Online Deck More Truly Random?
I've had this thought in my mind, and been reading some reviews of sites on FlopTurnRiver, and lots of people complaining about the game being fixed, made me bring this up.
Now, I am a developer by trade, and fully understand how random number generation works. Is it possible that the online games are much more random then the B&M games, home tournies, etc?
In a real deck, when pocket aces are tossed into the deck, what are the chances those aces will get spread out evenly during the shuffle? Or a flush set of cards? While with a random number generator, there are none of these possible human element issues that come up. Any card at any time can come up, and random cards aren't ever "grouped" together.
Thoughts?
Now, I am a developer by trade, and fully understand how random number generation works. Is it possible that the online games are much more random then the B&M games, home tournies, etc?
In a real deck, when pocket aces are tossed into the deck, what are the chances those aces will get spread out evenly during the shuffle? Or a flush set of cards? While with a random number generator, there are none of these possible human element issues that come up. Any card at any time can come up, and random cards aren't ever "grouped" together.
Thoughts?
Comments
Not just possible, pretty much certain. There have been studies of how much shuffling you have to do to properly randomize a deck of cards, and my vague recollection is that it's on the order of 30 seconds or more using various techniques. Very few hand shuffles last that long, IME, and don't generally involve a proper mix of techniques. OTOH, the better autoshufflers apparently do a pretty good job.
1. site corruption,
2. programming errors,
3. site hackability, or
4. lack of (or anticipatable) pseudo-random number seed or entropy source,
I'd say that the statistical nature of the shuffle at an online poker site would be far superior to any human version of shuffling cards.
I'm not sure that I would characterize either shuffle as "more random" than the other, although I think I know what you're getting at (in terms of card clumping, non-thorough shuffling, etc).
A human card shuffling process generally is highly random. However, a human shuffling process (random or not) is not likely to be selecting a shuffled deck from the proper Uniform(52!) distribution.
For example, take a person who shuffles cards using only the "grab a clump of cards from the bottom of the deck and put it on top of the deck" shuffling style. This process probably exhibits plenty of randomness, but in this case you are randomly sampling the final shuffled deck from a statistical distribution which is very far from being the correct one.
ScottyZ
I would guess that based on my experience with human beings and our natural greed that all of these things occur. It is just way to easy to basically steal our money, there is no way to ever find out the truth, the game of poker is just the perfect game to do it with, there is always a defense that makes sense and feeds the addiction of on line players. I happen to know hundreds of very high caliber players none of which can honestly tell me that the see the big money on the big sites. One question I do raise to poker stars is this. I have been keeping stats via poker tracker on the sunday tournament for nearly a year. Of the Big winners at least half of them have never played again. Now that to me is a little peculiar
Actually, it's exactly human greed that makes me believe that those things generally do not occur at the large & well-established poker venues (both online & B&M).
It wasn't until I sat down one day and estimated the amount or rake a large online poker site takes in each day that I realized how strong an incentive there is to run a legitimate online poker room.
ScottyZ
I have done so many times my self there is no question that the rake should be enough. However when is enough ever enough? Until there is a reputable governing body I think the whole issue will remain shady at best. Lets say Site X makes Millions a week. However they have a Prize pool of 500k every sunday so whats to stop site X from skimming another 100k every week from the prize pool through house players bots etc? Can you detect them? Sure people will raise suspicions and shout out but for everyone that does there will be someone whom benefits from the site to defend against the suspicions. So site X makes their mill a week in rake and skims an extra 10 points off the big prize pool taking the big money and leaving the smaller money to the average player to keep them coming back always thinking the big money will come soon if only some Swedish player doesn't suck out on them with 36os next time. Its brilliant really. Steal all the big money payout some medium size hits to shills affiliates or well known posters from various forums to legitimize the whole thing. I talked to many who win 7k, 15k, 5k in some of these events, of course they got cold decked or were sucked out on by some maniac. However in all my travels over the last few years, NEPC, WPF, WSOP, Turningstone Classic, WPO, I have met hundreds of players, all are playing on line yet I haven't met one that has hit the big money, yet many of us have cashed big and consistant live. Why isn't Danny N, bragging in his BLOG how much he is winning in on line tourneys? Surely the player of the year from last year must be good enough to take down some of these lucrative pools on line from the comfort of his living room. Walk out of the tournament room at foxwoods during the NEPC and see 8 people sitting beside eachother with their laptops playing on line after they busted from the days tourney, of course they are not colluding...Its just to god darn easy to skim more. What is the risk, lets face it no one can prove it would be happening. And no one can prove its legit. So we keep banging the drum slowly.
Can this be a function of the number of entrants? I believe all_aces noted when he came 2nd in the Stars Sunday last year there were about 1200 entrants. When I tried it a few weeks ago over 2500 were registered. I recall the 2004 WSOP main event and the admiration that Harrington made it so far again. Perhaps these people you've tracked think the coin flip odds are just too long to try for a repeat.