The fairness debate

Ok, just for fun, I’ve reviewed a large number of your last games.

Let’s just say that I have “some reservations” regarding your experience and knowledge. This is not a personal attack as I can say the same thing about most of the people here who complain about a rigged game.

The point that I want to make is that a “cunning strategy” of limping or folding, along with everyone else, and hoping to flop the nuts, the same as the other players, is absolutely guaranteed to let you see card distributions that you might think are unusual. Your opponents, I can assure you, think the same thing: that idiot limped with 94o, missed the flop and still called a min-raise (after 2 others had also called) and then got runner, runner to hit 3 of a kind. The game is rigged, nobody can be that lucky!

If you “let” people play their random rubbish because of your passive betting, not you personally, this applies to everyone, there’s going to be a huge number of things that you think are totally impossible that occur at a surprisingly large frequency.

Having done a small amount of reading regarding probability, I’d be looking for a rigged game if that did not happen. As I have said previously, seeing “impossible” events on a fairly regular basis convinces me that all is well in RandomLand. The PRNG (pseudo-random number generator) is behaving exactly as expected.

There’s a few things that believers in the “rigged game” hypothesis can do. I would strongly suggest that the believers start by learning some probability theory - specifically, the difference between dependent and independent events. The other thing that I would suggest they do is read up on poker theory.

A very high ranked player, @Yorunoame, put a huge amount of time into writing what can only be called a “Most Excellent” poker tutorial on this very forum.

As good as he is, Yorunoame is not the last word in poker! There’s many other sites out there. If you think that the advice is a bit strange or doesn’t make sense, feel free to ask in the forum here. You would be amazed how many very, very knowledgeable people will reply to you - that doesn’t include me, by definition :slight_smile: (ETA: I may very well reply but you should not think or suspect that I know anything at all about poker compared to the experts)

Finally, as mentioned before, when you have some understanding of probability and how random distributions work, when you have a good grasp of some basic poker theory, when you have some data and when you have a workable hypothesis regarding the gain/loss to Replay of “running a rigged game” then we can have a sensible discussion.

Quite frankly, to all you “Replay is rigged” believers who can’t fulfil those very basic requirements, you may as well try to convince me that you have a pet unicorn who farts rainbows that smell like roses.

Regards,
TA

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