Rigged: The AA test

Thanks for the update on the software. Sorry it took me a while to get back to check it. Wife had health issues... is having... Anyway, still an excellent thread. Pokerstars link is QUITE interesting. The sum of this knowledge is exponential here. I shall certainly be around more frequently. though I find it hard to post when I am reading so much.

Are you implying that only 300 royals have ever occurred?

I've had 4, so that's highly unlikely

I've been trying to work that dang egg into something relevant FOREVER, I'm just going to use it.

I actually started reading this thread in the hopes of finding out if there really is any gaming of the poker system. The more I read and the more I thought about it the more I realized (no offense to OP) that what this thread is measuring is a waste of time. Clearly, a program could be written to make sure that the correct proportion of hands were dealt and still tilt it to their advantage. Not really sure where I read this but someone posted somewhere that the sites have no reason to cheat because they make millions of dollars. No offense to that poster but they clearly do not understand how business works at all. Especially in this business their objective is not fairness but to squeeze as much money out of as many people as possible. The only efforts they will make towards fairness is to "appear" as fair as possible and a worst case scenario for them would be to be fair if they have to. These are not charitable organizations. I think a better use of efforts would be to find a realistc way for the poker players to get together and find a way to force the poker sites to be fair instead of all of us who should be on th same side fighting over whether or not they are actually fair right now but what do I know.

Not exactly. Going back through my numbers I realize that I was slightly off with the number of sample hands needed to test the RNG accuracy using a 5 card poker hand to the degree we have done with a 2 card hand. In my earlier thread, I stated that the number was 780 Billion. That should have been 780 Million. And we should see about 1200 Royals. What's a few hundred billion among friends?

However! Using a 7 card hand there are 133,784,560 possible outcomes so a sample size 300 times larger would require about 40 Billion Hands. That's still a pretty big number and we would expect to see about 1.3 million Royals.

Well, the machine PokerStars uses to generate the random cards is created by technology giant Intel (makers/designers of the Pentium processor). And as mentioned earlier, five random bits of information (like people's mouse movements) are used to feed the machine, so even if the machine didn't work properly and spat out predictable results, the numbers fed into it would be nearly impossible to predict.

PokerStars also uses two independent companies (Cigital and BMM International) to check their operation. These companies also check brick and mortar casinos like Caesar's, Bally's, Harrah's, MGM Mirage, Trump Hotel and Casinos, and many more. They are *not* puppets for the online industry and they know what they are doing.

Who pays those companies to do the audits?

In the case of government lotteries it's usually the state's lottery commission pays them. In the case of brick and mortar casinos the casino's pay for them. In the case of online poker, the sites pay for them.
And in this case they're paying lots of money to reputable companies who have a proven track record. I assume they do this because it's the best step they can take to prove the legitimacy of their system.

Are you implying that there's a massive scam going on, where the independent auditing companies are conspiring with each other and the hundreds of gaming establishments to steal? That all these hundreds (or thousands) of people are willing to risk bankruptcy and jail time an their already lucrative livelihood to make a fraction make a fraction more profit, knowing full well that if one person cracks and comes clean that it will all be awash?

Have you ever heard of Arthur Anderson and Enron?

Yes, I have. Does he have any AA stats to contribute? Preferably from Full Tilt.

Maybe you are not so familiar so I'll give a brief refresher. Arthur Anderson was once one of the "Big Five" accounting firms conducting auditing, tax and consulting services. Founded in 1913 and with a list of clients among the largest companies around the world everyone wondered why in a company like this "people were willing to risk bankruptcy and jail time and their already lucrative livelihood to make a fraction make a fraction more profit, knowing full well that if one person cracks and comes clean that it will all be awash"

Thank you for the quote by the way Savage.

The purpose of a business is to make as much profit as possible. Period. Anyone who does not understand this does not understand business. Maybe there are other reasons but there are only two reasons I can see that you would have to staunchly defend the integrity of these sites. The first is that you don't understand how a business operates. The second is schilling for the site for your own motives. If there are other let me know.

And maybe you don't understand the intent of this thread. You could just read the OP but that might be too much of a hassle so here's a refresher.

Many people believe that Poker Sites juice the deck by manipulating the shuffle to produce more action hands which presumably increases the pot size and in turn the rake.

I postulated that were this true, we should see some descrepencies in the number of times big hands like AA were actually dealt compared to the number mathamatically expected.

I then asked members to contributen the number of ring hands they were dealt AA in relation to their total number of hands so we could use this as a benchmark to check the accuracy of the RNG at various on-line poker rooms.

