Eds Poker Journal

[DeadNutts]

INTRO:
Today I tried to start another venture online. I've tried Pokerstars, Empire, Paradise, Truepoker, Doylesroom. I've found that all of them SUCK!!! I make a killing playing B & M. I play these sites and all I see is bad beats over and over. I'm to the point online where if I have any situation where I have a 60% chance or better to win, I lose 90% of the time. So I added Partypoker to the list to see if I could yank the bonus. If it weren't for the bonuses, I'd actually be down money, instead, I'm around even after 6 months. I've tried all the strategies, and when you get nothing but crap for months at a time, how the hell do you ever profit? I rarely get any playable hands, and when I do, I lose.

TODAY'S ADVENTURE:
So the partypoker bonus is what I was after. I figured I'd play the low limit of .25/.50. I played for about an hour, sat down with $25.00. I won 1 hand, and it was pocket kings. I flopped two pair 3 times, high pair twice, and either lost to a river straight or river flush on all 5 hands. I ended up playing pocket jacks, pocket nines twice, and AJ suited once. That's about it. I lost $20 that fast, mostly betting my Js down to the river, with no over cards on the board, only losing to a 2 on the river giving my great caller that 3rd two to go along with his pocket 2s. I lost a couple on 1 hand where I had Q9 suited, and 2 of my suite was flopped. I figured... what the hell, might as well see if can't pull out a flush here, everyone has done it to me... every time! Didn't hit. So after playing about 70 hands and winning 1, and really... only 1!!!!! Going after this bonus is going to be hard work, and I'll probly lose money trying to get it. At least I got good starting cards, and some good flops.... yet somehow managed to come away with 1 pot out of 70, in a limit game of all things.

THE REASON
I just got done with the longest dry spell in the history of online poker, over 2000 hands played and I only saw low pair 20 times, middle pair 10 time, high pair 5 times, 0 flushes, 0 straights, 0 two pair, 0 3 of a kind, and I played the top 40 hands the whole time, which is pretty loose. That was at Doylesroom. I played a tournament my first day on there, saw 0 bad beats during the tourny, 180 people, and I won it, $5.00 buy in. After that, 2000 hands in a row... with absolutely nothing. I probly won 15 hands... total. The same thing happened at pokerstars... Won big right away, then couldn't buy a hand forever. Paradise... same thing. Empire... same thing. Truepoker... was a joke, nothing but bad beats every other hand there too. Either I have the worst luck of any player in the history of online poker, or these sites are rigged. I'm going to log my B & M and my online play, and we will see. I use poker tracker, which is a great tool, so I can backup my stats if need be. I also created my own random hand generator, which is at http://www.selleazy.com/pokerscreen/pokerhands.php
Pretty interesting stuff it spits out. The SIMPLE ALGORITHM IS THE BEST ALGORITHM. I will probly expand my research further and maybe come up with an entire site, but we will see. The other thing I did was come up with some rigged hand generators, which still need some tweeking before I can publish them. The results so far resemble that which I have seen online so far... to a tee. I will keep this log updated as my progress continues with my poker programming project.

THE SOLUTION:
This entire log will be the base of the web site I will probly make which will be dedicated to figuring out what the deal is with these online cards. I know it's not 100% random. Even if they are not rigging the cards, then there is something else wrong, like an algorithm that is overcomplicated. A basic shuffling algorithm is simple. You have 52 cards in a deck, you assign a number from 1 to 52 to each card, use a rand() function, and it stick that bad boy in a loop, and have it loop until all 52 random numbers from 1-52 have been generated. Now you have an electric deck of shuffled cards. What is so complicated about this. If you were to overcomplicate it, you would end up with very strange patterns coming out, that would make it not as simple, and not as random. A simple shuffle is like shuffling a real deck of cards 6-8 times. An overexagerated algorithm would be like shuffling a real deck of cards 5000-10000 times. You are more likely to run into a similar deck of cards with the exagerated deck of cards, because the cards will have been all the way around the block so many times, you have a better chance to land the same deck. If you shuffle a deck once, you are guaranteed it won't come out the same. Based on that, and the number of players online at once, it almost seems like all of these sites are overcomplicating it, which is why you see such strange things, and large hot and cold streaks, tons of bads beats per half hour, and so on.

