Rigged: The AA test

LMFAO

You right but its .45% chance, great post..

lmfaorofpimp. Very nice Alon. You sure know how to breath new life into a thread.

slightly off topic...I dont have HH....but here's my thoughts on "rigged" hands to increase rake......

the rigged argument is usually put forth by people that lose big when they were sure they were gonna win (often by people that know little about poker).......

you have to look at the game you're playing....
it's online poker....( lotta newbies playing that just dont know any better.....so they call and suckout)

if it's low stakes (or freeroll)........always callers to suck out cause they dont care

even in higher limits, many play loose because ,
-not face to face with real people.....no embarrasment over stupid play
-money is not as real when it's like a video game...same people would prob play a little tighter in person with real chips in their hand

I play at Foxwoods quite often and over the last 3 or 4 years I've seen the quality of play go down quite a bit ( a good thing !) i know the deal isn't rigged there....but there are days when the fish are running good and call their way to suckout winners time after time....

play 1000 live hands at home with pennies and you will see all the same "rigged" hands

remember that pocket AA or KK is still just 1 pair.....prob 70% hands are won with 2 pair or better..

isn't the rake is capped once the pot reaches a certain level ? (capped or close in avg. hand ?).....building the pot beyond that would hold no advantage for the sites....

why would they even rig hands to begin with ? ...risk the millions they make to increase profits by a few percent ?....I don't think so

Collusion at ring games is what you should really be worried about....people say "they catch em all the time" (nothing to worry about ?).....

the smart ones DON'T get caught.....it does go on all the time....and a few smart colluders will take all your money alot more efficiently than the occasional bad beat from a "rigged" hand

Nice post Wach. All too true. I play at Foxwoods too. See you there.
Here's the corrected table with Zachvacs 330,000 PokerStars hands removed. Good to see you actually have a life Zach.

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Yeah online you get more all in hands, thats why I play tight online. In a sit n go, I always get pocket jj or higher every time. I was playing at a live cash game and did not get pocket jacks or better not 1 time. So I do think thats messed up. Maybee it's because the cards are not getting shuffled right or something? I do not know.

All this is proving is how bad my downswong is.

Updated stats:

Hands: 49,343
Dealt AA: 185
Expected: 220

[ ] plays good
[x] runs bad
[x] on life tilt

Last time I played live, I didn't get a pocket pair in 4 hours of play

Ouch FX. You've been short sheeted. 49,343 hands added. TY

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Just to make it clear, my last post was the new total, and it was on full tilt.

I hadn't subtracted the previous total.

Oh, I'll fix that later. I need to keep better track of who already contributed. Thanks for the heads up.

i like this thread alot, it seems like anyone who posted had about the same win % (82-87) and it shows that online isnt rigged

I realised earlier why you just can't win in low stakes online. People absolutely will not fold no matter what. They will call your all in with a set of aces on the turn with Queen high and hit a str8 on the river every time. If 9 hands are played to the river and nobody ever folds no matter what, how often will somebody out of the 9 hit a str8? It means you just cant bet with anything less than a flush. The irony of it being so much easier to beat people who know how to play just kills me.

What does that have to do with this thread?

CHESTERFLICK and all,
hi. CHESTERFLICK, you make a valid point when you state
"The real question is if online poker is ALWAYS on the up and up..
well obviously the answer is no."

for me too it is the honesty/integrity of poker sites
that give creedence to a lot of negitive issues...including rigging.
just recently yet another poker site goes down the
tubes,jungle, and yet another time accounts are not
paid. and as you know, this is not an exception...seems to be the rule.
these sites operating in third world countries pretty
much can do what they want.
so, i'm not saying sites are rigged/jucied...just that i
wouldn't put it past them (sure would be in character).
and i'll need a lot more evidence to convince me otherwise.
all this analizing everyone is doing...why not just
just go the poker sites home page and look up the
results of their rng "independent audits"? answer...you can't.
best to all in 08,
donvic

If a poker site wanted to rig, another reason for doing so besides upping the rake in cash games, would be to make sure the winning players had enough of a doom switch on them to even things out so that they don't take all the money away from the fish, thereby causing the fish to get too discouraged and not come back. I've probably done more work on this than most of you, having once been a conspiracy theorist on a mission. My conclusion drawn from my stats is, in general, that it's not rigged. There is one site I'm still amazed with, but they don't allow hand histories other than 100 at a time, so it makes my work harder. If I ever write a program to get all my hand histories, watch out site, (you know which one you are), I'm gonna expose you.

