So online poker isn't rigged? You tell me...

[Mad Genius]

I've maintained that everything is just part of the game, and even though I have taken TONS of bad beats in the past, I always thought it would even out in the end. But after the beats I have taken in the past two days at Stars, I am having serious doubts. I've lost over 90% of my allins in sit n gos and multis (I stopped playing cash games). I decided to step up and have played 4 $215 SnGs, which is very significant for me. I have gotten 4th ALL 4 times, and check out how I busted out in each of them. This is unfabricated.

AA vs QJs - lost to flush
KK vs KQo - lost to flopped QQ2
QQ vs AQo - flop K-J-10
KK vs TT - flop Q-J-9 turn K

In the same tourney as the last hand, I also went allin with AA and got called by AT. He flopped a straight, I rivered a 10 to split. All of these have been preflop allins. I have not won an allin with either QQ, KK, or AA in the last two days. And these don't even include all the times where I have been rivered by a straight or flush, as I don't even consider them big enough to care about anymore. I feel like I am playing the BEST poker of my career by far over the past few days, and especially in the last two days I have played ALMOST mistake-free poker IMO. I've made timely bluffs and strong moves when I hit the flop. But ANYTIME I get my money in PF or on the flop, I lose. I don't even think about taking coinflips anymore (i.e. I muck AK without second thought to a PF allin AFTER I raise). I hate this crap I'm always hearing about how it's suppsoed to even out because I've had at least 5-6 stretches like this in my 4 months of playing online and this is easily the worst. How can you expect someone to lose 18 or 19 out of 20 PF allins when you are at least a marginal favorite EVERYTIME? When people call allins with ATo or 87s and FLOP straights and flushes regularly on me, and this at some of the highest levels of online poker, then I'm really beginning to question the legitness of online poker.

[Mad Genius]

Wait...let's add two to the list..AQ vs Q3 preflop allin (yep, Q3o), and the supposed #1 tourney player on Stars just sucked out with his QQ against my KK allin preflop in the $109 tourney. By far the biggest pot of the night for me in that tourney too.

[Felonius_Monk]

[Mad Genius]

Thanks for the response. I should have listened to you and stopped playing at Stars Monk. Unfortunately I made the dumb act of playing again. Check out these two beauties from today:

AA vs 10-8 suited in $11rebuy 20k tourney. I limp UTG with 3k+ and BB who is hyper-aggressive raises 240 (11xBB) with 5 limpers. I reraise allin and he calls with 10-8 hearts. Turns and rivers a FH on me. I didn't even rebuy because I knew it would just happen over again.

$109 SnG. AK vs AK preflop allin. I have the , he has . And yes, he hit 4 consecutive clubs (out of the 11 remaining) and knocked me out. 4th. Again.

Also lost 3 more coinflips, and 2 where I was slightly behind. I think I've now gone about 15 PF allins in a row without winning. Call me whiny, I don't care. I'm just gonna make this thread my personal b*tching thread. Keep up with me if you want to hear about my next amazing bad beat story.

Good luck everyone.

[Molina]

I remember reading ages ago that one of the years Johnny Chan won the world series he had a stretch where he won 16 consecutive all ins. Don't know if this is true, if so, at least it's possible to happen on the positive side, though giving such luck to a man of Chan's skill is a bit like the thought of Bill Gates winning the lottery, good for him, but you can't help thinking there are others in greater need of it.

Molina

[Mad Genius]

Big news.

I finally won a PF allin. Amazing, no? Two, as a matter of fact. AQ vs 77 and TT vs A9. Won a $100 SnG. I can't describe how good it feels to finally win an allin again.

[kennyg]

I stopped playing on Pokerstars for those exact reasons Mad. My honest opinon, pokerstars is not rigged, but their random number generator is faulty. I took too many beats on there....

Interestingly enough, I just had a horrible bad beat run on Party/Empire for two weeks. Still it didn't even break the surface of the crap I've gone through on Pokerstars.

[eDgar]

They call that place RiverStars.. Maybe they should change it to BadBeatStars. I'm just bitter and too young to play theret. It's supposebly where all the big games are. So it must not be as bad as they say.

[Nortonesque]

Random number generation is well understood and easy to check for correctness. A quick Google finds that PokerStars even had it audited last year, by two separate companies: http://www.pokerstars.com/rng_audit.html.

[k3nt]

I haven't played Party much, but even if I had I would be very, very wary of jumping to conclusions based on a few hands, or even five or ten bad beats in a row.

Figure out how bad your luck was. First, for each hand, figure out what the chances were of getting beaten on each hand. Then multiply together the odds of being beaten on each hand to get a total odds of being beaten on ALL those hands.

If that chance is better than 1 in 10 million (literally), then put it down to bad luck, not rigged sites. Remember, people beat worse odds than those to win the lottery. Things like this do happen. (Also remember, your run of bad luck was followed up by a winning hand or two -- and probably one or two winning hands on the other end, before your bad streak started, that you don't really remember.)

Also remember the basics of human psychology: when you're expecting something to happen, you will often start to see it happening. If we think George Bush is a gross incompetent, we'll expect to see his next politlcal move as incompetent. If we think Bill Clinton is a liar, we'll remember his lies more than anything else about him. And if we get a bad beat or three in a row on UB, we don't think anything of it -- but if it happens on Party, because other people have complained about Party, we might put the incident a little more firmly in our memory bank.