THE PROGRAM:
The other option, is that they are rigging the cards. It's a pretty simple thing to do. All you have to do is pick a player's cards, and eliminate cards from the remaining deck based on what they have. If they have AK, eliminate all 2s, 4s, and 6s. Now your odds of having a bad beat just went up. Everything is still random, accept for the fact that 12 cards are missing from the remaining deck. I could even put a checkbox by a player's name in the database, telling the program to eliminate cards from the deck that would help them every 4 out 5 hands, and only when there are less than 3 other people at the table that also have the checkbox, and to randomly assign checkboxes to people every couple days. It's not that hard, and it's almost undetectable, because everything is still random to the naked eye. If there are 20 cards missing from a virtual deck, how would you ever know? Using this concept, you could really mess with poker odds, and everything would seem random.

MY PART IN ALL THIS:
My job as a human being who enjoys the game of poker, and who can program just about anything, who does things for the grace of good, who can't stand to lose, is to figure out the truth on my own, and whatever help anyone else has to offer. Because I know those sites would never tell you the truth if they were rigging it, or let you see the code to the software. And if they are not, it only leaves it to me having unrealistic bad luck, or the chance the algorithms are just too complex for a simple card shuffle.

TODAY'S GAME SUMMARY
I guess for this log, we will start with an immaginary bank roll of $500.
09/27/05
Start Bank Roll: $500
BM: Even
PartyPoker: -$20.00
OVERALL: $-20.00
All Other Online: Even - Not playing at any of them right now.

Current adventure is Partypoker, which is owned by Pokerstars (Empirepoker is also owned by pokerstars).

[Molina]

Welcome to the site,

Erm, Party is not owned by Pokerstars. Party got floated on the London Stock Exchange over the Summer. Pokerstars is privately owned by a couple of Israelis I think who are looking to float it soon.

Also, I don't see how the randomisation of a deck of 52 cards can be 'too complex', if there is a difference between the complexity with which the cards can be shuffled then the more complex the shuffle, the less predictable to the players it will be surely?

Regarding the deck being stripped of the low cards, I think if you compared the Pokertracker databases of winning players on this site then AK would have a similar winning rate across players and sites played on.

Molina

[80Proof]

[DeadNutts]

Thanks for the extremely HARSH replies. When I get home tonight, I will compile all of the stats from my online experience and post them on here. If 20,000 hands isn't enough to compile anything good, then I guess I need to play every second of every day for the rest of my life to have enough hands. I know there are people who make a living playing these sites, so maybe it's jut bad luck, but I can't leave it that... it's just the way I am. In all reality what I would hope for more than anything is to be posting on here how the luck all of a sudden flip flopped and everything evened out.

I never said the sites were rigged. I said they might be. I've played long enough to go through the ups and downs in real poker, and have never seen anything close to what I'm seeing online. It's not just me either, I've had a few other people play, and they see the same things. I can see a cold streak lasting a couple days if you played the whole time, but not a couple weeks at a time, then have a couple hours of good hands, then back to another 2 week cold streak, that's just insane. How about seeing hands "like" AK vs KK vs AQ before the flop almost 80% of the hands I play online. Playing real poker you do see stuff like that, but it's more like 10% - 20% of the time. You don't have to agree with anything I say in this log, but you can at least acknowledge that this is what I see, and I along with a lot of other people are seeing the same thing. It's not just about cold and hot streaks, it's also about the PERCENTAGE of bad beats seen, which given the amount of hands I have played both online and in real poker, is not even close. I haven't come to a conclusion yet about anything, AND THAT IS WHAT THIS LOG IS FOR, to find the real answer.... and the answer is NOT that I just need to play better, I know exactly what I'm doing. All I am doing is logging what I see, COLD HARD FACTS. And if I end up coming to the conclusion that everything is fine, and I have been seeing very strange stuff for the past 6 months, and that's it, then at least I will have enough information compiled to figure out the best way to play around what I'm seeing. The bottom line is that I'm not going to fold AA or KK before the flop unless I absolutely should... in a tournament or something, and right now, I'd be better off folding those types of hands every time, I'd come out more ahead. I have had "luck" that bad in real poker before, but it only lasted a couple days, then everything was back to normal for a while, it's expected. 6 months of saying... "Why didn't I fold KK before the flop" is getting real old real fast. And 6 months of watching 2 pair lose 90% of the time I play it to the end is also getting old (That stat is complimentary of poker tracker).

