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Is Online Poker Rigged?
One of the most hotly talked about topics regarding online poker that takes place on all poker related blogs and forums are whether online poker is rigged or fixed in some way. These accusations are usually made by people who do not understand the massive role that variance (luck) plays in poker and/or are frustrated that they are unable to win in the long term on online poker. These accusations can be quickly put to bed by a simple search of a poker site’s webpage which will soon unveil that their software is based on a Random Number Generator (RNG) to ensure that each hand Is completely random and impossible to predict. This is often independently audited to ensure that it is indeed random and the results can often be found through a quick search.
This fact alone is enough to ease most people’s fears however it still hasn’t stopped the common complaints and myths regarding the fairness of online play that are currently circulating:-
• There are too many bad beats as compared to live play.
• Cards are fixed to help bad players win to keep them playing.
• Cards are fixed to build bigger pots and therefore generate extra rake for the poker room.
This article will try to break down these common myths and will go on to show why they are not true. The most common complaint you may come across is that there are too many bad beats. A bad beat is where a hand which is a statistical favourite to win loses to an inferior hand. These players often do not understand the variance involved in the game, just because a hand is a favourite to win doesn’t mean it will. There are 1000s of online poker professionals who make a living day in and day out by playing on the internet. They do not win every day, in fact they could lose for weeks at a time being faced with continual bad beats but they understand that this is short term variance which will start to even itself out in the long run.
Another explanation is a simple one, in online play you see more hands and therefore logically more bad beats. The game play online is simply faster due to lack of time wasted in shuffling, dealing, counting of chips etc. It is common to see 70 hands per hour which is over double what you would see live and this is not considering that many people play more than 1 table at a time.
The beauty in online play is that it’s completely anonymous and people are prone to act differently being free of social restraints. This manifests itself by them playing more liberally by making loose calls and chasing draws; essentially playing differently than they would live. This is because during live play there is the fear of embarrassment and looking bad amongst your peers this is not really relevant online. With more people chasing draws it stand to reason that more people will hit and more bad beats occur.
The second and third myth can be explained and rationalised using the same explanations. Online poker rooms e.g. Party Poker (Party Gaming) is a publicly traded companies with hundreds of millions of dollars each year in turnover. If they were to manipulate their RNG they would undoubtedly be caught since they are audited by independent regulatory bodies. They would then face heavy fines and their gambling license would be revoked resulting in them having to cease all of their business operations. Since they make money out of every hand of poker it would be completely irrational to risk their entire business just to earn something they would have done anyway just a few hands quicker.
With the manipulation of the RNG to allow bad players to win it would logically lead to there being no professional poker players as mentioned above this is simply not the case. There are people winning over millions of hands with databases to prove it. Many people use their own tracking software to analyse hand histories and despite all the millions of hands that have been recorded nothing untoward has come to fruition. Unfortunately despite the compelling evidence to suggest that online poker is not rigged this topic is destined to be rehashed again and again by new and old players alike in various debating forums. It is human nature to blame others for their own faults and misgivings, in this case their failure to “beat” online poker.
However, online poker is hardly cheat free, in fact there have been many scandals in the online poker world that have threatened its integrity not to mention the threat of collusion and perhaps the future threat of bots. The most notable being the “superuser” scandal at Ultimate Bet and Absolute Poker and more recently the very small, flash based site, Pitbull Poker. In both cases certain staff at these poker rooms had “superuser” accounts that allowed them to view every player’s hole cards; this cheating was only discovered by the players themselves through the studying of hand histories and the use of poker tracking software. The poker rooms continually denied the accusations and many of the people responsible have still not been made accountable for their actions. In the case of Pitbull Poker they closed down shortly afterwards, however with Ultimate Bet and Absolute Poker they are still one of the biggest players in the online poker world being endorsed by Phil Helmuth and Annie Duke. Having said this it is generally considered safe to play there now at least at the low to mid-stake games.
This shouldn’t cause alarm, events like these are extremely rare, as a rule of thumb if you stick with the larger poker rooms you will be safe in the knowledge of playing in a fair game. These rooms invest heavily into protecting the integrity of the games they offer through their security departments and anti-cheat software. Any person that tries to collude with another or tries to use a bot is often caught very quickly and their money refunded to the players that they have cheated.