All just IMHO, and open to correction from people with more experience with these things.

[Mad Genius]

I can be told whatever I want, but fact of the matter is this - I went back at it today on Stars and played for a few hours in tourneys and sit n gos. I lost every single time I had QQ - 6 times to be exact. 5 of those were preflop allins. Once my opponent had AK, and the other five times it was either semi-domination (i.e. A7) or complete domination (i.e. QTo). Nevermind the fact that these morons are either pushing or calling allins with these types of hands, the odds of me losing all 5 of those allins must be astronomically small. Mysteriously, I also didn't see AA or KK in about 600 hands, although admittedly, this is somewhat reasonable. I've tried to analyze my own play to find faults, but all I can come back on is how someone would raise and then call an allin by me with K8 when I have literally folded 30 hands in a row. Something is seriously f-ed up about that place. That's all I can say.

Quitting online poker. Probably for at least a year. I know I've said it in the past and not meant it, but...after this weekend it's happening. I'm most likely gonna play all the big tourneys on Stars this weekend, give the big sit n gos a shot and then withdraw whatever I'll have left (if any). Going at this rate I will probably go broke before Sunday's big event. Wish me luck.

[Molina]

Mad Genius,

Don't mean to be opinionated but here it is anyway,

Being on a 3 week stetch of being outdrawn consistently and rivered beyond belief myself I do not see how, in your current frame of mind, you'd be able to play your best game, especially in bigger buy in tourneys. Either cash the money in so you'll have a bankroll whenever you want to play again or keep on playing as usual.

Also, I'm not sure what not playing for a year will do, unless that's how long it'll take you to calm down. Its not as if you're saying you don't want to play any more, just that the bad beats are getting to you, will you be a better player in one years time by not playing?

Whatever you do this weekend just don't tank your money away because your determined to kill the bad beats or get killed bt them

Molina

[Mad Genius]

[k3nt]

Kennyg:

How would a faulty random number generator produce bad beats? I can't see it. I can't even see how to rig a random number generator ON PURPOSE to produce bad beats. I mean, the random number generator just creates a random number, which is used to create the order in which the cards appear in the deck through a complex mathematical process. How would you even begin to go about making the random number generator produce bad beats?

Presumably, some decks produce predictable bad beats -- AA will lose to , because the turn and river cards are both hearts. But how can the random number generator know that the guy with is going to call the AA's big PF raise? I mean, [Ts] or [Jd] is more likely to call the all in -- but both of those hands would presumably lose because they don't have the hearts!

So, to create bad beats, you would have to write a program that went something like this:

--if (starting hand = AA, KK, or QQ)

--then (read the cards of the hand that calls the AA, KK, or QQ)

-- and (produce on the flop/turn/river the cards that beat the AA, KK, or QQ given the hand that was read).

You could write a program like that, of course. But that ain't no random number generator -- that's having the fix in, in a big way. And it would be easily found by anybody who had access to the code producing the cards.

I just can't see it happening. I mean, these card sites are multi-million dollar assets. Why would you screw with that?

Now, the other possibility: Mad Genius is just on a run of bad luck.

Let's look at the odds of losing 5 hands in a row with QQ against the types of hand he mentions.

Let's say 2 of the hands were QQ vs QTo
2 of them were QQ vs Axo
And 1 was QQ vs JTs

Checking out www.twodimes.net

QQ vs QTo: QQ wins roughly 87% of the time
QQ vs A8o: QQ wins roughly 72% of the time
QQ vs JTs: QQ wins roughly 80% of the time

So to lose all of these, the chances are 13% * 13% * 28% * 28% * 20% = 0.0264%

This bad run will happen roughtly 2.64 times in ten thousand. Not often! But it's hardly impossible.

Put it this way: if you get QQ against bad hands 5,000 times, bad beat runs like this 5-in-a-row should happen, on average, about 1.3 times. OK, you haven't gotten QQ 5,000 times. But bad beats happen to other premium hands too: AA, KK, AK, etc.

If you add up all the times that you, your friends, contributors to this forum, and people on unitedpokerforum.com, combined, have seen premium hands over the past year -- well, how many times would you guess? Let's run some guesstimate numbers.

Say 100 regular poker players are talking to each other on these forums.

Say they play an average of 3 hours per day, double table, averaging 50 hands per hour. That's 300 hands per day, or 1500 hands per week (taking off two days per week).

So, 100 players are playing an average of 1500 hands per week each, 52 weeks a year. That's 7,800,000 hands per year. (All of these figures are just off the top of my head. Anybody got better guesses?)

Say 3% of those are premium hands -- 234,000. A bad run like Mad Genius' -- getting beat on 5 straight premium hands with crap hands like those -- will happen, on average, to one of us, about 61 times per year. (Apparently, this year, several of those 61 times are happening to Mad Genius!)

Maybe it won't happen quite that often, because we can hopefully get other people to fold their crap hands sometimes. And sometimes we won't be called with any crap hands in the first place. (Then we'll start complaining how we can't get any action on our premium hands!) On the other hand, sometimes people get called by more than one crap hand at a time, increasing the chances of getting busted by one of them.

Just some food for thought, for what it's worth.

[Nortonesque]