As far as my THEORY on an algorithm being too complex, the way these sites compile the data for the algorithm is by taking data from each of the player's computers that are playing and tossing it into their algorithm, every hand. I can see it where you would see things you would never see in real cards by making an algorithm that complex. The thing they forget to take into account, is that in real poker, every table, every deck is individually shuffled, and usually shuffled about 6-8 times, then cut. I think this might actually be the answer to my question. I'm looking for an online site that mimics real poker, and I will probly never find it.

By the way:
http://www.selleazy.com/pokerscreen/

Check out the screenshots I took in a 1 hour span. See if you can find the OBVIOUS pattern of cards coming out when 2 tables are open. This is just a 1 hour span, which I could do at any given 1 hour period and come up with just as many, just like it. You will have to look at the images to see what I'm talking about. It seem suspicious to me, because that would never happen that frequently in real poker. I've tried multitabling in real poker just to see.

[Tiburon]

[ale_k300]

[stealthtt385]

[Nortonesque]

[Tiburon]

[80Proof]

[DeadNutts]

Cool, lots of replies.

First off, when I played the K5... for that entire hour, I was playing everything, so I could get more screenshots. I do know that online you have to play pretty tight, and K5 does not exist in a tight playing style.

To clearify about the "AK vs KK vs AQ" comment: I will restate, because the 80% was pulled out of my ass, I was exagerating the situation, but at the same time trying to make it known that it happens more often than what I'm used to seeing at a B & M, and not per hour, more like a percentage deal. What I meant to say was I see those types of hands come up quite often, playing against each other, not necessarily in my hand.

The real multitabling thing I did last weekend. It was actually pretty cool. I was joking about it while playing a tournament at my buddies house. A few guys were going to start up a side tournament, and after joking about it, we decided to try it. We pulled a second table over, right by my side, and I played two games at once. The second table was not a real game, but we were dealing hands and betting with chips... just as an experiment. We laughed about it and that was that.

I have had the luck disgussion many times with many people. And I seem to come to the conclusion that luck does exist, but not in the ways most percieve it to exist. If something happens that is out of your control, and it effects you in either a possitive or negative way, it would be defined as luck. Luck is just a term. Everything could be controlled, or manipulated to the point of having some sort of control, but I'm not sure any human brain is capable of handling such a task.... controlling the chaos theory, or even understanding how to manipulate it. That being said, until we become unhuman, there is always a sense of luck.

As far as me thinking the online sites are "Rigged", I'm always open to anything, which leaves that as a possiblility until I am PROVEN wrong. It seems like everyone here seems to have a lot of information about online poker I was unaware of. Very interesting. I may have jumped into the online poker world unprepaired. I am finding how different B & M is from online. I'm really glad I found this site. Basically what I'm saying is that the information posted in this log by everyone is weighing in heavily on me coming up with a conclusion. Just like all of you, I like to take in as much information as possible before coming to a final conclusion. Right now, I do see that I need to learn a bit more on how to win at online poker versus B & M. Once I do that, I will be able to make a more informed decision. Based on stats alone, all I have is the hands I have played. I have gone through them, and found my mistakes, found where I could have saved or made more money. But the overall statistics I'm seeing would put me on the end of the imaginary term of "Bad Luck".

