In this post I will attempt to address every argument I’ve ever heard regarding online poker being rigged. Mind you, I do work for a company that develops online poker software but my motivation is not to convince people to trust *my* employer’s software, rather it is to have a central place where people can point misinformed message board and blog posters who think somebody is pulling something on them. Just point them here and end the thread. If you have heard an argument or have your own argument not covered in this post, please email me and I’ll add it to the list.

Though it’s more than obvious to many people that most of the major online card rooms are legit, the internet is littered with literally thousands of claims that they’re somehow rigged. Regardless of how many people point out obvious counter-arguments such as the fact that most online card rooms have their games audited by well respected firms to ensure that the games are fair, people continue to insist that online poker is rigged.

Almost without exception, claims of online poker being rigged fit pretty consistent patterns. For instance, nearly every accusation is presented void of any sort of empirical evidence. Perhaps someone will post a particular hand history of a bad beat but I have yet to see anyone post the results of analyzing 10,000 or 20,000 hand histories to show a true statistical anomaly worthy of further research. Readers are asked to take a leap of faith that this person’s bad beat or his gut feeling about how often certain things happen are indicative of long-term trends.

This lack of empirical data should be the first clue as to the strength of the argument. First because with a large enough sample size (20,000 hands or more) one not need make any argument as the numbers will speak for themselves. But more importantly, it’s the fact that those making accusations don’t even collect hand history data which exposes a fatal flaw in their argument because nearly every serious online poker player uses a software package like PokerTracker to analyze their play. Not using a tracking software package immediately casts serious doubt on claims made by most accusers that they are experienced, savvy, online poker players.

Another common characteristic of online-poker-is-rigged claims is a fundamental misunderstanding of probability. Just because something has a low probability of happening doesn’t mean that when it does, something is wrong. In fact, in many cases, quite the opposite is true. Low probability events are expected to happen given a large enough data set. For instance, if you flip a fair coin ten times, the chances of having a run of ten heads (or tails) is .09765625% (0.5^10). However, over a million coin flips, regardless of how seemingly low the probability of a run of ten heads in a row, you expect to get nearly 1000 runs of ten heads in a row. Unexpected things do happen. As long as the chances are above 0%, there’s a chance that it can happen.

Obviously, this doesn’t apply only to online poker. At the 2005 WSoP, during a televised event, Mark Seif, in two different hands, faced opponents with quads. One flopped quad fives and the other flopped trips and made quads on the turn. The odds against this happening in so few hands that are dealt at one final table are fairly high. Yet it happened. In the 2004 WSoP Gallagher flops quad fives, his opponent with pocket nines pushes all-in and Gallagher obviously calls. The turn and river come 99 giving Gallagher’s opponent quad nines and the winning hand. According to PokerStove, Gallagher was 99.899% to win that hand. Both examples demonstrate that the improbable is not the impossible.

Yet another common type of accusation is that from a player who has recently changed sites or is relatively new to online poker (though they claim decades of live poker experience). In other words, Party must be rigged because I was a winner on UB or I’ve been playing at Commerce for 25 years as a winning player but I can’t beat the $2/$4 at Paradise. Usually buried in this accusation is that the card room purposely rewards poor play. Since the accuser obviously plays excellent poker, the only explanation for losing at this particular site is that the game must be rigged. The glaring flaw in this argument is that there are many, many solid players playing on the same site and winning. If the deck was being stacked in favor of the fish, how do other players work their way up from .05/.10 micro-limits to playing the $30/$60 game? Based on the accuser’s argument we would have to believe that their consistent winning is due to how poorly they play. That’s an easy argument to refute if you’ve ever read their posts on forums like 2+2 and elsewhere. They are anything but fish.

But rather than continue with generalities of the accusations being made, let’s jump right into it.

Claim: More (Quads/Flushes/Straights/Full Houses) get dealt online than is normal.

Fact: Completely false. As this link points out, and as many hundreds of regular online poker players have confirmed for themselves, given a large enough sample size of data, the numbers are within expected statistical norms.

Claim: Online card rooms stack the deck in favor of poor players to keep them playing while allowing better players to be sucked out on.

