R
rmillot
Rising Star
Hello.
This thread is not an opinion of whether or not online poker is rigged. It is an attempt to show that the two most common (and annoying) responses to a whiny player who claims that online poker is rigged are completely absurd.
1. "Online poker sites make millions and millions of dollars. Why would they risk it all by rigging the game?"
Let me answer this question with another question...Why would Martha Stewart, who owns a $600 million dollar product line, risk losing a large part of her fortune and imprisonment by engaging in insider trading?
online poker sites are already taking a risk by taking bets illegally from U.S. players after the passing of the UIGEA. Is it really such a far stretch to imagine them placing bots or insiders in the ring games? I'm not implying that all of them (or any of them, for that matter) do...I'm just trying to stamp out the fallacy that just because someone SHOULDN'T do something automatically means that they won't. Greed is extremely powerful...why make $500 million a year from blinds when you can make $1 billion from the players? If the CEOSs are not afraid of "risking" fines and possible imprisonment for taking bets from US players, why should they be afraid of "risking" cheating?
2. "You encounter a lot more bad beats online than you do in live games because you see many more hands per hour."
This is true: however, what players usually mean when they complain about too many bad beats online is that they experience a larger PERCENTAGE of bad beats online than they do in live games. If, on average, a winning player plays 8 all-ins in a live game and has 1 bad beat, he can expect to play 32 all-ins in an online game and experience 4 bad beats. In the end, this player will be a winner, and will probably not complain about the number of bad beats he experienced because he is still ahead. What is more probable is that the player complaining did not truly experience a bad beat (perhaps he miscounted his opponents outs), or that he is experiencing a discrepancy in the ratio of wins to outdraws in shifting from the live to the online game that is causing him to lose.
R
This thread is not an opinion of whether or not online poker is rigged. It is an attempt to show that the two most common (and annoying) responses to a whiny player who claims that online poker is rigged are completely absurd.
1. "Online poker sites make millions and millions of dollars. Why would they risk it all by rigging the game?"
Let me answer this question with another question...Why would Martha Stewart, who owns a $600 million dollar product line, risk losing a large part of her fortune and imprisonment by engaging in insider trading?
online poker sites are already taking a risk by taking bets illegally from U.S. players after the passing of the UIGEA. Is it really such a far stretch to imagine them placing bots or insiders in the ring games? I'm not implying that all of them (or any of them, for that matter) do...I'm just trying to stamp out the fallacy that just because someone SHOULDN'T do something automatically means that they won't. Greed is extremely powerful...why make $500 million a year from blinds when you can make $1 billion from the players? If the CEOSs are not afraid of "risking" fines and possible imprisonment for taking bets from US players, why should they be afraid of "risking" cheating?
2. "You encounter a lot more bad beats online than you do in live games because you see many more hands per hour."
This is true: however, what players usually mean when they complain about too many bad beats online is that they experience a larger PERCENTAGE of bad beats online than they do in live games. If, on average, a winning player plays 8 all-ins in a live game and has 1 bad beat, he can expect to play 32 all-ins in an online game and experience 4 bad beats. In the end, this player will be a winner, and will probably not complain about the number of bad beats he experienced because he is still ahead. What is more probable is that the player complaining did not truly experience a bad beat (perhaps he miscounted his opponents outs), or that he is experiencing a discrepancy in the ratio of wins to outdraws in shifting from the live to the online game that is causing him to lose.
R