Here is my "simple shuffling" algorithm, which was written in php. You could do the same basic thing in any laguage.

/********************************ShuffleCards()***************************************/
//This function Shuffles the cards - randemin=1 rangemax=52
function ShuffleCards($ShuffledDeck, $rangemin, $rangemax) {
for ($card = $rangemin; $card <= $rangemax; $card++) {
for ($shuffle = $rangemin; $shuffle <= $rangemax * 100; $shuffle++) {
$rand_no=GetCard(rand($rangemin,$rangemax));
if (str_replace(",".$rand_no.",","",$ShuffledDeck)==$ShuffledDeck) {
$ShuffledDeck=$ShuffledDeck.",".$rand_no.",";
//once the value is assigned to a card, exit the loop
break;
}
}
}

$StrippedDeck=str_replace(",","",str_replace(",,","|",$ShuffledDeck));
$FinalDeck = split('[|]', $StrippedDeck,$rangemax);
return $FinalDeck;
}

I'm trying to answer everyone's questions the best I can.

By the way, I'm thinking of creating a strategy generator, where you set your own strategies and simulate games against other strategies. I think it could be a usefull tool. What do you guys think? If it doesn't look like anyone will use it, I may still create it for myself. But it would be cool to put it out there for people to use.

I thank everyone for their replies. I know everyone understands the frustration I'm going through playing online. I just may need to step back for a bit, then load up on some new information, and hit it again. If you saw my entire hand history for as long as I have been logging it online, you would probly use the term WOW! Or maybe you have found a way around getting a winning hand dealt to you every 70 or so hands, playable or not, for days... sometimes even weeks at a time. If you have, I'd love to hear it. Even with all my complaining about the online poker, I do have to say it's making me a better overall player, which is what I'm using it for anyways. My best poker is played against real people at a real table, where manipulation and reading tells is a big factor. Playing online should be strengthening my playing strategies and reading betting patterns, and it has.

In conclusion to this message, I think everyone just might be right. Either way, I have a lot to learn about online poker, and I know that now... I was 100% unaware of some of the things I've been reading on this site overall.

Thanks everyone, and keep posting. This is going to be a great log.

[DeadNutts]

