Fantastic reply! its so funny lol
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Well, I get the impression that a lot of people think I am wrongā¦In spite of the obvious facts.
Captain obviousā¦ Oh that was the first post, even obviousāer 
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JJack
Iām fascinated by the statistical and psychological challenge in determining whether free sites are juiced for action and/or dealt out to reward donk/aggressive (sub-optimal) play- ie rigged/non random.
The most interesting example to me is users who have some skill and play surprisingly loose, already accounting for free chips and equally loose opponents.Comparing the action to live games with drunk rich maniacs,the card fall āseemsā entirely different free online, which tells me itās rigged and smart players play accordingly and win. The live outcomes are certainly different- the maniacs get slaughtered as long as stakes stay low enough for table to absorb the variance.
Second example are donks and calling stations, obviously rife on free sites, where run outs are easier to assess statistically. Comparing to low stakes online eg E 0.50/1 on Unibet (no bots or HUD) where play is fairly loose on Saturday evenings. Not as loose as free but plenty loose. Accounting for free users playing any 2,the runner runner all in draws hit only maybe 40-50% of the frequency on Unibet compared to Replay My experience and judgement says Replay (and other free sites) is rigged.
Looking at the āWhy bother rigging itā argument, there is EVERY incentive for both free and paid sites to rig
Long as they donāt get caught
Paid sites are well regulated (Iāve dealt with Malta Financial Services Authority and they are on the ball and very strict) and, most importantly, so profitable its probably a bad risk to rig, certainly in last 5 or so years. Someone can analyse a few million hands and if they are credible enough youāre done.(The discredited Bovada study could have had a different outcome)
Free sites that exist just to feed the associated paid site were/are blatantly rigged to encourage fish to deposit. Not played in a few years so may have changed
A new phenomenon is free sites that sell chips. Thatās their biz model.
So here we are at Replay. I found Replay via google adwords. Poker is a VERY expensive keyword that tells me Replay make money. Maybe very good money.
POKER IS BORING and needs patience even most regs and grinders cant sustain. I played 5/10 at Borgata last month and it was like a funeral. The regs were playing 1 hand an orbit max and delighted with 3 bigs an hour. Sorry, but the average free chip joe who might throw $5 at Replay poker just canāt enjoy the action.If they loosen up they bust and leave- no $5++ for replay. Unlessā¦itās rigged
Now i truly love the game, Iāve read all the arguments from experienced players why iām fooling myself,why my subconscious is making excuses for me etc etc and recognise I COULD BE WRONG!
I donāt wish to slur the owners of Replay, itās a fun gig. BUT observation 100% confirms logic that Replay should be, and is, rigged. Both juiced for action (big hands for multiple players) and non random run outs rewarding underdog.
Stating it isnāt rigged, certified by whomever, is noble and makes me think twice, even three times, but the action iāve seen tells me it is. Super happy to be proven wrong
Source of expertise:
Iām an experienced and moderately winning player of 30 years both on and offline, entered math and statistic competitions as a teenager, have read extensively about psychological traits such as cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias,and was a professional trader for 25 years.
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I must say this . 1 Replay is not rigged, this is coming from someone who knows . 2 no one is in business to lose money.
Your volley sir !
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I know ppl want to believe Replay is riggādā¦ after having it posted and re-posted by different authors, I am convinced its poor implementation that leads to the outcomes you see here @ Replay. Add to that its free chips, and well there ya goā¦ case closedā¦ but certainly not āriggādā in the conventional sense.
Oddsandsods needs to duel that statistics dude in the other threadā¦
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dont know what it is rigged or not rigged all i know is that i have been rivered 5 times today all by the same 2 or 3 peopleā¦all under the ranking of 300ā¦and in every one it was for a slightly higher hand than i had, a higher flush. or i lost 3 hands allin to a higher fullhouse that they hit on the river and almost all the hands a normal player would have folded i did and about half of them would have won the handā¦lost 1.9 million in about an hour and all the hands i lost were on the river. i lost with a k high flushā¦3 fullhouseās and the other 2 hands were 3 of a kind flopped trip 8ās and lost to trip 10ās and again every one of those hands i lost at the river and i had the better hand until the river so its probably not āriggedā but u gotta admit the program sure seems to be river happy 
What started as a tongue-in-cheek post has turned into a discussion that belongs in āThe fairness debate,ā so Iām merging these posts.
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Yesterday.
Flop came xxh and I had 2 hearts. I was first to play.
Checks all around.
Turn was a heart, I checked and 3rd to play bet pot.
It was pretty obvious he had top pr with a nice kicker or possibly 3 of a kind. I was confident of this because he was playing tight and never opened the betting on a draw. The board was dead except for hearts. We were late in the tourney and this guy was a decent player.
I had nothing but a heart draw.
I called.
Why?
We will get to that.
Now we were head to head.
