Online Poker Rigged
Is Online Poker Rigged?
If you've been playing online poker for a while you'll often hear people asking and some even
suggesting that online poker is rigged.
I'm going to take you through some of the most common statements made by players that
claim that online poker is rigged and explain why it's simply not the case.
1. You see more bad beats online than you do live
This reason is one that I see posted, most often. it's normally posted by the older
generation of player that is very accustomed to live play.
There are a couple of things for us to consider. Firstly, online you are simply dealt
that many more hands per hour as the software is much faster than human dealers
in the live setting. Another factor to take into consideration is the fact that many of us like to play more than one table with four tables being the most common number.
The next thing is that the human brain very often remembers 'shocking events' such as a bad beat.
When you get it all in with the best hand, you often expect to win. So when you hand does in fact win
you automatically brush that memory to one side and eventually forget about it.
Let's assume that example was getting all your chips in pre flop with AA and your opponent has 99 and you win 5 times in a row. Now you had AA, that fish deserved to lose. But here's the thing, 99 is meant to win (yes I said meant to) 20% of the time so by you winning 5 times, you are running good (also known as over expectation).
So what is the point that I'm trying to make? Your natural expectation (luck if you will)
does not always run perfectly in small samples. Luck expectation is a long term number.
So with playing so many hands per hour compared to your live games you will naturally see more situations where you get it in good in a shorter space of time. Now let's explore this further.
I have given you a situation where we ran good and that is easy to forget about as in the very short term (that one hand) you were 'supposed to win' right? But that's just it sometimes you expectation can run perhaps you win 3 times lose twice then win three times but over the course of 5 hands you won 3 times and lost twice (ok maybe that could happen live and you just got unlucky).
When you actually do run bad you may lose all five times or lose 4 times and win once (in that small amount of samples) but over the course of 1000 of those situations you will win about 800 of them (it's all about the big picture).
So the truth is that the more you play online the more hands you're going to see plus you will get a more realistic view of how variance plays out and so you actually will see more bad beats online but only in a time frame. Over the same sample of actual hands played you will see just the same variance in results live as you do online but it may take 5 years to do live what it takes a couple of months to do online (and that works for positive and negative results).
I always get bad beats after I withdraw (The doom switch)
A lot of players seem to think the online poker room is rigged to punish them as soon as they
withdraw money. Now to dispel this myth we need to understand how poker rooms make their money.
Online poker rooms (as with live poker rooms) make their money from taking rake out of the pots played or a tournament entry fee. It doesn't
benefit them at all to 'give your money' to other players through some kind of elaborate 'doom switch'.
these poker rooms want to playing as many hands and tournaments as possible as that is how they make their money (keeping you at the tables not busting you).
So you see, it really makes no sense for online poker to be rigged to punish you for withdrawing your winnings.
It's rigged for the fish to win with bad play to keep the sites soft
This is one that I heard in a live poker game only recently. I have to admit that this was one of the funniest conspiracy theories that I've heard about online poker being rigged.
Here's a fact. Bad, fishy players on average play a lot less volume than winning regs and all the players that are working on their game to become winners. We've already talked about how poker rooms earn their money so it really IS in their interests to keep the valuable players happy. This is the main reason you see poker rooms giving so many additional rewards to the guys that put the hours in.
It's just crazy for online poker to be rigged
The whole idea of online poker being rigged is just crazy. Online poker rooms are literally printing money as it is. If they rigged it for any reason then there is a chance that someone really smart would prove it and that would destroy the reputation and ultimately the poker rooms and then the millions of dollars that they are printing would simply vanish.
It's just an insane idea for poker to be rigged for any reason.
Who says poker is rigged
For the most part the people that say online poker is rigged are players that to be honest are not very good at the game.
Poker is a tough but very learnable game much like chess and it takes a lot of hard work to see good, long term results.
Now you know it's not rigged, how do you start making money?
There is so much information on Tagpoker to make you a winning poker player that some people are not sure where to start. If heads up poker is where you want to begin then you need to check out:
The beginners guide to beating heads up poker.
Tagpoker's free poker training videos
Brokerstar's full heads up sit and go poker course
6 Max Cash Training
Tagpoker students forum