$23 buy in - no limit - blinds .15, .25 (PartyPoker day 2)
bb= big blind, ff=flop fold, pf=preflop fold, tf=turn fold, rf=river fold sb=small blind
W = I won the hand, L=I lost the hand
bbff 94 Deal A93
pf 85 Deal 10 98
pf 74s Deal AA2 7 6 Winner had A2
pf 8 10
bbff 76 Deal 7A2 J K
sbW A4s Deal 474 Won the blind calls
pf 59 Deal Q4K
pf 78
pf A3 Deal 10 56 A 10
pf K5s Deal K36 3
pf 10 4 Deal 4Q4 7
pf 5c9c Deal AdJdKd 4c Ah winner As10s
pf 3s9s Deal 8dQc8C Qd 10s
pf 8dKs Deal Kc5d9s Qd As
bbff 5c4d Deal QsAs2s
sbpf 5s10c Deal 3cQc9c
pf 2s7c Deal 8d7dKc 9c Ac winner AsKs
pf Jc6c Deal 10c6h5s 3s Ac winner 9s6d
pf 7s2c Deal JhAc5c 3d
L QsQc Deal 232 7 Kc winner KQ
(I lost $8 (same caller the whole time))
pf 5s9d
pf 7s2s Deal JdAd8s 3h Kd winner Qc10c
bbff 3s 9d Deal Kd5c4h 9s 7s
sbpf 6h7d Deal AcKd2d
pf Kd10d
pf As6h Deal 3c4sKc 9s 4d winner Ac10c
pf 7h2h
pf 2sAh Deal 9s7hKh 2c 8h winner QsQc
pf 6s7c Deal 2hQs4d
pf Kh6h Deal Qd3h4c Qc Kc
pf Kd5d Deal 5hKs8c 6s 8h winner Qh8d
pf Qc5s Deal 6h3dQs 8s 10h winner QhJs
bbpf Ac3h Deal 2d10hAh 9c 3s
sbpf 9c5d Deal 3sJs6s
ff JdAs Deal 8c2h4c
pf 8c2c Deal 4sJh10h 10c 5h
pf 2d5c Deal 9dQs6c
pf 5h3d Deal 10sQd9c
rf AcKd Deal 5s7h6h Jd 7d
ff Ac2c Deal 5s7hKh 7s Qc winner 7d6d
pf 5s8c
Wbb 6h4c Deal 4dKsKd As 7d won the blind calls
sbtf AdQc Deal 4d9s9c 8d
pf Ac7h
W JdJcWon the blind calls
pf 10d6c Deal 7c2h2d Kd 3s winner had KhQh
pf 8h4c Deal 3s10h6s
pf Kc6s Deal Ks8c8h
pf Qd6c Deal 4hAh6s As 2d winner Ad7d
bbtf Js8s Deal 8d5h7h Acraised on the turn lost 1.25
pf 9d3c Deal 2dKh9c Ah
rf 9s8s Deal 6hQd2c 8c Jc Checked until river, 1 guy went all in
pf 8c4h Deal 9s3s10s 6d 9c winner AhKs
pf 2d7c Deal QcAd5c
pf As4h Deal 9sKcQs 6c 5s winner KdQd
pf Kc2s Deal 8d8cKs 7h
pf 4d2s Deal 8hKc5s 7d Ks
W AdJc Deal Ks8sAh won the blind bets
bbpf 5h10c
pf Jd2s Deal 7h4c5c 2c Qs winner 3d3s
pf 4h8d Deal 5sAh10s
ff Ac7d Deal Jh6c6d Kc 4d winner 3h6h
pf 5c8d Deal Jh6h9s 9d
pf 2d5d Deal 5cKdQd 8h
ff 9h9d Deal QsQd3h someone went all in
pf 10h7s Deal 10c7s9c Ks
pf Kd7s Deal JhJcAd Qs 5c winner Js7h
bbpf 2s4d Deal 5c9d4h
sbpf 2sJs Deal 3h8s7s Qd 3d JdJc
pf 8hQd
pf As5d Deal 6c2d7c
pf Ks5h Deal Jh4h10c
pf 4h5s Deal 6c7dAc 5h
pf 8cJs Deal 8h3s3h
bbW AhKh Deal 7cJs3s
sbW Ks5c Deal Ks9s8h 3h 8s won $5 on this one
pf 2d3h Deal KsJcJd Ad 4d I predicted the 4 on the river
pf Ks5d Deal 8s3dKd Jc 4d I did it again!! QdJs wins
pf Kc7h Deal As3dAd 4c 7d not this time JhJs wins
pf 3s2s Deal JhQsJs
pf Kh4c Deal 2c10s6c 7c
pf QhJc
bb Ks4d Deal JsKhKc 9h 5s ALL in after river - lost to K9 lost $

$3.45 left in account!!!!!

83 hands
Top 40 starting hands:
This session = 8
Calculated Average = 20 (what average starting hand would get, based on 169 starting hands.)
Bad Beats = 2
Pots Lost = 2
Pots Won = 5
Good Pots Won = 1
Great pots Won =0

17 more points til the bonus

To the micro table, time to fold away some more, to see if my last $3 can get
$25 bonus.

TODAY'S GAME SUMMARY
I guess for this log, we will start with an immaginary bank roll of $500.
09/28/05
Start Bank Roll: $480
BM: Even
PartyPoker: -$28.00
PartyPoker Bonus: $25.00
OVERALL: $-23.00
All Other Online: Even - Not playing at any of them right now.

[80Proof]

[DeadNutts]

[80Proof]

Buy PokerTracker.....play 5,000 hands....post your numbers.