The fairness debate

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2373

I don’t understand this whole fairness debate, which seems to be founded on a misunderstanding of probabilities and is largely a function of the passive play on this site, which allows too many players to see flops and subsequent streets. The value of premium hole cards (even AA) diminishes with the number of players at every street.

Let’s take your QQ hand as an example. You stated that the big stack made a huge re-raise. Generally these types of bets (especially 3-bets) mean that the player is strong, and AK suited is indeed a strong hand. But QQ is also a strong hand, and probably worth defending in the big blind (that appears to have been your position since the player to your left was first to act).

Of course, I can’t tell you whether or not that you should have folded/called in this situation, because I don’t know the key details: for example, how huge was the 3-bet (this is needed to calculate pot odds), what type of player (e.g., loose or tight) is the re-raiser, what was the re-raiser’s position, and what were the relative stack sizes?

The underlying tone of your post, however, suggests that you sensed that losing this hand was inevitable (something was not right). The fact that the big stack hit a backdoor flush draw to win is irrelevant, since you were no longer in the hand. If you were in it, you could have prevented the big stack from getting there (which required running cards on the turn and river) by making your opponents pay heavily to see the turn card (I would shove here). Yes, sometimes people will call and you will get unlucky, but remember that they made a -EV play. People who consistently make -EV plays depend on luck to win and will pay you off in the long run, and that’s what you need to focus on, rather than short-term results.

The bottom line is this: while some people feel that the game is rigged, these types of beats can happen in “real” poker, but they tend to happen more often on Replay because people let them happen with passive play.

Pre-flop, AK suited is an excellent hand, and the big stack played it aggressively, putting himself/herself in a position to win by taking control of the action, forcing you to fold and isolating the short stack for heads-up play. This is precisely how you protect your holdings and reduce the probability of losing.

3 Likes
2374

hi hi !!!
see the sites certificate for random number generator was 2011
please can we see a more current?
just we assured the play is fair
thanks

1 Like
2375

I can’t say I trust the RNG either, given the outcomes of my good hands whenever I bet them big.

I will say that after tracking my starting cards for about 5000 hands, the stats I compiled sure looked like the initial hole cards were being dealt fairly. The distribution was not perfectly even, but well within standard deviation for most ranks, and just barely outside for perhaps one or two.

But I don’t thin it means all that much, because if you were going to screw with the randomness, you would never want to make it that obvious.

The way to do it is to wait until someone bets big, then de-randomize the hand outcome. This happens to me nearly universally. I will win on occasion with an open shove, but even against hands I dominate, I lose easily at least 80% of the hands I open shove with when I get called. Not by dominating hands that should call me, but by random piddly-twink any-two-card callers who smash the board for trips or a four card flush for their random suit-I-don’t-have after I have top pair top kicker and they shove for some reason with nothing. Basically if I raise anything more than 3BB, the fix is in.

Or it sure feels like it.

2BB is a 6-seat call and a family pot that I can’t win because someone will smash for a straight or better every single time.

2.5BB is a blind stealer so I get the blinds 8/10 of the time, which ruins the value for any hand I can raise with. 2/10 of the time it gets called, misses, and I check/fold, or it hits and I bet it and get rivered/coolered because someone doesn’t know when to fold a draw, but can hit sweet miracles all day long when I’m paying them.

I’m absolutely convinced that the site hates me and my chips, probably because of how I have expressed myself on the forum and at the tables in the past, and I deserve it. But I don’t know what the site has against everyone else who experiences the exact same thing I do, or so they say.

1 Like
2376

hi hi puggywug!!!
thank you very informative post
i agree
i play at numerous sites (pokerstars, acr, 888), the cards dealt on replay & the numerous resultant big hands (trips, boats, flushes & straights) seems very suspicious, and beyond the realm of statistics & probability
this does produce a lot more “action” than is expected

simply - replay should produce an independent certification of their rng, more current than 2011 (following many software upgrades)
some jurisdictions & parent licensing agencies require this of a gaming site?,

1 Like
2377

Since the chips aren’t worth anything, I don’t believe that Replay is subject to the more strident regulation that for-money games are.

