Mase31683
Legend
Silver Level
(This is a longish post, to some a complete dissertation, lol)
I posted this as a reply in Is online poker Rigged???, however due to the amount of effort I have put into this post and the rapid number of posts pushing older posts quickly into obscurity, I started a new thread.
There has been a lack of any quantifiable evidence for or against online poker being fair vs online poker being rigged. This was brought to my attention recently in the "Is Online Poker Rigged???" thread. The only idea before this was the aces test. I decided to gather some data myself, and post it here, along with my interpretation of the results, so that people can plainly see, agree, and debate what I put forward.
I think the most compelling argument against an online poker site knowingly and purposefully "fixing" the game in any way is frankly, it would be stupid. poker sites basically have a license to print money. By providing a place for people to play poker, digitally mind you, they get thousands upon thousands of dollars an hour. Why even remotely possibly botch that up to make a little more money when the site is already making obscene amounts legally. The risk/reward ratio just isn't there in my opinion, but that is my opinion. I feel they want to provide the most honest gaming environment possible, just as a casino would.
Let us for a moment look beyond the scope of microstakes. Here is a snapshot of what's going on at Full Tilt right now.
*Number of tables per limit was manually counted starting @ 9:40PM Tuesday, February 24th, 2009.
*Avg Pot was taken by a random sampling of 15 Avg Pot numbers displayed in FT lobby per level.
*Avg Rake was calculated by applying rake rates from http://www.fulltiltpoker.com/rake.php to the avg pot figure
*H/hour was achieved through a sampling of 15 tables at a given stake multiplied by the number of tables running
*Rake/hour = H/hour * Avg Rake
To make things easier on me right now, I'm only going to look at $10nl and $25nl. Others may feel free to do further calculations, and I may as well, but for now just those two levels.
A rigged hand is going to get two stacks in, making the mean net profit from rigging the hand $1.824
Net Profit = (Rake of Rigged Hand) - (Average Rake)
When 100bb stacks collide at $25nl the rake is $2.50
When 100bb stacks collide at $10nl the rake is $1.33
At these two levels, 25nl = 55% of hands/hour, 10nl = 45%
Rake of Rigged Hand = $1.9735
(.55)($2.50)+(.45)($1.33)
Average rake = $0.1495
(.55)($0.19)+(.45)($0.10)
Now the question becomes, how much need profits be increased to make the possibility of losing your gaming license an acceptable risk combined with the likelihood of being caught.
I feel a bare minimum would be 10%, others may think otherwise, but I'm going to go with 10% for now. To increase profits by this margin, (only on the tables to which we are currently discussing, not total profits of the site) we need to make an additional $739.60 per hour. $739.60/$1.824 yields a result of 405.48 rigged hands needed every hour. There are 640 tables, so this leads to 0.6335 occurrences of rigged hands per table per hour, or one rigged hand every hour and a half per table.
At first glance, this sounds quite reasonable. Only one hand need be rigged every 1.5 hours per table, which appears to be an amount very unlikely noticed by any but the most ardent. In itself, this seems to indicate that cheating could indeed be present. However, upon looking at the greater picture, cheating does not make much sense.
When we look at the site in its entirety, Full Tilt is making approximately $71,174 per hour off cash tables alone. This does not take money made from tournaments into account, and these games surely need not be rigged as rake is paid up front, not on a hand by hand basis. If a site were to be caught cheating players, surely the business would be crushed in its entirety, losing its entire player base, not merely cash players. Therefore, 100% of tournament profits are also at risk with no gain whatsoever from the fixing of cash game hands.
Further, these statistics were taken on a Tuesday evening, not a peak time for poker playing by any means. Should one re-record this data on a Friday night, one would expect the total $/hour taken in rake to be significantly higher. The greater the bottom line of the site, the slighter the gain of any rigging, and the greater the negative aspects of being caught engaging in these behaviors.
I feel that this information strongly supports the hypothesis that mainstream, popular online poker websites are indeed legitimate, and not intentionally rigged.
