Pokerstars! Pocket Pairs!!!!

I have noticed on pokerstars that pocket pairs seem to come in groups much more often then in "real life" Is it just me or what?

lol, they tend to come in "groups" in real life as well. I once got AA, JJ, AA at a live game.

slost said:

I have noticed on pokerstars that pocket pairs seem to come in groups much more often then in "real life" Is it just me or what?

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To opponents yes, to me no

Do you mean 3 or 4 pairs on the same table, or pairs in consecutive hands?

honestly mate if you are looking for a conspiracy try empire poker!..but seriously, tenbob is right..its only our imagination methinks...ive just started playing pokerstars and find it quite fair on the cards front...I think that when you play on a site for a while you start seeing combinations that are only really in ones own mind...I'm not being funny cause i sometimes think that too!

From what I expereinced, pocket pairs are given fairly and at least one pocket pair is dealt to each player at some point (if they don't get otu early). I've gotten mostly medium pair (5's 6's) at a $3 sit n go table last night. No bad beats overall and ended up getting 2nd place.

If you get 3 pocket pairs in 5 hands, you remember it...

If you don't get a pocket pair in 40 hands, you don't really think about it too much...

It balances out on the average over hundreds of thousands of hands. You'll get a pocket pair 1:17 hands live or online.

I mean it seams like when one player gets pocket pairs there are often 3 players getting pairs the same hand.

it seams like when one player gets pocket pairs there are often 3 players getting pairs the same hand

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Well if this is the case, its probably you overplaying your 55 and running into someones KK

Honestly, this issue if sites are rigged has been discussed thousands of times. I have faith in the computer generators to generate random results that will fulfill their mathematically projected hand results.

chicubs1616 said:

Honestly, this issue if sites are rigged has been discussed thousands of times. I have faith in the computer generators to generate random results that will fulfill their mathematically projected hand results.

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I have faith too Chicubs.

Many studies have been done on these Random number generators. I've not seen one yet that show a HUGE statistical difference between live and on line play. We also play so many hands on line that it seems like there are more pocket pairs.

Pocket pairs Huh, Last night at out Stars buyin in the first hour i must have gotten small pocket pairs 14 or 15 times, and not once did i get a set on the flop with them, i thought it was my lucky night when you see so many pocket pairs, but last night they were useless, and they were all small, under 88`s, all they did was cost me chips,and a few times i folded them.>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> buck:hello:

LOL Buck - I got 3 pocket pairs (2's 5's and 10's) in 170 hands yesterday on stars, and got 1 in 40 hands the tourney before (10's)- 4 out of 210, when 17/1 odds said i should have 12!

Once in 3 hands i had KK, QQ, JJ - didnt feel there was anything wrong at the time

Not complaining now either lol


Remember there are 52 cards - 26 pairs available on each deal they are bound to appear every so often

I often get a run of 52, 72, k2, 32, - it happens wherever you play including home

IanT

so that's why I haven't been getting PP's on Pokerstars, you are getting them all and I have to balance the averages out. You are right though, they do seem to come in bunches, usually at the start of a sit-n-go for me when all they do is lose money or pickup the puny blinds.

Personally, unless a poker site is really shifty and I really believed that it was just plain crooked, I would assume that the distribution of cards dealt is just random. You might flip a coin 6 times and find it comes up 'heads' 5 times, but it's still a random outcome.

Pocket pairs as a group are not that rare:

- When dealt 2 cards at random from a 52-card deck, there are 2,652 possible hands you could be dealt (52 * 51).
- Of those, there are 6 of each pocket pair to be dealt (heart+diamond, heart+spade, heart+club, diamond+spade, diamond+club, space+club).
- There are 13 different levels of pocket pairs to be dealt (deuces, threes, fours, etc).
- 13 * 6 = about 3%, which is the amount of the time we should expect to be dealt pocket pairs.

Sure, pocket pairs twice in a row is lucky, it's about 3% * 3% = about 0.1%. Sure, that's rare, but that means for every 1,000 times you are dealt 2 sets of hands, you should expect to once be dealt pocket pairs twice in a row.

And I think between us, we've played enough hands of poker that even the unlikeliest thing should be happening from time to time.

If any of these sites are actually rigging their hands dealt in any way, it would be a massive case of fraud because of the dollars involved. When you can run a thriving, successful business without rigging a darned thing, why on earth would you bother? And aren't these things audited independent too?

I stick to playing reputable sites, but on those sites I'm confident that I'm being dealt random cards, and that the flop, turn, and river are random also. If I wasn't sure, I wouldn't put money there, simple as that.

Just my 2 cents...

Sammyv1 said:

I have faith too Chicubs.

Many studies have been done on these Random number generators. I've not seen one yet that show a HUGE statistical difference between live and on line play. We also play so many hands on line that it seems like there are more pocket pairs.

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So you are saying that my recent lack of success has been a result of my play rather than a plot by the 4 or 5 sites I have been playing on? Naw it's got to be them.

SO OBVIOUSLY RIGGED!

