The good players on this site can win easily if you blame your cards you are blaming the wrong thing. Try to work on your play even if you are having bad luck. Right now I am on a terrible bad luck span in my opinion but instead of saying its rigged im trying to get better at poker. If you are better than most players on this site you will do well. This site does not favor anyone.
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completely agree happens all the time
We can add AKFolds to that illustrious group of people who care enough about āthe fairness debateā to actually collect data.
Apparently, AKFolds tracked 45,000 hands keeping count of AA and, surprisingly enough, found that pocket aces were dealt very close to the expected number of times.
It is interesting that the good players are the ones most interested in doing these tests while the āReplay is riggedā crowd are content to sit in the balcony whinging and moaning.
Regards,
TA
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Hahahahahaha, how appropriate LOL 
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Yes, I thought it was most excellent!
Itās unfortunate that we canāt āsuperlikeā wonderful posts like that!
Regards
TA
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My apologies @tqwheoioas, I thought that I had already replied.
Replay make a statement that can be āput to statistical test (sic)ā every single day: they keep on dealing cards. Tens of thousands of hands every day.
That, my friend, is the only statement that Replay can make that is subject to statistical analysis.
It seems that you and @wildpokerdude are destined to become great friends. Iām sure you could, between both of you, find at least one other who goes along with your belief that the game is rigged. Surely you could do that?
Given the replay function that Replay offer us, it would be easy for you and your friends to record the first hand that you play in each session or, if you change tables, each time you change tables and just keep track of how often you are dealt a particular hand.
Later on, when you have sufficiently āprovedā whatever it is that you think you can prove, you can replay those sessions and, this is the very, very clever bit, you record the replay. That ātrapsā Replay into providing āhonestā data and you have the scoundrels over a barrel!
Hope this helps.
Regards,
TA
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So Iām dredging this back up again because I thought some might find this interesting.
Iām clearly on the side of Replay being random and fair - but thatās not how I started. I got there by doing my own little, small scale experiments, and each time Replay held up.
Anyway, one of the things I originally stated - and that Iāve heard echoed by many - is the idea that āReply hands out beats on the river like candy on Halloween.ā In fact, i may have used those exact words in my very first post here.
So letās go to yesterday. By the time I stopped playing, I really felt that beats on the river had been falling like raindrops the whole time. That is what I felt like I was seeing - and I felt it strongly. So this morning, I went back and looked at my last hundred hands, and I replayed all that went to showdown and record how many of those were won by a fortunate (for someone) river card.
Here are the numbers:
53 hands went to showdown.
12 were won when the winner got the river card he/she needed.
Thatās 22.6 percent winners on the river from that small sample.
So what do I think it means? Yep - Replay yet again proves statistical fairness. Given that there are 5 cards on the board, Iād guess that statistically speaking, over thousands if not millions of hands, youād expect a completely random system to deliver āthat one card that made the differenceā equally over all 5 spots. Perfectly equal would be 20 percent. I got 22.6 percent river. However - given I only sampled 100 hands, 53 of which went to showdown, Iām going to hazard a guess that is WELL within the margin of error for such a small sample.
So why did I feel otherwise?
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I was on the receiving end of a few of those beats - and there was one three hand stretch where I was beat on the river twice in three hands. That tends to stick with you, unlike the other stretches (like one of ten hands in row) that had not one single beat on the river.
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During that 53 hand run, there were three instances of back to back beats on the river. And again - something like that stands out. By comparison, two (or three, or four, or five, etc.) showdowns in a row where the river was meaningless simply donāt register.
For me, the idea of āriver candyā was put to bed a while ago - but after what I felt I had experienced last night (at the time I could see Oprah screaming āYou get a river card! And you get a river card! And you get a river card!!ā) I thought Iād take a more substantive look.
Turns out Oprah was just saying to me a few times āMaybe you should have folded.ā (Actually no - on none of those plays should I have folded. Itās just that it aināt over 'till the river card sings)
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Something else to consider is that with each new card revealed, there are new and different possibilities. Those new, different possibilities compound just like interest on a loan does. Therefore, there should have been more river beats than you recorded, like closer to 30% than 20%. Thatās a big part of the reason you want to take the pot before the river is reached, if you can. Fewer board cards = fewer chances to lose.
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Icanāt count how many times my blah blah blah has been beaten by a rivered yadda yadda yadda.
Once i took a closer look, however, I saw that my blah blah blahs held up more times than I could count too.
My conclusion? I donāt know how to count very well!
Well, yeah - but the point is that for a lot of people āperception is reality,ā which is where this āreplay is riggedā stuff comes from.
But if theyād just take the time to look at data (when that sort of thing is available) instead of āfeelings,ā theyād find that āreality is realityā and it doesnāt give a damn about your perception.
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I agree. I did collect the data a few years ago, and satisfied myself that all is right, or at least that part of it I looked at.
I collected data on how often I flopped a set when dealt pocket pairs. In 1,023 instances, I flopped a set or would have flopped a set within 0.02% of statistical expectation.