Fact: Completely false. Again, go look at the actual numbers. Over tens of thousands of hands analyzed by hundreds of people, high card holds up as often as it should, top pair holds up as often as it should, two pair holds up as often as it should, etc. There’s a simple and easy way to test your accusation, use hand histories! The numbers will either prove or disprove your accusations very simply.

Claim: Online card rooms deal action flops to get more money in the pot so they can make extra rake.

Fact: Completely false. One more time, go look at the actual numbers. Use the stats from any casino. They’re all going to come out about the same and that same is right about what they should statistically.

Claim: If online poker rooms were legit they wouldn’t need to base their operations in offshore countries.

Fact: False. Due to the legal climate in the US regarding online gambling, no site can be hosted or have a base of operations here.

Claim: If Enron teaches us one thing it’s that corporations are just out to screw people and this makes them prone to rigging games.

Fact: Debatable. While I, nor anyone, can debate the morality and ethical standards of every casino, the incentive structure for the online casino is highly weighted towards offering a fair game. Fist off, the profits are huge. Go look at Party’s financial statements. Why would one risk the almost instant death of their business if they were found to be rigging games just so they could rake an extra .50 a hand? They would be far more incentivized to just raise the rake than they would be to rig the game. Additionally, there’s far, far more money in going public or being acquired by a larger casino than there is in nickel and diming games. Of course, the most compelling argument is that enough smart people (mathematicians, computer scientists, etc) play poker and religiously track their results that any poker room that was doing something out of the ordinary would be quickly and easily caught thus providing sufficient disincentive.

In summary, the vast majority of online-poker-is-rigged arguments can be easily resolved by allowing others to view your hand histories. If anything it seems painfully odd that in the thousands upon thousands of claims of online poker being rigged, not one single person has offered compelling data which could be scrutinized by others. Poker is a numbers game and the simplest way to test a hypothesis (say, that online poker is rigged) is to compare the numbers against the expected outcomes. And since many people have and continue to monitor such statistics without discovering evidence of any serious anomalies, the burden of proof rests with the person making the accusation. Simply inferring motives or dispensing anecdotal evidence is not likely to receive any sort of serious consideration when access to empirical data is readily available. The lack of empirical data in any claim that online poker is rigged reeks of suspicion.

Links to additional resources:

Perry Friedman and Howard Lederer on Full Tilt’s random shuffling

PokerStar’s description of their random shuffle

PokerStar’s independent auditor’s opinion on their shuffle

Paradise Poker’s independent auditor’s opinion on the fairness of their shuffle

PartyPoker’s independent auditor’s opinion on their shuffle

Kahnawake Interactive Gaming Regulations (Kahnawake regulates many of the most popular card rooms)

How We Learned to Cheat at Online Poker – Though this article is how a security team broke PlanetPoker’s random number generator (RNG), at a higher level it demonstrates that despite a poor RNG the researchers didn’t discover any intentional rigging of the game.

Fluctuation and the Rigging of Online Poker by Bob Dainauski – Although his intent was to prove or disprove theories regarding the cash-out curse, one can easily see why players who start playing on a new site, perhaps underfunded, experience similar results.

Shuffling and Randomization by Daniel Kimberg (CardPlayer Magazine)

Updates

Eddie points out that bot software is used on some sites. True. However, most bot programs are specifically banned by nearly every cardroom. PartyPoker and others have specific policies geared at stopping bots from playing on their sites. Most sites have adopted terms of service agreements that allow them to freeze the accounts of anyone suspected of using bot software on their sites. Obviously, for every move that the cardrooms make to prevent bots, bot writers will try to come up with a counter-measure.

There have been some rumors about smaller sites using bots to fill tables but anecdotal evidence suggests that the bots play softly and usually leave as soon as the tables fill. Not exactly above board but if you stick with the larger poker rooms you can avoid such practices.

10.12.05 I recently saw someone argue that one cannot prove online poker is not rigged. This person is correct. However, one can prove it to be rigged very easily. Since there lacks any crediable proof of it being rigged, despite the ease of proving it rigged via statistical analysis, one can correctly assume it is not rigged. If it were difficult to prove online poker being rigged then I could see the difficulty in the argument that it can neither be proved or disproved (like God) but this is not such a case. This is more like the theory of relativity in which scientists may not be able to prove it to be valid but they can devise plenty of experiments that would prove it to be false.