I posted this as a reply in Is online poker Rigged???, however due to the amount of effort I have put into this post and the rapid number of posts pushing older posts quickly into obscurity, I started a new thread.
There has been a lack of any quantifiable evidence for or against online poker being fair vs online poker being rigged. This was brought to my attention recently in the "Is Online Poker Rigged???" thread. The only idea before this was the aces test. I decided to gather some data myself, and post it here, along with my interpretation of the results, so that people can plainly see, agree, and debate what I put forward.
I think the most compelling argument against an online poker site knowingly and purposefully "fixing" the game in any way is frankly, it would be stupid. poker sites basically have a license to print money. By providing a place for people to play poker, digitally mind you, they get thousands upon thousands of dollars an hour. Why even remotely possibly botch that up to make a little more money when the site is already making obscene amounts legally. The risk/reward ratio just isn't there in my opinion, but that is my opinion. I feel they want to provide the most honest gaming environment possible, just as a casino would.
Let us for a moment look beyond the scope of microstakes. Here is a snapshot of what's going on at Full Tilt right now.
*Number of tables per limit was manually counted starting @ 9:40PM Tuesday, February 24th, 2009.
*Avg Pot was taken by a random sampling of 15 Avg Pot numbers displayed in FT lobby per level.
*Avg Rake was calculated by applying rake rates from http://www.fulltiltpoker.com/rake.php to the avg pot figure
*H/hour was achieved through a sampling of 15 tables at a given stake multiplied by the number of tables running
*Rake/hour = H/hour * Avg Rake
To make things easier on me right now, I'm only going to look at $10nl and $25nl. Others may feel free to do further calculations, and I may as well, but for now just those two levels.
A rigged hand is going to get two stacks in, making the mean net profit from rigging the hand $1.824
Net Profit = (Rake of Rigged Hand) - (Average Rake)
When 100bb stacks collide at $25nl the rake is $2.50
When 100bb stacks collide at $10nl the rake is $1.33
At these two levels, 25nl = 55% of hands/hour, 10nl = 45%
Rake of Rigged Hand = $1.9735
(.55)($2.50)+(.45)($1.33)
Average rake = $0.1495
(.55)($0.19)+(.45)($0.10)
Now the question becomes, how much need profits be increased to make the possibility of losing your gaming license an acceptable risk combined with the likelihood of being caught.
I feel a bare minimum would be 10%, others may think otherwise, but I'm going to go with 10% for now. To increase profits by this margin, (only on the tables to which we are currently discussing, not total profits of the site) we need to make an additional $739.60 per hour. $739.60/$1.824 yields a result of 405.48 rigged hands needed every hour. There are 640 tables, so this leads to 0.6335 occurrences of rigged hands per table per hour, or one rigged hand every hour and a half per table.
At first glance, this sounds quite reasonable. Only one hand need be rigged every 1.5 hours per table, which appears to be an amount very unlikely noticed by any but the most ardent. In itself, this seems to indicate that cheating could indeed be present. However, upon looking at the greater picture, cheating does not make much sense.
When we look at the site in its entirety, Full Tilt is making approximately $71,174 per hour off cash tables alone. This does not take money made from tournaments into account, and these games surely need not be rigged as rake is paid up front, not on a hand by hand basis. If a site were to be caught cheating players, surely the business would be crushed in its entirety, losing its entire player base, not merely cash players. Therefore, 100% of tournament profits are also at risk with no gain whatsoever from the fixing of cash game hands.
Further, these statistics were taken on a Tuesday evening, not a peak time for poker playing by any means. Should one re-record this data on a Friday night, one would expect the total $/hour taken in rake to be significantly higher. The greater the bottom line of the site, the slighter the gain of any rigging, and the greater the negative aspects of being caught engaging in these behaviors.
I feel that this information strongly supports the hypothesis that mainstream, popular online poker websites are indeed legitimate, and not intentionally rigged.
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