For what it's worth, I'm not naive enough to blindly trust any profit driven organization. But as far as this thread is concerned I don't care about Arthur Anderson, King Arthur or Chester Allen Arthur and I don't need to be talked down to like a three year old. If you want to contribute some data to this project, or just say something relevent to its intent, then welcome aboard. Otherwise take your insulting and paranoid apersions as to my integrity elsewhere.

I don't think anything we say can convince jstnorv07 because the possibility will always be there. There's always one more layer.
There will always be unknown factors.

Other than getting to unrelated, independent auditors who have direct access to the source code and using specially designed equipment from Intel (another multi-billion dollar company unrelated to poker), what else would you want? You can't expose hand histories without betraying your customers. The more access you allow to your system the more likely it is for someone find a hole to exploit, and there will always be holes.

You have companies like SharkScope collecting billions of hands, and tens of thousands of people with millions of hands each using programs such as PokerTracker to examine their hand histories. If there were inconsistencies, it would be apparent. Usually when you hear complains about poker being rigged it's from improperly bankrolled players. If you're improperly bankrolled, I assume a lot of other things about your understanding of the game of poker.

To get back on track... I appreciate the effort of posting hand histories for A/A here. I'll contribute more in a bit.

The title of this thread is Rigged: The AA Test...my point was that this test doesn't prove anything except that if they are cheating this is not the method that pokerstars uses. I thought my point regarding the auditing of the site was legitimate and the comparison to Arthur Anderson was also legitimate. When you ridiculed it by asking him to contribute to the hands you asked for the response I gave so I apologize if it offended you. As far as reading OP the first sentence is "I know we're all sick and tired of the on-line rigged debate." This statement clearly indicates that the objective is to dismiss the online rigged debate. Further down "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. "
Clearly prior to receiving any hand information you built up a straw man and took him down. Congratulations but you didn't prove anything at all and I think it's too bad that instead of looking at this objectively and creating an open debate about it you are going to try and run this thread like a tyrant.

Savage,

I want to be convinced but there is nothing convincing here or anywhere else that I have seen. Clearly, the number of AA hands does not prove anything of meaningful value regarding the rigged debate. Only reason I am posting here is becuase there are clearly very intelligent people on this board who could contribute something very meaningful if they put their minds to it.

jstnorv07, let me hear ur oppinion

ok hear what, if u dont believe that this test is proving anything, then what do u suggest we research and make a test about?

i honestly believe this test is showing that online poker hands occur at just about the same rate at which live hands occur

still think we need more data and we need to be testing this out with different hand variations and test the probabilty of these hands occuring compared to the rate at which they are suppose to mathematically occur

I'm pretty thick skinned and welcome opposing viewpoints. My initial response to your dissoriented reference to Arthur Anderson was an attempt to get this thread back on track. If you wanted to make a relevant connection you should have just done so instead of tossing out a name and waiting for someone to say "Gee wiz jstnor, no I haven't. Please inform us".

Your follow up was just patronizing and plain insulting. You've been here for 4 days. You don't know me from Adams Ox. Who the F*ck are you to suggest that I'm a schill for anyone.

As far as proving anything with this thread, unless your also insinuating that I've somehow manipulated the data to support a preconceived notion or to advocate in favor of some disreputable poker site, numbers do not lie.

So go ahead and hide your head in the sand. I suppose mere facts are a shallow substitution for paranoid conjecture.

pantin007,

If I knew the best way to check it would have been my first post. Pokerstars sent me a list of my allin hands and I started trying to dice up the data but I am not really sure that I am using the best method or if it provides any meaningful results.

It is pretty time consuming also and I am not sure if I can continue but here is what I have so far.

70 allin Hands
33 Wins
35 Losses
2 Ties
I did not calculate any odds for the ties
I was favorite 46 times and won 25 of those hands.
I was underdog in 22 hands and won 8 of those.
My average preflop advatage on hands that I won was 59.38%
My opponents average preflop advantage on hands they won was 48.21%

If anyone wants me to forward the email from Pokerstars with these allin hands I will oblige.

You took that way too personally and obv I touched a chord with the schill reference but it was not directed at anyone in particular. Hopefully we can put this behind us because I would really like to continue what I think is a very important discussion. Also, in no way was I insinuating that you manipulated the data. I hope this doesn't offend you but my insinuation was that the data you are measuring here is completely useless.

but how is it useless?
this shows that the RNG is correctly dealing out the hands as often as they should be dealt out, well AA is

Yes I take insults personally. Useless I can handle. Please explain why though.

