Quote:
Dear Pokerstars support. I know someone who insists that Pokerstars
cash games are somehow 'rigged'. I keep telling him its not true
but he just won't listen. These are some of his thoughts:
"all online cash games are rigged, they are built to cause sick
amounts of coolers. your best bet is to play as slow as humanly
possible and only raise when you have the nuts or close to it."
and
"I wish I was joking, but the only time I've had success in cash
games is to play super tight. I just sat at 3 PLO8 tables for about
3 hours and didn't catch a single big hand. I've got morons all
around me raising preflop with anything imaginable and hitting
runner runner garbage straights to beat my top set. I can't figure
it out for the life of me, other than they are helping the dumber
players and punishing those who understand the game. Like I said
before, the cash games are completely fucked."
As I said he just will not listen to me, so I am asking if you can
say anything that will make him see the error in his ways?
Thanks, and greetings!
Quote:
Thank you for your email.
Well, you can tell him that all the commonly held 'rigged' theories are
certainly possible, and make for a very interesting and advanced
conspiracy theory, but they all suffer from the same problem - a
fundamental logical flaw. This is because, unlike all other conspiracies,
the evidence needed to prove them is freely available - let me explain:
Let us say that you wanted to prove that PokerStars' shuffle was not
random. The potential value in you proving that our deal is unfair is
huge. There was one instance, in the early days of online poker, where the
top site at the time had a shuffle algorithm that was not random - It was
cracked by Cigital (1), one of the companies we commissioned to review our
RNG and procedures. The site fixed the problem, but they never truly
recovered and are now not even one of the top 20 sites. Everyone who has
followed in their footsteps learned a valuable lesson indeed.
If you proved that our shuffle was not random it would be worth at least
tens of millions of pounds (the value that another site would likely pay
to eliminate us as a competitor), and to us it is worth more since you
would have the evidence to end the company and the careers of everyone
working here.
All you would need is a sufficient sample of hands and you could easily
statistically prove the shuffle was not random.
Now we do freely give out complete hand history records to any player who
asks for them, so we are in effect willing to give out the information you
need to prove these conspiracies and destroy this company. To put that in
poker terms, if we are involved in a conspiracy, then we are making the
biggest bluff you have ever seen, since we are gambling hundreds of
millions on the fact you wouldn't do anything with the histories we would
happily give you. In fact we even programmed the PokerStars client to
store your hands to your hard drive if you want, so there can be no
possibility of us fixing the histories either.
If it is a bluff, then it can't be a smart decision from any perspective
can it?
So, you can ask your friend this; Does he think we make this bluff every
day, or are we holding the absolute nuts as we *know* he would only be
able to prove the shuffle is fair?
What I have given above is also the most basic form of this argument. I
haven't even detailed the fact that my colleagues and I have access to all
the hands ever played on the site and could obtain a huge sample of hands
within minutes. We have the same potential payoff to proving a conspiracy
as you do.
In summary, the conspiracy theories are believable because he wants to
believe that the bad beats he suffers have a reason behind them. It's
easier to accept that than the fact that in a random game anything can
happen. It's also much easier to accept than the reality that if you play
perfect poker all your beats will, by definition, be bad beats - which is
a sobering truth.
So, if the entire hand history is available whenever you, or your friend,
wants it. I hope it is obvious that it is impossible for us to run an
unfair site and freely provide the evidence to players to prove it.
You can give him some more good why we do not cheat our players too, if
you want:
1. Integrity of the game would clearly be jeopardized and players would no
longer trust us and play on our site.
2. As a business it makes sense to keep all our players happy and there is
no incentive for us to favor one player winning over another.
3. PokerStars makes money from the rake and tournament fees. We want to
have as many players on our tables as we can. If we favor some players to
win and others to lose, it would actually decrease the number of players
and the site would actually lose money.
4. It would actually be much more difficult to create a non random, bias
shuffle that favors certain players over other players. The manpower needed
to do this with the number of hands we deal and the number of players we
have playing on any given day would be tremendous. Since there are no
benefits from doing this, but a dramatic increase in costs and programming
labor, there is no motive for us to make a non random bias shuffle.
Let's assume for a moment that we did do this though. In this very
hypothetical situation, let's then assume that a PokerStars employee gets
sick of it and releases compelling evidence that it's true. We would then
likely lose a large percentage of our players, if not all of them. As we
make our money purely from rake and tournament fees, we would therefore go
out of business. So what's the point in doing it? A debatable short term
gain in return for losing the entire business isn't a very good trade off,
irrespective of mathematical, moral and legal reasons to not cheat our
players.
I hope you have found this email helpful.
If you have any other questions, please let us know.
Best regards,
Fredrik E
Poker Specialist
PokerStars Support Team