Think it's just the name of the game win some loose some. I've got poc.A's on down and been busted big time. Might get cards for the hand before or after hands that I've played. Doesn't matter or not I'm still going to play it's a good learning session! LOL

robwhufc said:

LOL Buck - I got 3 pocket pairs (2's 5's and 10's) in 170 hands yesterday on stars, and got 1 in 40 hands the tourney before (10's)- 4 out of 210, when 17/1 odds said i should have 12!

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LOL> i just couldnt believe it,every 4th or 5th hand was a small pocket pair, and nothing to go with them on the flop, even when i folded a few times there was nothing on the flop, i couldnt get a set to save my life,LOL, but i had a good time,thats what counts.>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>buck:hello:

I had pocket pairs three times in a row yester, first 88, then jj, then kk. Won all three hands with them and then never saw them again for the rest of the tourney. Good thing the first three hands built my stack up a little!

Beriac said:

Personally, unless a poker site is really shifty and I really believed that it was just plain crooked, I would assume that the distribution of cards dealt is just random. You might flip a coin 6 times and find it comes up 'heads' 5 times, but it's still a random outcome.

Pocket pairs as a group are not that rare:

- When dealt 2 cards at random from a 52-card deck, there are 2,652 possible hands you could be dealt (52 * 51).
- Of those, there are 6 of each pocket pair to be dealt (heart+diamond, heart+spade, heart+club, diamond+spade, diamond+club, space+club).
- There are 13 different levels of pocket pairs to be dealt (deuces, threes, fours, etc).
- 13 * 6 = about 3%, which is the amount of the time we should expect to be dealt pocket pairs.

Sure, pocket pairs twice in a row is lucky, it's about 3% * 3% = about 0.1%. Sure, that's rare, but that means for every 1,000 times you are dealt 2 sets of hands, you should expect to once be dealt pocket pairs twice in a row.

And I think between us, we've played enough hands of poker that even the unlikeliest thing should be happening from time to time.

If any of these sites are actually rigging their hands dealt in any way, it would be a massive case of fraud because of the dollars involved. When you can run a thriving, successful business without rigging a darned thing, why on earth would you bother? And aren't these things audited independent too?

I stick to playing reputable sites, but on those sites I'm confident that I'm being dealt random cards, and that the flop, turn, and river are random also. If I wasn't sure, I wouldn't put money there, simple as that.

Just my 2 cents...

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Hi!

I just wanted to point out a slight (well, not that slight) miss in your numbers here: You're saying that there are 2652 possible starting hands, which is true, but then you can't say that there are only 6 possible ways to get a specific pair - because there are 12.

When you say that there are 2652 possible hands, you're counting A♥A♣ as a different hand than A♣A♥. Just thought I'd point that out. Therefore, you will get a pocket pair about 6% of the time, not 3%.

Now, when it comes to rigged sites and pocket pairs, there are a few things that should be said:

1. (Minor) The fact that one person gets a pocket pair actually makes it more likely that someone else at the table also gets a pocket pair. The effect is small, but might interest some of you.
2. Since pocket pairs constitute 6% of the hands dealt, there will be on average 2 pocket pairs dealt every 3 hands. You won't notice when no one gets a pocket pair, but you WILL notice when more than one person does. Therefore, the conclusion that pocket pairs are "too common" is based on self-reporting statistics - the worst kind.
3. When you play live poker (which is where you say pocket pairs are less common) do you play 10-handed like they do on Stars? Otherwise you will see PPs less often. Don't forget, also, that play is a lot slower live than online, so you get to see many more hands in one evening than live. Reverting back to the problem with self-reporting statistics, you will tend to forget hands that are of no interest, but remember hands that struck you as spectacular. You will, therefore, have the feeling that in one night of online poker, more spectacular events have happened than in one night of live poker. My guess is that the ratio is about twice as many spectacular events online as live - but that's because you play twice as many hands.

Two things to consider when it comes to rigged online play:

1. The sites have nothing (or very little) to gain from rigging play. In theory, they could rig it so that big hands clash more often, and thereby increasing the rake. However, they have a maximum rake (at Stars, I think it's $3?) and at the higher stakes, that rake is almost automatically reached, so this gain is tiny.
2. With the extreme competition that exists between poker sites these days, no site can afford the risk of being exposed as cheaters. They rake in tons of money every day, and they would lose that immediately if anyone could show that they were cheating. And with the logging capabilities, the large samples of hands that people can collect, and the fact that it's all digital, coupled with how computer geeks are the most paranoid bunch of people on the entire planet (seriously, who do you think invented the concept of tinfoil hats?), you can bet your bankroll on the fact that someone would have found evidence of foul play, if it was there.

Cheers,
FP

Sweet catch F Paulsson! I'm usually less of a ditz with statistics, but I guess I'm not as used to applying it to poker yet, so I mixed my combinations and permutations. I spent awhile looking at the numbers, too, thinking that I'd done this exercise before and found that there were half that number of total possible hands, and of course that's why my numbers were off, I was using the larger number of possible hands (that double counts every hand) but not doing the same to the suits. Thanks for noticing!

On all your other points: right on.

Well, it's quite possible that it takes one to know one - and that the reason I saw your mistake was because I have made it myself before.