2378

sort of true…
they do sell chips to make money
i believe in that case chips do have $$ value?

2379

Yes, but they cannot be redeemed. In essence they fund the site.

2380

wouldn’t mattered what I had done. AK was gonna call and result would been same out side of me being busted or staying in game. why is it so hard to understand that no matter how play a hand on here , players just gonna call who knows what and always end up out hitting any hand I hit.

2381

Well let me put it like this … I play probably as many hands as anyone on this site … Sadly more and I would never ever play on a real cash site that used this “random” program … I asked a friend whom is in the on line poker business and I was told … " yes the dealt cards probably random but there is nothing saying that there is not a logarithm that is not player specific but hand specific to generate “action” … Just saying :slight_smile:

2382

I am passive because these hands happen over and over and over. example I flop a straight but there 2 of same suited cards on flop I darn well know someone has that flush draw and regardless of what I do, they, just gonna call all the and hit their flush. so I flop a straight , I’m better off checking it cause they gonna call all the way and I just know a 3rd same suit is coming.
same can be said for KK. every time this dealing program will puts a ace on the board and we all know any Ax gets played on here, so what point of doing anything preflop when I know darn well a ace is gonna pop up on board? and if a ace doesn’t pop up its because they got AA and program will make my Kings look good all the way when in fact it just wants me pass my chips off.

2383

maybe to answer concerns of players
obtain current certification of the rng used here?

2384

The people who believe that the site is rigged will, almost certainly, quite happily believe that the certification is fake. The argument will be something like “of course XYZ Company would certify the PRNG, that’s how they stay in business”.

In the end, if people believe that the site is rigged, there is no amount of “evidence” that will convince them otherwise.

Regards,
TA

2 Likes
2386

Keep sticking up for reality. Sadly, people will never be convinced that the site is fair. Every single poker site (including the major real-money sites) has lots of people who are convinced that the game is unfair.

A lot of it is down to cognitive bias. Poker is a game with so much variance that people can’t believe the outcomes. And the people who have played their whole lives are used to live environments where you see maybe 25 hands per hour, and now they are seeing 200 hands per hour, so the number of wild outcomes just got multiplied by 8 and they can’t wrap their heads around it. Heck, I wonder myself when I see all kinds of weird hands, but then I remember that’s just poker and see a bunch of less interesting situations in a row.

It makes no sense that a free money site would be rigged when you are under no obligation to buy chips. It is extremely easy to turn the starting amount of chips into hundreds of thousands and then millions. Why would anyone buy chips (except to support the site that provides this free poker)? If I can have 800m chips without buying any, how can someone believe that there’s an algorithm designed to force people to buy chips?

6 Likes
2387

I don’t see anything wrong with kcorbee’s request. I’ve also noticed and have mentioned on here a couple times that something seems to have changed with the RNG since the new format change last year. Again, I’m not implying anything nefarious is going on just maybe the RNG is not working as before. As I recall, after the change in format, I noticed a couple of quads and a str8 flush winning hands occurring in two separate MTT games shortly after the change. I remember, I even hit quads but no one called my raise in that hand.

I saw on this thread in an earlier post an explanation which was made ( but it was ) several years ago about how it was being generated and I agreed when I read it that this method could be reasonably considered random.

Btw, I wasn’t aware there was a certification of the RNG available for this site. Where is it located and how does one view it?

I’m just glad others have noticed a change. Also, I’ve also noticed what wildpokerdude’s post stated above. But, maybe it’s because we are dealing with free chips and people won’t be pushed off a hand which becomes another type of problem for me.

1 Like
2388

In end they go away,

2389

The PRNG certificate can be viewed by going to the dashboard page and scrolling to the bottom. This is the link:

This is exactly what is happening. More people are seeing more flops, more people are continuing with hands that “should” be folded and so on. People are checking all the way to the river with 2 pair and the player who “shouldn’t” be in the hand hits their straight draw.