I meant to fix this a while ago. I double counted FX HH's. Here's the fix.

I appreciate the interest in this thread people, but I think we're getting a little off track.

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ok i'm new to this and I have read all of this thread and don't believe that it is
rigged for this ...now how about a test that show bad card against good cards ...like 72 over aa I have seen more bad beats with good hand to little hands ..I think they the poker site cater to bad hand so it gives people a false sense of being good..I have played at a casino and did great .. I won three sit and go tables ..

Been lurking here awhile. Here's my A/A stats.

17,784 hands.
A/A 73 times
Win % is 93.15, 82.14% as showdown.

A lurking penguin comes in from the cold. Welcome to Cardschat and bless you sir for your generous contribution to ART the AA Rigged Test.
You'll see that the table has been updated to reflect your input.
Looks like you were shorted 7 or 8 of the goodies. Pushed PokerStars in the wrong direction by .0005%

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OK. Let me try to comment on this as it does peripherally have to do with what the point I'm trying to get at with this test/game.

We get this alot. "AA is soo Cliché. If they (the evil poker cartel) were going to juice to deck they would never do anything so obvious." The point I'm trying to make is that it doesn't matter what THEY do to manipulate the outcome of a hand. Any mismanagement of the shuffle, intentional or otherwise would result in anomalies throughout the process and would be noticed.

In order to achieve manipulation of the cards in any way, some fiddling with the RNG and or shuffling algorithm would be necessary. In order to make any result more likely than another the integrity of the shuffle MUST be compromised in whole. In order to pay Paul, you have to steal from Peter.

So it doesn't matter that I chose to test the RNG's with AA. I could have picked any hand, starting or final to test my hypotheses. It seemed to me that a meaningful sample size needed to test a final hand, like a straight flush, would have been prohibitably large and the pocket pair AA just seemed alot sexier than 72o.

I would like to take this moment to say that I am really pleased with the attention this thread has received. I've had threads in the past that I thought were the total bomb which in fact totally bombed. It never occured to me that there would I'd still be tending to my little spread sheet one month, 90 replies and 1700 views later. It's even got a 5 Star rating.

Thanks to everyone who's contributed. Let's see some more Full Tilt hands.

-Roy

I know you want Full Tilt Poker but I only play PokerStars. Here's some more hands I've played since the last post, if needed:

Site: Pokerstars
Number of ring hands: 19550
Dealt AA: 95
Expected: 88
I am dealt AA: 1 in 206 hands
Won: 90.53%

Added Chucks 19000 from PokerStars. The heart at rest sees a feast in everything. Whatever that means.

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I don't believe that any website is rigged at all. I have played poker in real life and had some back to back situations when it seemed like it wasn't meant for me to win. you have to improve from your bad beats not make excuses for them i think.

you make a very good point but my question is,do you take into consideration how many hands are dealt at any given site at the same time.if say pokerstars has say 200 ring games going and there are 20 hands out of 200 that have AA in them,coming from the same RNG this would up your %.i think to prove your theory you would have to find the number of hands dealt in a 24 hr period then find how may AA hands were dealt in that time then do the math.1 persons hands over a year would probably come out the way u explain it,but add all the hands on the site and c if its the same.

lol. Oookay! I'll get right on that.

But seriously, I don't think all that is necessary. I'm just checking their consistancy with expected results. What were looking for is something like .045% of ANY sample. It doesn't matter from who, when, which or the sample was taken. It doesn't matter how many or few hands are being played simultaniously or whether or not it was taken in a 24 hour or 24 year period. And to this point, as far as PokerStars is concerned the missile has gone right down the chimney.

Greetings all. Long time player and keep my hand histories, but I don't do statistical analysis of them (after four years in engineering and another four years of business grad school, I hate stats more than you can imagine). What are you guys running your cards through to get the AA numbers? I saw a reference to a piece of software, but maybe I'm diverting the thread a bit by asking here... So, maybe after the past hour of reading I shall go on a site expedition to find a synopsis thread for software! Anyway, excellent posts. I've been around a lot of boards and this is among the highest levels of discourse I have seen. Kudos!

P.S. I do imagine the is some chicanery out there... I mean this IS poker. But, if you stay at the finest sites, I think you can minimize it's effect on your play (collusions amongst players not withstanding). In other words, I don't think there is much (probably not any) institutional manipulation going on at the top sites though it is certainly feasible. But why risk the golden goose when you can milk it.