River was a heart and I bet minimum.
He probably knew he was beat. You could almost hear him cussing that river.
He raised. I re-raised. He went all-in. I called and he went bye bye.
He had pocket something, Jās I think, and he had hit for 3 of a kind on the flop.
I felt bad for the guy. He didnāt play the hand badly on this loose table. The circle check on the flop was unusual. He was expecting to get all his chips in one way on the other.
He was playing Poker.
But I was playing Replay Poker.
I called because I have seen three things:
Replay tends toward three consecutive suited cards on the board.
Replay tends toward flushes.
Replay tends toward chasers on the river.
Math is fineā¦and I use it when I have nothing better to go on.
But poker is more than math.
āYou get your chips your way, Iāll get my chips mine.ā
āPhil Ivey
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iāve played a few other free poker sites and yes there is alot of bigger type hand 3 of a kind and higher and a bunch of just silly play but for whatever reason its not happening on riverā¦why the river here about 90% of time? not saying it rigged just wanna no why it dont compare to other free sitesā¦also not saying the other sites are betterā¦
Youāre right, Scratch, I have complained about the lack of ārandomnessā for years. I stand by my previous statements. Replay Poker is a money-making organization (Iām OK with that) that chooses to manipulate and control the play with programming designed to make the game more exciting/interesting.
I would be OK with this type of programming if Replay would simply ācome cleanā with what theyāre doing. It speaks to the integrity of the Site for Replay to continually say that the programming they offer is Random play. Anyone who plays on the Site a lot, which I do, can see that the laws of probability are continually violated.
You can see by how the folded cards influence the subsequent flop, turn, and river. You can see by the number of times that natural quads come up. You can see by the multiple bad beats that players suffer on the river. You can also see that individual players become the beneficiaries, or victims, of Replayās programming quirks. There are so many deviations from probability that I wonāt go through them all.
Wait! You have NEVER offered a shred of real evidence. Your argument is based on guilt by accusation. It doesnāt work that way Jack.
Iām a simple guy and like simple explanations (think Occamās razor) - when it is easier to run a legitimate RNG and site because that is profitable, why go through the massive expenditure of time and resources to ārigā the game? If the site wanted more profits it could market better and increase rake, especially at higher levels (for the love of all that is good, please get on with this already).
For people who believe the site violates all laws of probability, I will state definitively that they do not understand the very laws and principles they claim are being violated.
Just to play Devils advocate - if the rocket scientists who claim they see patterns in the cards and can discern the lack of randomness are correct, why havenāt they exploited that knowledge and become the highest ranked players here yet? I mean geez, if any halfway decent poker player had knowledge like that, theyād be unbeatable. I guess RP must have dedicated reps online at all times to make sure people who discover the code but are on the naughty list, donāt profit from their knowledge.
This is boring. Canāt we get a new conspiracy, like the Russians are manipulating the results or some Macedonianās are reselling playerās credit information or anything interesting at all? Frankly, the only reason I even check this thread anymore is to see if SPG has a new version of the pull my finger gag posted.
Added - Oddsandods, you have come to your statistically significant conclusions with a sample size that you have personally collected in about a week of play here? Thatās impressive. Please share your results.
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Warlock,
You mentioned Occamās Razor. I must share with you that my very own brilliant son has discovered something he callās āJanās Razor.ā He believes that his mother, Jan, finds the most convoluted explanation possible for the simplest data about her sonās activities. I think perhaps a few people in this conversation may be utilizing a razor more like Janās, less like Occamās, eh?
Sincerely yours,
Jan
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Not since watching Wile E Coyote have I seen so many attempts to build a Rube Goldberg machine to do what a simple shotgun would accomplish quite nicely 
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Hahahaha, that was great. Should have put that in the joke thread Hahahaha 
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FYI, I shared that somewhat self-incriminating information because I assumed that any male with a mother would understand. Glad you laughed, Craig.
Jan āThe Razorā Cee
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Warlock,
How do you know noone is exploiting stuffā¦ While I do think there is some implementation issues that do lead to the outcomes we see here, I do not believe it is focused on any specific player.
If I said ( at a bar ), every hand crack a new deck, then only shuffle 4 times, and cut onceā¦ then dealā¦ what you will find is over time certain hands and types of hands will come up more than they should. This wonāt happen @ a bar, beacuse the deck isnāt new each timeā¦ its the dead pile+ the unused deack from before.
Replay states, they start from a clean deck, every hand and ābasicallyā shuffle once ā¦ thats where I say its problematicā¦ I do believe thats why we see what we see. the logical response to this is 2-foldā¦
- Chg the way the deck is shuffled, and do it a rnd # of times
- Collect cards into a dead-pile, add to deck after hand, start with that next, not a clean deck.
Looking @ the programming necessary, more is needād for #1 , yet #2 is much easier and more critical to the processā¦ doing both is optimal, yet doing just #2 would prolly result in much better play.
