA and KK and QQ statistics. That's a little too obvious. Maybe JJ and AKo since they already have a love/hate relationship attached to them.

No, in my opinion it would make much more sense studying other card combinations. Pick one maybe that would normally be considered a hand you would fold, or something like that. See how often they win vs how often they should win.

Or another good one might be to study the community cards against a control say of the 21st to 25th cards in a million shuffles by a shuffling machine. As a corollary to this, what were the winning cards, and what is their expected frequency against actual frequency. This would be a good test, because it would force the issue. One or other of the sides would have to admit they were wrong. I would certainly admit I was wrong if this showed no significant difference.

This is a "wouldn't it be nice if......" not a suggestion, because it's probably impractical. A quick bit of (rough) mental arithmatic tells me that we have about 350,000 hands posted so far. I'm sure there are many others who have PT / PO who haven't posted. Just think what we could do if we could collate all of those stats. into a single PT db (I've got all my HH's archived - as I'm sure do most others).

I suspect someone (AG would be odds on favourite) is about to post a link to someone who already has done this, but if it doesn't already exist, it would be awesome!

What kind of information would you want from a big database? I mean, I've 120k from Stars alone this year, and few statistical anomalies require a large sample than that to find, really. I guess what I'm saying is that if there's something you'd want to test Stars ring games for that can be detectable in PT, I can probably do it with my DB alone.

/FP

What I was most interested in was a comparison of the number of times when 2 players had the same top hand ie AA vs AA, KK vs KK, QQ vs QQ or AK vs AK (either suited or not in the last example).

It would need a few lines of PL/SQL to extract it because it's not going to be available with any of the existing PT stats.

I would stress that I am not a subscriber to the rigged theory, my motives are to rule out as many of the common arguements as possible, hence looking for ways that rake could be increased that would not be so easily detectable.

full tilteroo

Actually I've never seen anyone argue this, it's too easy to disprove. Instead, people argue that AA and KK coincide more, so that AA still comes out as much as it should, and KK comes out as much as it should, but given there's an AA out there, KK comes up proportinally too much and vice versa. So even if (when) we come up with a perfect proportion of AA, people will still continue to believe that when we get AA, KK comes up more often than it should. This is not a testable hypothesis because we don't take every AA hand to showdown and especially when we set, it's possible someone is laying down KK. Although I guess what we could do is take all the hands in which we have AA where the board doesn't hit an A. We're assuming no one would fold KK to an under flop when we're in it with aces. Of course I guess that wouldn't work because that's assuming we never fold our aces, which isn't true at all.

So scratch that last idea. Basically, we are trying to come up with ways to prove a negative, which is a logical fallacy. The burden of proof is on those who wish to prove that the site is rigged. But I'll play along with this.

Pokerstars:
39,420 hands
AA 172 times

178 expected (damn pokerstars, ripping me off)

Full tilt:
3,798 hands
AA 21 times.

17 expected (now why have I only played 3798 at full tilt and 39420 at pokerstars? Perhaps a change in site is in order )

Sorry for taking so much time to get back to this. Hollidays and all. I hope you all understand that this is just for fun and that IF a site wanted to fiddle with their shuffling algorithm, there are other, less obvious ways they could and would do it. IMO, the action hand argument is the most widespread, probably because it's the easiest to understand.

Dispelling the notion that big rake generating hands like AA or KK are more prevalent should go a long way toward silencing all but the most hard core conpiracy theorists. Take away their biggest weapon and they might actually have to learn something about the issue to continue the debate, something they are unlikely to be qualified or inclined to do.

Very few of us have a DB big enough on its own to prove or disprove anything about the frequency of a given hand but many who don't understand this might think that their library of 20,000 hands is a sufficiently large enough sample to do just that. I'm no statistician, but it seems to me that any such assertion is meaningless with anything less than 10 times that number. If anyone knows something about statistics and standard deviations I'd be happy to hear from them.

But there's a better more satisfying reason for conducting this experiment than using it to defuse ignorant assumptions based on scant evidence. Even if there is no actual calculated ill intent on the part of the poker sites, it would be interesting to see just how good their RNG's and shuffling algorithms are. with just short of 400,000 hands we are deviating from our expected result by just a little over .5%. Unfortunately, only the Poker Stars sampling is by itself large enough to have merit, thanks to big contributers like FP and TB. If we focus on that site alone the gap is MUCH smaller, about .1%. I wouldn't mind seeing some more stats from FTP as it is the probably the most played site after PokerStars. At this time it's deviation is high by about 4.35% but I suspect that given it's reputation, with a sufficienlty large sample it would approach that of PokerStars.