The way to beat this is to play less hands and play far more aggressively.

The other thing to consider is how many hands are being dealt here. As I type this, there are 1650 players seated. Someone, just now, almost certainly had an event occur that has a probability of 1/1650. Maybe they just got quad aces for the second consecutive time or maybe their flopped KKK got beaten by some clown playing 9-4 off.

I would be very highly suspicious if stuff like this was not happening on a regular basis! This very thread reassures me that all is well in PRNG land!

I expect 1/5000 or even 1/10000 events to be fairly common. I’d be very disappointed if 1/100000 events aren’t happening on most days.

Hope this helps

Regards.
TA

1 Like
2390

Thank you for your reply and the PDF link.

2391

Delighted that it helped you!

It occurred to me that, if we are dealing with a company who is prepared to rig games in any of the suggested ways though (or any other way), there is no reason why they couldn’t just hand over the same algorithm that was used for the original certification, get a new certificate and then continue with their nefarious ways :slight_smile:

It is obvious that some people truly believe that is what has happened already: a certified PRNG was replaced by an algorithm that is biased in some way.

It’s a simple and rather unfortunate fact of life that it is (practically) impossible to prove a negative. Replay or any other site just can not prove that the game is not rigged. That is not possible. You may want to look at Russell’s Teapot on Wikipedia.

On the other hand, any player who kept notes for, say, one year of fairly regular playing would have sufficient data (> 100,000 hands) to show with some degree of certainty any “irregularities” in the card distribution. That is a long way from “proving” that the site is rigged but I would certainly be prepared to take claims backed by data very seriously and I would undertake to do the initial analysis myself and publish, in this thread, the raw data, the methodology of the testing, the expected results and, of course, the actual results. I have no doubt at all that quite a few of the players here, most of them much more qualified than I, would also analyse the data.

If we are approaching this from the perspective of Replay being somewhat “suspect” then, although the company has the data, we have no reason to trust whatever they might make publicly available. The only data that we can trust is that which we have collected ourselves.

Just as soon as we have 1 million hands (that is only 10 players collecting data!), clearly documented by hand number, we can do some more serious analysis on the numbers (beyond my abilities) and see if, in fact, there is any deviation from the expected values. We need the hand numbers so that Replay themselves have an opportunity to check the data that has been collected.

With all respect, I mean that seriously, to you and all the other participants in this thread, the plural of “anecdote” is not “data”. I, and anybody else who has some mathematical knowledge, just cannot accept any of these claims without data.

I strongly encourage everyone who reads this to have a quick look at basic statistics and probability maths. It will probably take less than 2 hours of your time to significantly improve your understanding.

I wish all of you much better luck than you seem to have been receiving :slight_smile:

Regards,
TA

2 Likes
2392

First, I want to make it clear ( again ) when I raised these questions that I never thought anything nefarious was going on. But, was making a request that the RNG should be reviewed that it was working as before the recent format change. It seemed a coding change (error) may have been made, maybe a semicolon became a colon or vice versa etc. Wildpokerdude’s observations noted above echo my recent sentiments. And, I’m really glad others have had similar observations and expressed them here.

I have a question for theanalyst01, in your prior post you noted that as of that writing there were 1650 players seated. Assuming an average of 5 players to a table ( HU and 6 and 9 players tables etc.) that would make only about 330 hands dealt at that time for all the tables. I looked up the odds of quads in a 7 card poker hand and it is 1 in 224,848 ( hands ) or .168%. So, I would question it if quads occurred more frequently than that percentage. Remember that the next hand is randomly drawn so the % of quads hitting should remain the same.

Now, in my case I was in two different MTT’s and observed 3 quads and a str8 flush in probably less than 100 hands played. This was shortly after the new format change. And, that didn’t seem reasonable to me and the reason for my posts.

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2393

there are a lot of things I notice and they keep repeating over and over, which in turn makes it predictable. I can’t do this with a real deck of cards. random things can’t be predicable.