The most common conspiracy theory is, that in cash games poker sites earn more rake, if the pots get big, so they have an interest in creating cooler situations or "action boards". This month I actually played a few short cash game sessions on PokerStars, so we can look into my tracker and see, how many of these crazy "action hands", there actually was. I played 299 hands at 10NL, and I was all in..... drum beats.... zero times.
Whats at work here, as with all the other conspiracy theories, is typically confirmation bias. It sucks to lose a big pot, and therefore we remember those set-ups and action flops, where for instance we flop a set, and someone else flops a combodraw, and then they get there on the river, and we lose our whole stack. But we dont remember all those hands, where we won or lost a small pot without showdown. And once the idea has been planted, that maybe its rigged, we will see every single big pot, even those we are not involved in, as evidence of our theory.
In tournaments the poker site dont rake each pot, but this does not stop the conspiracy theorists either. So for tournaments they have developed "the big stack always win" theory. This is based on the idea, that if players bust faster from tournaments, they might end up playing more tournaments, which will then earn the poker site more rake. And once again confirmation bias kicks in, so that every single time someone with KK is busted from the tournament by someone with A5, its seem as "proff" of the theory.
