In my opinion there is no way online poker is rigged. Here are the reasons:
1. Rigging a game will benefit some players, not the Poker Room. Online
casinos make their money by charging rake, which removes a certain percentage of each pot, regardless of who the winner is. The rake is a highly efficient and 100% guaranteed way of making money, way better than the
roulette or Black Jack marginal house advantage, because in those games the house also loses
real money, sometimes a lot. In poker the house has virtually no risk.
2. Rigging is illegal, and being discovered would have devastating consequences for the people involved, with asset seizure and most likely jail time. Also, all the internet poker rooms would suffer unparalleled financial losses regardless if they were involved or not in the illegal activity, simply because most players would stop playing the game, at least for a while.
3. Some people suspect the
poker sites of altering the software in a way that would reward "bad play", turning underdogs into winners in a non random way. The idea is that the "donks" would deposit more money if they won more often. My question is would a particular
poker site's executives risk everything for such a questionable increase in return? And even if the increase in revenue was real and measurable, what about the cost? How much would they have to pay a programmer to design and maintain a highly illegal non random program? How about all the people with knowledge about the rigging, how much more do they need to be payed to maintain secrecy? What if one of those people leaves the company and decides to blackmail his ex colleagues? All these potential situations would make the cost of rigging a site astronomical and there is simply not enough money to be made by such a move to offset the costs, because even though poker sites are highly efficient in extracting money from the tables, there is still quite a limited market in online poker. If you remove the freeroll and micro stakes players from a site, how many players do you see at medium and high stakes tables on ACR or Betonline? Several tables, and mostly the same people sitting at them. The poker sites are a business, and no business man will commit an illegality unless there is clear financial benefit.
4. Just a funny personal observation: most people obsessed by online poker being rigged are the ones mainly playing micro stakes and
freerolls.