Balls, we're just looking at out PokerTracker hand history. We can see how many hands we've played and how many times we've had A/A. Statistically, we should have A/A every 221 hands.

That being said...

I have changed my mind. I guess it's time of me to join the multitude of whiners who think it's incredibly obvious that online poker is rigged.

You're supposed to get A/A once every 221 hands. Our small sample shows a .04348% varience in that. That's means that every 5,083 hands we'll get one less A/A than we're supposed to.

I applaud the multitude of complainers for being able to notice this inconsistency, as I admit I just wasn't smart enough to remember the past 5,000 hands. I also... oh... wait... Did I say one less A/A than I was supposed to?

Nevermind.

i understand that in your test, that yes you are correct.most of the time an singal person and his AA hands will equal how many times he should get his AA verus how many times he actually gets them.but you said this was to see if online poker was rigged right?well if your not takining all the other tables that are being played at the same time as this 1 person,into consideration how can you prove that it is or is not?

Hi Rick. I appreciate your interest in this thread and I am willing to consider any advice or criticism you or anyone else may have to improve it, but I'm not sure I follow what your saying. Are you suggesting that in order to prove conclusively that the software is working correctly one would have to check all the tables simultaineously? This is a just a sampling. The larger the sample, the more representative of the truth the results should be.

Because the number of cards in a deck is static, there are a discrete number of outcomes. In a 5 card hand there are 2,598,960 possible outcomes, and only 4 of those make a Royal Flush. In order to validate the accuracy of a shuffling algorithm by determining the deviation of expected royals to actual royals we would probably need a sample of several billion hands. I'll get back to this.

We can simplify things by only considering starting hands in which case there are 1326 separate possibilities and each possibility is a fraction of that number.The starting hand AA (or any 2 cards of the same rank) can happen 6 different ways out of that 1326 or expressed as a percentage .4525%. But even though the number of possible outcomes is quantifiable, the possibility of any part of that whole is still a random event, like flipping a coin, therefore some degree of variability or spread, is inherant, and the presence of some deviation expected.

Our sample so far is only a small fraction of all the hands that have ever been played on-line, so how can we assume it's accurate, even if the result we've achieved is very close to that which we expect? After all, if we flip a coin twice and get each of the possible results, our deviation from the expected result is zero, but we really haven't validated the legitimacy of the coin, have we. We validate by having a sample size that is sufficiently large not in relation to the number of possible flip attempts which is infinite, but rather in relation to the the number of possible outcomes.

In the case of our coinflip we flipped the coin twice and there are in fact only 2 possibilities, so the relationship of our sample to possible outcomes was 1:1. Very poor reliability. In the case of our AA rigged test we have about 400,000 hands from PokerStars. This is about 300 times greater than our possible 1326 2 card starting hands. 300:1 with a deviation of less than 2.5%. I'd say this is accurate and would be very surprised if the next 400,000 hands didn't sharpen our confidence.

Our sample from iPoker is very small in comparrison therfore the deviation is not surprisingly larger. 16,000+/- ÷ 1326 or 11:1 with a deviation of 4.9%. A pretty useless sample if you ask me.

One last thing just for fun. Remember our Royal Flushes? In order t0 recieve the same degree of accuracy using a Royal as we have achieved with AA we would need a sample size of about 780 billion hands. I douubt that many hands of poker have ever been played in all the history of the game. Not to mention that most of the time you'd need to go to showdown. lol

So Rick. Did that answer your question?

Hmm . . . I started reading this article, and while it sounded interesting, when I noticed a reference to "Pascal" (an archaic programming language, to my knowledge), I looked at the date of the article -- June 7, 2001 -- and moved on. I'm not saying there may not have been some relevance to this at some point, but it's certainly way past outdated at this time.

Here's how PokerStars generates a random shuffle.

Not only do they used a random number generator that runs off thermal noise (static), but they use five sources of information to feed the generator including the movements of players' mouses. Nobody can control all of that.

They have had two independent security monitoring companies view the source code and they both vouch for it's randomness.

In 2001, sites weren't as concerned about security. Nowdays, if it was discovered that a site was using an unfair shuffle, it would be a deathblow.

Nice add Penguin. Where did you find that info?

Isn't this getting just a little bit old? If you really thought it was rigged would you be on it? I think not! Does someone play with the full knowledge they are going to lose or because they have a chance at winning? I wonder!!!