Sarah -
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To date (to my knowledge), no one has presented a single statistically significant result that could be compared to what would be expected from a random distribution of hands. I find the entire debate based on anecdotal evidence from exceedingly small samples to be pointless. Anecdotes do not prove theories.
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If there were discernable patterns, it would stand to reason that they would have been picked up by quite a number of people here. One would then assume that this group of people would exploit this information and rise to the top of the rankings here in short order. I see exactly zero indication this has happened or is happening.
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Since this site is not for money, had someone found this golden key, it would have been blabbed over this forum long ago. People suck at keeping secrets. Having a pattern that is readily discernable and therefore widely known but that remains a secret is simply not plausible.
I have zero knowledge of programming so have no idea how the RNG is implemented. I donāt recall reading about the single shuffle of a clean deck thing. What I do know is that I have seen this debate conducted time and time again in the industry, with the advent of each new change or technology. Its not new to social poker by any means. There will be people who will go with the rigged theory no matter what is said to them. There will be people who are convinced they can beat the slots or the lottery or whatever other game is invented. I donāt find it particularly productive to argue with any of them.
There is a boatload of money involved in online poker. Anyone who had an inferior product (i.e. one that was beatable) would be booted out of the industry so hard and fast that their ass would precede them through the door. I just donāt see how or why an inferior product would even make it to market to be used by RP or anyone else at this stage. Its not like people are cooking up their own programs from scratch anymore.
Hereās another remarkable coincidence: Within a span of 20 minutes, I got knocked out of 2 MTTs after going all in with a very strong full house. The first time I had aces full of eights. Itās obvious my opponent has eights full of aces. Eight drops on the river I lose to 4 of a kind. (Bad Beat.) Next tournament, I have kings full of threes, my opponent has threes full of kings. Three drops on the river and I again lose to 4 of a kind. (Bad Beat #2)
I wish I was this lucky. Had this happened in one of the casinos, (that are a 45 minute drive from my house), I would have received the lionās share of the Bad Beat Pool. I donāt know the actual numbers of what the average take is but itās a lot. Usually upwards of $40K! Thatās my share. The guy that won the hand with 4 of a kind would get around $20K and everyone else at the table, (even though they all folded), would get about $4k each. 2 bad beats in back-to-back games would amount to quite a lucrative coincidence.
But wait! Thereās another coincidence. Both times my opponent just happened to be an extremely aggressive player who was off to a very early chip lead by intimidating everyone with massive bets relentlessly. It;s been my observation that Replayās random deal randomly rewards these aggressive bettors with random winning hands MOST OF THE TIME!!!
You can call it random. You can call it coincidence Iām calling it something else but this is a family oriented site so I canāt share that with you. (Thatās another Replay reality that I find hard to swallow, the family friendly thing. Iām struggling to imagine the parent, or parents, whom are offended by the use of foul language but would encourage their non-adult children to learn the game of Texas Hold 'em. Especially where it would present an alternative to completing online homework assignments!
@ranchcracker
I just had a look at your hand history and I presume these are the 2 hands you are speaking about.
https://www.replaypoker.com/hand/replay/316978361 /four-of-a-kind-eights
This hand was on Omaha split MTT (hi/lo omaha). Your hole cards 5s3hAd2s. abouthouse hole cards were 8sQh6dJcā¦ Flop 8cKhAc, Turn 8h. In omaha you must use exactly 2 hole cards and exactly 3 community cards so at this stage you had A5 from the hole and A88 from community giving you 2 pairs AA88. abouthouse had 8Q from the hole and 88A from community giving him trips 888. River is 8d. Your hand improves from 2 pair to trip 8s and abouthouse has quad 8s. You never had a full house. To have Aces full of Eights you need AAA88 and on that board it is impossible. This is how the dealer called the hand.
Dealer: ranchcracker shows [ 5s 3h Ad 2s ] Hi: Three of a Kind, Eights; Lo: .
Dealer: abouthouse shows [ 8s Qh 6d Jc ] Hi: Four of a Kind, Eights; Lo: -
Dealer: abouthouse wins 10,294 chips with Hi: Four of a Kind, Eights
https://www.replaypoker.com/hand/replay/316981417 /four-of-a-kind-threes.
This one you held 77, flopped trips 777 turned sevens full of threes. The 3 on the river was terrible for you so Yeah that one was unlucky. You probably should have raised the flop with 777 and made it too expensive for him to call with only 33. Dealer called this hand
Dealer: willrav4 shows [ 8c 3d ] Four of a Kind, Threes
Dealer: terrilynn shows [ Tc Ad ] Full House, Threes full of Tens
Dealer: ranchcracker shows [ 7s 7h ] Full House, Sevens full of Threes
Dealer: willrav4 wins 12,980 chips with Four of a Kind, Threes
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