I believe I just pissed off the Replay River Gods. Just got knocked out of a SnG - pocket sevens, flop trips. Guy next to me goes all in and the board is fairly dry so what the hell - I go with him. Heās got top pair (9ās). Care to guess what he rivered? LOL - no good deed goes unpunished - gotta love it!
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There is no point in posting one hand and saying āthat should not happenā
Any one hand can happen in Poker, which is why it is a great game and attracts poorer players too who mistake luck for skill.
To show that something is unfair you have to demonstrate it occurring an improbable amount of times over a large number of deals, say 50,000 hands or even more
Now having said that the reason I am reading this forum, is because I started playing real money sites after using replay poker for a while, and it was there that I started to get suspicious of unfair deals.
So to be clear i have had no issue with the Replay poker deals at all.
So last week on a Real money site, for example , I twice got dealt Pocket KK , to find on the showdown the Villan had pocket AA. And I also was involved in a hand where it happened to someone sles
So that is three times pockets KKs and AAs within less than 3000s deals on one Money site (it was Betfair). That I calculated is highly improbable and gets me suspicious , especially as such hands usually involve large pots by the showdown and if you lose ALL your showdowns unfairly you will go bust.
But there were other things too. For example I had multiple showdowns in a row, where I was 80-20% by the Turn, only for Villan to draw his magic card on the river to win. (So for example I would have A-J paired by the turn, and villan gets his trip on the river to take the pot)
So I recorded this and found outt of my 15 last showdowns where i was 80-20 (or 90-10) favourite by the turn I only won three of them.
This raises my suspicions
So to repeat I cannot point to any particular showdown and say that should not happen. But if i can point to winning 3 from the last 15, where i was 80-20 favourite , that is suspicious to me
does anyone else play Real money sites, have looked at the data of their hands, and thought āis my account set up for failure hereā
Real money play is illegal here in the USA (with a very few exceptions), so thereās no way for most of us to know. I do know that I wouldnāt play for real money online back when it was legal (really before they began enforcing the already existing laws about 2001), because it was too easy for players to collude at that time. It was much more likely than the site purposely cheating the players. Thatāthe possibility of collusionāat least, has been addressed here at RP and probably most other reputable sites, too.
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I hear you - but in the end, I still think itās just poker. Over several thousand hands under your same scenario, Iād think youād see something close to the expected odds. 15 consective hands could be cherry picked from a compilation of thousands of hands to show almost anything, but given enough hands, the odds should hold up.
Just for grins, (since you mentioned the āmagic river cardā):
Today, Iāve been āriveredā more times than Iād like to count - for example, hereās a good one just a bit earlier today: 9 player tournament table, me and one other player are about equal short stackers, and he goes all-in. Iām holding A8 suited, so I figure what the hell - weāre both desperate, and maybe my desperate hand is better than his and I can double up.
It was. He had 72o.
I get an Ace on the flop (Yay me!). So now itās even better, right??? Turn? 7. River 7. All I could do was laugh.
And that was the course of order today (to a point - it got better). I was hit by a flush on the river so many times today I started to feel like a toilet. Or a gutshot straight - or a full house - whatever the other guy needed, he seemed to get, and it seemed like I was always ahead until that river card hit the table.
But then - last tournament, luck changes - I go through it like tearing through wet newspaper - everything going my way, easy win.
So, yāknowā¦ what can I say about that? What does it all mean?
I say it means āpoker.ā
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Iām a very visual person and enjoyed reading your post. It provided me with some very vivid images. Thanks for the laughs.
Happy to have provided a laugh! Got a million of those stories - but donāt we all? Weāve all taken that premature victory dive into the deep end of the āall-inā pool only to find - once the river card hit - that all we did was dive into a pool of our own tears.
Elvoid
I didnāt cherry pick 15 hands, I just used them as an example which could be repeated bias.
But the difference between my examples and yours is that i provided repeat examples of the same hand.
Your 72o is just a funny River story but it is irrelevant to the discussion because you need to demonstrate it happening an improbable number of times, over a large sample size, which you didnāt do
that was what I tried to do with my KKs. Getting pocket KKs while Villan gets pocket AAs will happen in a Heads Up about every 30-40 thousand deals.
So for me to see it three times in a week is starting to look like evidence that something could be unfair. (So 3 times in a few thousand hands is improbable)
I didnāt say you cherry picked - sorry if that wasnāt clear - I said 15 consecutive hands COULD be cherry picked to show anything - meant to be a generic statement. A block of 15 consecutive hands could also be randomly picked and statistically, it wouldnāt mean anything other than perhaps inspiring an analysis of thousands of hands in order to get a result that would statistically mean something. And I also misunderstood your post - you said 15 consecutive showdowns where you were 80/20, not hands - but the same principle applies: in a pool of thousands of 80/20 showdowns, there would be stretches of 15 consecutive that would skew one way or the other - and sometimes, perhaps, drastically skew.
And the 72o story was just playing off your āmagic river cardā line. Lord knows I got my fill (in a bad way) of that type of card yesterday.
Without buying in to the idea of an unfair dealing system one way or the other - I will say that whenever real money is involved on a large scale in anything (and Iād assume any real money online game, which would be a global endevour, would be by definition ālarge scaleā) the idea of fraud being committed wouldnāt be a great shock to anyone.