Probably
I say “probably” not because of what I observed when I used to play a lot of
online poker, but because I know that engineering a game of chance to cheat is remarkably simple. Take a look at any Solitaire
App. It will almost always have settings for altering the level of difficulty, ie cheat settings. And you don’t even need to mess with the random card generator. Remember, this is a computer program that can process a gazillion tasks almost instantaneously. What you see on the screen is not necessarily what is being generated in the program. In other words, there is no technical reason why a gaming program cannot generate a random set of cards, deal the hole cards, deal the flop, the turn and the river, store that information and then render the visual representation of those completed tasks as necessary.
A poker program can also easily generate multiple ai/bot players on each table. Creating bot players, even relatively sophisticated ai/bots is something even a newbie programmer would have as part of their skill set. Every card and board game app on your phone has bot players. There are ai chess programs that can beat some of the worlds best human players. And we are talking here about a billion dollar gaming industry that has the resources to hire the very best programmers. There is no technical reason why an online poker program can’t reveal other players hole cards to ai/bot players or even the flop, turn and river cards before you see them on the screen. It is the same program generating those cards and operating the bots.
All of this information given to a couple of ai/bot players clearly would allow the gaming site to manipulate outcomes to its own advantage. A clever site would resist the temptation to be overly greedy and would tweak the ai so that the bots didn’t win too often, but even shifting the wins in the house’s favour by a few percentage points over thousands of hands per day would mean millions of dollars a year.
But wouldn’t real players detect this cheating? I can say that as a poker player who played online quite a bit, it would be hard to detect. Again, watching for randomness doesn’t matter because rigging games doesn’t require a nonrandom deal, only that the information from the random deal is shared with ai/bot players. And detecting bots isn’t so easy either. My experience on online poker rooms is that there is very little that could distinguish between a real player and a sophisticated ai/bot player. Players calling and making long shots is so common that it makes you want to throw probabilities out the window. And attempting to chat doesn’t reveal much, since many players don’t seem to chat at all or don’t chat in English or some big sites have no chat feature at all.
Again, I have no evidence cheating is happening, only the knowledge that rigging outcomes would be so remarkably simple and so hugely profitable that it would almost be shocking to me that this wasn’t being done. I guess the question is, what are the risks vs reward for big online gaming corporations? The rewards would be huge. Potentially hundreds of millions more in profits. And yeah, they already make a lot with rake, but even a first year business student knows that businesses don’t just want to make a profit, they want to maximize profits. And you just have to look at Enron, Lehman Brothers, Volkswagen and Chrysler over the last twenty years to know how far big corporations will go to cheat and lie when profits are on the line. But what about regulators governing the gaming industry? Well, I know of one “regulator” close to Montreal where I work. They’re called the Kahnawake Gaming Commission (KGC), located on an Indian reserve bordering Quebec and New York State and it just so happens that the KGC is the regulatory body governing some of the biggest gaming sites in the world. How did an Indian reserve become a global gaming regulator? Who knows, but I do know that the RCMP have stated that this reserve has a long history running contraband for organized crime families in New York and Montreal. Some of the other regulatory bodies are in places like the Cayman Islands, beyond the reach of law enforcement. So, yeah, sounds a bit like the foxes watching the hen house to me.
So, should you play on these poker sites. Well, maybe they are clean and maybe you can still win money if they aren’t. But for myself, I’d found a brick and mortar room to play in with real, live humans. It may not have massive pots, but it’s a lot more fun.
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ill just say im glad i listened to my heart and not you.
