SatchDork
Full House
Joined: 13 Sep 2005
Posts: 245
|
 Posted: Sat Oct 01, 2005 4:24 am Post subject: Re: |
 |
|
| jbrennen wrote: |
| SatchDork wrote: |
| The real point I wanted to make is this: even IF a poker site is "rigged for rake," it's poor play that causes ANY ONE INDIVIDUAL to lose money. Given enough hands (and given a rigged site), each of us takes a turn at being each Player 1-6 in the above hypothetical (THE "RIG" EFFECTS US ALL EQUALLY). |
Ah, but that's the problem. It doesn't affect everybody equally. Let's say that they rig the game so that the chance to fill a flush on the river is 50% higher than it should be; in an honest game, there are 9 cards to fill the flush out of 46 cards unseen, so the chance is 20% (rounded off). So let's say they rig the game so that you actually have a 30% chance to fill a flush on the river.
The uneducated fish will continue to call on the turn, going for that flush draw, and they don't care about the odds, they just know that if they hit their flush, they could score a big payoff.
But on the other hand, those who know how to compute pot odds will make incorrect decisions, because they believe that filling the flush is a 20% proposition, so they need to be able to win a total pot at least 5 times the size of their current bet in order to justify going for the draw. But in actuality, since it's a 30% proposition, they could make their bet and go for the draw even if the eventual pot size is only 3 1/3 times their current bet. That's a big difference, and given such a rigged game, the educated player will make the wrong decision quite often.
Looking at it from the other side, if I'm holding a hand like two pair, and my opponent seems to be on a flush draw, I'm going to bet on the turn a bet which denies him the correct pot odds to call me. If I think he's 20% to make his flush, but he's actually 30%, I'm likely to make a too-small bet which actually gives him a positive expectation for calling me.
Of course, this is a totally silly proposition, because if some online poker site did rig the game to fill flushes on the river 30% of the time, that sort of statistic would be obvious over a sampling of several thousand hands. They could probably fool a table full of players for a while without anybody suspecting a rigged game, but over thousands of hands, the deviation from the honest expected rate would rise to the point where it would be obvious and couldn't be explained by random variance.
Let me finally add that, no, I don't think online poker is rigged. As somebody who is fairly well versed in probability, statistics, and combinatorics (I actually know the mathematical definition of variance and what it means), and a professional programmer for 20 years now, I can't imagine how you could rig the game for significantly increased rake without causing significant perturbations in the observed statistical patterns of card distribution. I haven't done any extensive analysis myself, but I have yet to hear of a single long-term analysis of online poker hands which deviates significantly from the expected honest behavior. |
I agree with most of your analysis with a couple comments. First of all, the "rigged for rake" conspiracy theory, as it's generally presented, doesn't suggest that draws a simply more likely to come up than usual (like the RNG is somehow stacking the deck). The theory is that certain situations come up more often than others. Such as flush draws vs. sets and straights vs. flush draws and trips top kick vs. trips 2nd best kick. Basically situations that create "action flops." This combination creates problems for both good and bad players because basically it's making it correct for EVERYONE to keep drawing and even raising, not making MORE CORRECT for ONE PERSON.
Second comment, your scenario above (a fish being correct to draw to "rigged odds" while a good player is not) still affect fish more than good players. Let's say our fish is playing a good player and is correctly drawing to rigged odds when it would be incorrect if the odds were straight. The fish hits his flush more often than he should, but the good player recognizes WHEN the fish hits and saves himself a bet or two on the river. Now say a fish is playing another fish. The other fish, not being as savvy as the good player, continues to raise his flopped two pair throughout the hand, even though the flush possiblity is there. The fish looses more to the other fish than the good player does. Similarly, good players know when to dump their Aces and Kings against a flopped set of jacks (or insert your own example hand here) while fish marry them.
Again, good analysis. It's just that the conspiracy theory isn't just that the odds of draws are increases, it's that the frequency at which certain "action" situations occur is greatly than it statistically should be. Good players still handle these situations better than fish. Besides, wouldn't a good player benefit from his flush draws hitting more often even if he didn't EXPECT them to hit that often? |
|
FAQ
Search
Register
Profile
Log in to check your private messages
Log in