Easy, you could run the software with the parameters that all hands should be evenly distributed, however, you could pit Player A against player B and write the program that Player A will beat Player B regardless of the hands they start with. I'm sure it would be very simple for software to do something like that and surely there could be other more complicated methods of making sure they get the most money out of the most people. Maybe first time depositers and frequent depositers are given 4-5%(or whatever) tweeks to their advantage. Just enough to fly under most people's radar. Before I get attacked on this, this is conjecture on my part but if I could come up with that off the top of my head imagine what a group of people whose job it is to increase profits could come up with discussing this every day for however many years Pokerstars etc. have been around.

I was not directing any insults at you. If I was I would have said Four Dogs,,,blah blah blah(insert insult). I should have been using this quote thing before so that I could direct my comments more succintly at the people I am talking to. I have been reading here for a while but just started posting because I like this thread. My first few posts were mainly a jumbled together response of everything that I had read over a long time from many different threads prior to posting. The tyrant thing is the only one that was specifically meant for you.

OK, here's my synopsis of the recent discord brought up. The postulation is that there are numerous potential ways online poker could be rigged out there. For our study here we are looking at whether or not sites are "juicing" the play by matching monster hands against each other thus increasing the rake and their profit. Now, to do this, we assume that A-A would show more frequently in the pocket than the statistical probability would indicate as as a measure that this indeed happening.

Now, this has brought up an excellent discussion and some great analysis. Of course, we can all dissect the null hypothesis and find flaws as to whether it would lead us to any conclusive results as to:

1. Is there rigging of the deal?
2. Is there true randomness in the dealing?
3. Is there cheating by players?
4. Is there cheating by the site?
5. Is there juicing by any means?

Now, as with any study, medical or otherwise, it is not without merit to conduct a focused study so that you can answer the null hpothesis conclsively then you can go on to the next question. This is how all research is conducted. It takes time and study. The trick is, we need these results and then we need the next question to build on this. First, we need to get this question answered conclusively. Maybe the next question is, "How often does K-K come?" Then, "How often are K-K and A-A up against each other?", and later, A-K, etc.

The bottom line, both sides of this dispute here have a point, but there is absolute merit to this study and it is completely inconclusive at this point. We are like a little lab starting research into a huge new field. Kudos to us... well, not really me, but you guys.

Well said.

lol

Here is a pretty out there idea that I just thought of that I reaize would probably be very difficult to achieve. Again please don't attack this as I know it is pure conjecture. What if a US player was playing someone in Berlin. There is an ever so slight delay between him seeing his hand and you seeing yours. Software is written that determines his hand after you make your move. i.e. you push all in with A's, instantly and unbeknownest to either... Berlin player sees K's and flop is set to drop a K. I hope I don't regret posting this one.

I have matured enought in poker to realize that just because I glance down at a pocket pair of AAs, I have the winning hand. Or a sure thing.

In a tourney last nite, I had Pocket AAs on the button. One player to my left bet raised the BB 800 chips, another called, I went all in and everyone called.

Player with the Pocket 77 wins with three sevens.

I was out of the tourney. But, was not surprised or upset, because with that many callers, I knew the odds of me winning dropped drastically.

Of course, I was not impressed with the player who called a raise and reraise with pocket 77s.

In days of old, I would have been bent out of shape over this.

But, having seen it so many times, and finally realizing the odds, I left the game with a quit demeanor.

LMAO

ange



one

Sorry, spelled my screen name wrong. Playing poker and writing here at same time.

Can see only half of the sheet.

lol

angie

Healthy stoicism Angie.

Yeah, those pesky Loose players. I'm beginning to think they don't need to mess with the deals with players they have nowadays. Maybe five years ago, but today? Everyone calls!!!!

Full Tilt Poker: Hands 6646 and AA 30 (just about as expected) -- win 90%
PokerStars: Hands 5365 and AA 30 (higher than expected) -- win 83.33%

Well it took about 2 weeks for someone to finally get this thread back on track. Thanks skoldpadda. GL this afternoon in event #1.

Here's the update. I don't know about anyone else, but Full Tilt is starting to look a little sick.

Attached Images

Rigged AA.JPG (28.9 KB, 28 views)

Hey Chatters,

I have nothing to add to this blog. It is interesting reading. Just want to "bump" this thread to let you all know that it is being read.

Thanks

angie