Online Poker rooms such as PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, Party Poker, Absolute, Ultimate Bet, Titan, Bodog, and ALL others are guilty of a very dirty little secret.
I'll try to keep this short and sweet and I promise you that if you read carefully, you will NEVER want to play online poker again without this knowledge.
The first online poker room came around in 1998 known as Planet Poker. Here it is 11 years later and with all of the technological advances with computers, there is still a very big problem.
Would you believe that the public sector does NOT posess the ability to randomly shuffle a 52 card deck of playing cards?
As of this update, October 25th, 2009 we are just starting to see the emergence of 64 bit technology with Windows 7... and XP 64 and Vista 64 both have launched as well.
Even with 128 bit processing power (which doesn't exist to the public yet), it is only possible to get 1/1 trillionth of 1% of the possible outcomes when it comes to shuffling a 52 card deck.
This is because there are quadrillions of quadrillions of possible outcomes from shuffling a deck of cards.
So what does this mean? Is online poker rigged?
Without some special programming it would be very possible to determine (crack) the programs shuffling outcomes.
Because the shuffling and possible hand outcomes are limited, the programmers have had to come up with some creative solutions. Unfortunately, these creative solutions really do NOT have your best interests in mind.
It comes down to something called "equitable distribution". This means that every player has a fair chance to equally win an even number of pots. Sounds good in theory but it also means that if you get too many good starting hands in too short a period of time, the shuflling porgram (algorithm) will FORCE your good hands like AA KK AKs to flat out LOSE.
As a matter of fact, if you win too many pots in a short amount of hands in online poker, your future "decent" starting hands will ALSO be forced to LOSE as well.
How many times do you get in a hand with a decent pocket pair like TT and some ***HOLE calls your raise with 93s and proceeds to mop the floor with you?
Have you ever seen multiple 4 of a kinds, a royal flush, and a straight flush within one hour of playing? I have.
A recent study of 250,000 hand histories from a "I won't say which one" online poker room, found that flushes occurred 50% more than they should have and full houses occurred 35% more than they should have.
In fact, if you had not witnessed these bad beats with their frequency, you would not have done a search to find this website in the first place.
The algorithms do some nasty things. They match up good starting hands more frequently. This makes the game seem more fun, FORCES ACTION, and of course gives every player the adrenelin boost we all enjoy.
They then divy up winning hands based on each players win percenatges which means more rake and more porfits.
This bugs me so much , and it is why wrote a book about it.
And for those ding nobs that say "well, that's poker" I say they are ingorant fools. Yes, poker has suckouts, yes poker has bad beats, yes poker has some frequency of luck, yes, poker is 5 times faster online than in real life meaning you see 5 times the action, BUT being forced to lose hands because you won too many is outright bull****.
Poker is hard enough as it is. You have to know your players, know their tendencies, know the math, odds, expected value, etc. etc..
Yes, you can track your play and improve your game and finally become profitable. If you have the tenacity for tracking the wins and losses, you can do really well in online poker!
