Dublin Poker

Im about halfway through one of the new books i bought... came across an interesting few lines...

This is from "Dirty Poker", written by infamous casino cheater 'Richard Marcus'. He talks a bit about how you get cheated online by both the other players (through collusion) and the card rooms themselves.

"Lets take a look at how the actual games offered by every online poker site work. They use random number generators (RNGs) to 'shuffle and deal' the cards. In principle, unless they are crooked or contain bugs, computer shuffles are closer to being completely random than shuffles in a live action game. This is true because no cardroom dealer performs a totally random shuffle. He cannot obtain that result because he is human and often might just rush the shuffle to the point he is doing nothing more than riffling through the deck, leaving clumps of cards throughout.

However, there can be bugs in the shuffling algorithms. A few years back, a team of computer programmers from Silicon Valley moonlighting as card cheats discovered a means of calculating the precise order of cards in decks shuffled by algorithms used by multiple online cardrooms. Their discovery was hushed, but the fact was that with the application of this knowledge, the cheats knew in advance the hand of each player at the table as well as the future cards to be dealt; either to the players individually in stud games or on board in Hold'em and Omaha games.

The flaw in the algorithm was that the starting point used for the RNG was the number of milliseconds since midnight according to the systems clock. All the Silicon Valley geeks had to do to compromise the RNG was synchronize their programme with the system clock. Online cardrooms today insist it is no longer possible to crack their shuffling algorithms, but I wouldn't want to bet my case money on what they say.

If RNGs are truly random, then over millions of hands we should see a distribution of deals, flops turns and rivers no different than live poker. But I have heard from many sources in the know that RNG's randomness may not be 100% random. A computer whizz I know has run his own programmes to keep track of what goes on in internet poker. He chose one particular major site and tracked a million hands of Texas Hold'em. What he found, somewhat to his shock as he professed it to me, was that the RNGs seemed to be skewed to put more pairs on board and create more flush draws. Although such machination is not directly cheating its playing customers, it certainly can be concluded that biased RNGs benefit the site immensely".

"How? The obvious explanation is that they create more action. When you have an inordinate number of flush draws, you keep more players looking to catch a flush in the pot. Same thing with pairs on the board. They open up possibilities of sets and full houses. Again, more players exhibiting more staying power creates a lot more action. The end result is the creation of bigger pots, which in turn attracts more players to the site increasing its revenues through table rakes of more games. Do I personally believe this is still happening on the major sites?

You bet. Even if the RNGs are skewed by just a tiny amount, lets just say a fraction of a percent, that irregularity will generate millions of dollars of additional revenue for the site over a long period of time".


I wouldn't call this proof by a long shot, but I'm surprised that this sort of an experiment hasn't been done before. We're investing so much money into these online cardrooms, with absolutely no guarantee that we will get a fair game.
If ever there was a book to get you paranoid, this is it...


He goes on to attack all the common replies people who think they are being cheated get...

"You get all the nonbelievers who tell you stuff like "you get wiped out online because your never concentrating totally while playing", or maybe your playing too many games at once... "

Utter crap, as I knew already. I'm so sick of people spouting these reasons for why I can't make money online. I play well, I get my money in ahead, and I lose to bad players making bad moves and getting lucky.

As I am writing this, I am as usual getting horribly robbed over and over and over again...this one is all in preflop.

Why do I bother...the most annoying thing is the big 5 second pause before the river burns you. What is that all about? How do you cope with sooooo many bad beats...

Hopefully someone will do a study on this soon, and perhaps prove once and for all that online poker is utter crap...

The day online poker is banned will be the happiest of my life!

In other news, Ive been chat banned from PPP for a week for obvious reasons...