Wow, that's the most I've written in like a year. Time for some Data.

The results so far.

Attached Images

Rigged AA.JPG (27.9 KB, 643 views)

Pokerstars:
12,359 hands
AA - 52 times
56 expected

Fulltilt - 1724 hands
AA - 7 times
7.8 expected

Ah, very nice. Thx Dax.
Ooh! That one hurt our cause a bit. lol

Attached Images

Rigged AA.JPG (26.6 KB, 631 views)

I knew it was rigged against me lol.

This experiment seems like it would be very fun to participate in. However, I do not have PT or PO. I would like to purchase PT when I begin to actually show a big enough profit in poker. Sigh.

Not to turn this into a PT thread, but IMO, buying a product like PT might actually help you to show that profit RB.

Using PT to prove that online poker is not rigged will not work. Everyone knows that the sites have software that can detect PT and they only juice the tables where no one is using PT

Full tilt
Hands 31,908
dealt 120
expected 143
1 / 265.9 hands for me

I realized I didn't include all my databases.

Here's the total for my 2 db's:

Full Tilt
Hands 43,212
AA - 162
expected - 194
1 / 266.7 I'm dealt AA

Number of tables where nobody is using PT = 0.1%
Therefore:-
Maximum number of tables that are juiced = 0.1%

The case is proven - the games are not rigged

omg AA dealt on all sites are now below expectation! this proves online poker is rigged for....... non-action!?!?

i'll add my ftp db when i'm home

Doh! Nice going Alon. You just started a whole new conspiracy theory.


really, check it out. The poker sites are down by 46 AA's after 400,000 hands. Twisted logic says they're losing rake $. They better fix that leak before they go broke. Full Tilt is getting totally screwed.

Attached Images

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I have not posted in quite some time and it is because I have never seen so many experts at one site before I mean really what could I possibly add to your little gang of experts. My god you all must be filthy rich with all the poker knowledge you have and you math skills are only 2nd to the top guys at NASA.
But here is the truth about it as I see it.
Whenever anyone comes to this site and claims anything to the negative to online poker they are laughed at and beat up so bad by you poker experts that I would think they would never want to return.
No matter what anyone ever says you experts always want to use the word rigged.
And here is a guy justifing what went on at absolute as merely a security issue..a security issue thats all.
The real question is if online poker is ALWAYS on the up and up..well obviously the answer is no. To what extent..who knows maybe the absolute thing is the only time in online poker history that anyone was caught cheating. Rigging is another type of cheating but lets not mix words.
People come to sites like these for help but you experts dont do that you would rather laugh and tell them how bad the play poker or be real inventive and call them something like donk or donkey.
The owner of this site nick just e-mailed me wondering why I have not posted in a while. Its because you regulars are rude and obnoxious know it alls who must be the richest online poker player the world will ever know.. more power to you. As for me I will just go through my online poker playing with the knowledge I have and try not to make anymore deposits.
For my play I play at full tilt only because I tend to do better there then anywhere else and would tell people to never ever play at ultimate bet. hell I would rather play at absolute before ultime bet.
so Adios poker pros I am sure you will be happy with the millios you are making playing online you must be the best in the business because you are not even scared by a little teeny weeny security breath at a top online site.

5624 hands on PS
Dealt AA 28 times
I believe the expectation is 25.3

It's a shame that you feel this way, but I think that you are confusing 2 different issues. Yes, people who accuse sites of being rigged and fail to supply any evidence to support that are often ridiculed, and justifyable so (in my opinion). However, I would challenge you to reply here with a link to ANY thread on this site where a member, either new or old, has been ridiculed for asking for advice.

Again, I think you may be getting 2 issues muddled into one. The Absolute debacle related to individuals who were cheating (and caught out). This was not a case of the poker site being involved, though most will accept that the site's security was crap in the extreme. Again, I would challenge you to post a link to a thread on this site where anyone has claimed that cheating (by individuals) does not exist. Indeed, there are several threads where just such behaviour has been highlighted. Nobody (as far as I know) has been ridiculed for suggesting that there are people out there who try to cheat.