On a side note, despite readers of this site posting the link to this thread on message boards all over the place (usually in threads where some yahoo is claiming online poker is rigged) and plenty more coming to this site to debate me personally, NOT ONE has accepted the challenge of providing their hand histories as proof of what they claim.

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Traditional (or “brick and mortar“, B&M, live) venues for playing poker, such as casinos and poker rooms, may be intimidating for novice players and are often located in geographically disparate locations. Also, brick and mortar casinos are reluctant to promote poker because it is difficult for them to profit from it. Though the rake, or time charge, of traditional casinos is often high, the opportunity costs of running a poker room are even higher. Brick and mortar casinos often make much more money by removing poker rooms and adding more slot machines.

Online venues, by contrast, are dramatically cheaper because they have much smaller overhead costs. For example, adding another table does not take up valuable space like it would for a brick and mortar casino. Online poker rooms also allow the players to play for low stakes (as low as 1¢/2¢)^[3] and often offer poker freeroll tournaments (where there is no entry fee), attracting beginners and/or less wealthy clientele.

Online venues may be more vulnerable to certain types of fraud, especially collusion between players. However, they have collusion detection abilities that do not exist in brick and mortar casinos. For example, online poker room security employees can look at the hand history of the cards previously played by any player on the site, making patterns of behavior easier to detect than in a casino where colluding players can simply fold their hands without anyone ever knowing the strength of their holding. Online poker rooms also check players’ IP addresses in order to prevent players at the same household or at known open proxy servers from playing on the same tables.

Free poker online was played as early as the late 1990s in the form of IRC poker. Planet Poker was the first online cardroom to offer real money games. The first real money poker game was dealt on January 1, 1998. Author Mike Caro became the “face” of Planet Poker in October 1999.

The major online poker sites offer varying features to entice new players. One common feature is to offer tournaments called satellites by which the winners gain entry to real-life poker tournaments. It was through one such tournament on PokerStars that Chris Moneymaker won his entry to the 2003 World Series of Poker. He went on to win the main event, causing shock in the poker world. The 2004 World Series featured three times as many players as in 2003. At least four players in the WSOP final table won their entry through an online cardroom. Like Moneymaker, 2004 winner Greg Raymer also won his entry at the PokerStars online cardroom.

In October 2004, Sportingbet, at the time the world’s largest publicly traded online gaming company (SBT.L), announced the acquisition of ParadisePoker.com, one of the online poker industry’s first and largest cardrooms. The $340 million dollar acquisition marked the first time an online cardroom was owned by a public company. Since then, several other cardroom parent companies have gone public.

In June 2005, PartyGaming, the parent company of the then largest online cardroom, PartyPoker, went public on the London Stock Exchange, achieving an initial public offering market value in excess of $8 billion dollars. At the time of the IPO, ninety-two percent of Party Gaming’s income came from poker operations.

In early 2006, PartyGaming moved to acquire EmpirePoker.com from Empire Online. Later in the year, bwin, an Austrian based online gambling company, acquired PokerRoom.com. Other poker rooms such as PokerStars that were rumored to be exploring initial public offerings have postponed them.^[4]

As of March 2008, there are fewer than forty stand-alone cardrooms and poker networks with detectable levels of traffic. There are however more than 600 independent doorways or ‘skins’ into the group of network sites.^[5] As of January 2009, the majority of online poker traffic occurs on just a few major networks, among them PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker and the iPoker Network. The vast majority of high stakes action takes place on Full Tilt Poker, with the top ten winning players from 2008 all coming from this site.^[6]

As of February 2010, there are approximately 545 online poker websites. Within the 545 active sites, 16 are stand-alone sites (down from 40 in March 2008), the remaining 529 sites are called “skins” and operate on 21 different shared networks, the largest network being iPoker which has 68 skins operating on its network. Of all the online poker rooms PokerStars.com is deemed the world’s largest poker site by number of players on site at any one time.

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