The Bad Beat Street........At UB.
Anyone figure out the secret to getting good cards at UB. It seems in most tourneys that unless you are able to increase your chip count early and stay above the average...... your pockets, ( based on ranked strength), begin to deteriorate rapidly and the frequency of getting pockets ranked at 80 % or higher also goes down markedly. Simply put.... it appears that the largest chip holder will get the better cards or at least gets a more frequent frenquency of high ranked pockets........not to mention getting a higher frequency of the neccessary matches in the community section.
Comments
The size of your chip stack has no influence on the cards you get. I'm a very conservative player in the early rounds of a tournament and rarely increase my stack by and huge margin in the early rounds, however, I've never noticed any deterioration in my cards, and in most tournaments, I fall slightly below average early on and then make it up n-times over in the later rounds.
There is no connection. The software is not giving an edge to certain players. The dealing is random.
This is a ridiculous myth.
Phippo44 must be on the take, don't listen to him he's a pawn for the illuminati who run online poker ... or is it the free masons, ughhhh it's so hard to keep track. Or is it the pretenders, no that was a rock group. Quick delete this message before they track you down
Enter stage right
I generally prefer to play at the rigged sites myself. Since there has already been extensive research in this area by RGP posters, I won't bore you with the details of which sites are the rigged ones. Needless to say, prominent RGP researchers have picked out quite a few.
So, why do I play at the sites that I think are rigged? Easy.
1. You can play a lot of starting hands that your opponents aren't expecting. On a rigged site, AA pre-flop is an easy fold, but you can ceratinly play (and often raise with) any unsuited Deuce-rag. Now your (sucker) opponents will pay you off big time with their big pocket pairs when you rig-flop two pair.
2. If you go on a big losing streak, it is easy to find the source of your losses. It can't possibly be due to your poor play. Obviously, the site you're playing on has gone unrigged for your particular session. Remember, that even the highly rigged sites need to go unrigged every so often so that their shuffler can be audited, or statistically analysed by people on the lesser* online poker forums. So, if your 93o keeps getting cracked, it just may be due to the natural variance of poker, but don't forget, if you notice your 93o getting beaten twice within 3 hours, and both times by the exact hand KK, you may in fact be playing on an unrigged day. Get out.
3. You'll be able to get a good laugh at the fish who are berating you for playing your "junk" (according to them) hands. When you take their money, simply respond with something like, "Look at who's got the money, yo." Whatever you do, do NOT let on that the site is rigged, either in the chat box, or on internet poker forums. Why would anyone give away such profitable information for free? When the word gets out that a site is rigged, the site will just get flooded with rigged-poker pros, and the "by the book" chumps will quickly take their donations elsewhere.
Bottom line: When you find out a site is rigged, please, for your own benefit, keep this knowledge a secret. An internet poker forum is the last place you want to broadcast such valuable and profitable information.
ScottyZ
*That is, those other than RGP... I've even heard they've got one in Canada now. Chumps.
If something only happens 2.5% of the time, it should never happen to me. Thus, the B&M room is rigged. I shall never return (until Friday when all the drunk people play).
Phil.
However, this experiment (like many "poker is rigged" arguments) suffers from both observer bias, and the ever so dangerous conditional vs. unconditional probability blurring (to be explained later).
Say you sat down at the table one day and completely at random said "I'm going to monitor exactly 29 future occurances seeing a flop with a pocket pair, and record whether or not I flop a set". It would be correct to say that the probability of seeing no sets is (roughly) 2.5%. At the end of this experment (if that was the actual outcome) you have witnessed something unusual.
Now, in reality, people do not usually sit down at random and decide to monitor their next 29 flops seen with pocket pairs. What happens is they would probably witness a certain occurance before they decide to get the experiment rolling.
For example, a poker player (who generally has an above average memory for these sorts of things) may sit down at a session and be dealt 7 pocket pairs, all of which fail to hit the flop. This then strikes him as unusual, so he says to himself, "That seems strange. Very well, I'm going to monitor exactly 22 future occurances seeing a flop with a pocket pair, and record whether or not I flop a set." The probability of floping no sets would still be pretty low, around 6.0%.
You might see what I'm getting at. It hopefully strikes you that you can't get the first 7 observations "for free" and later report that you saw a whopping 29 no-set occurances instead of just the 22 which are properly within the scope of your experiment.
Of course, in reality, even after witnessing 7 occurances in a row, you are not going to pick a number like 22 out of the air like that. You're just going to keep observing and observing until your experiment fails (by the experiment failing, I mean you flop a set).
Sometimes you'll flop a set on the hand immediately following the 7 misses, and have nothing to report to your peers on a poker forum. You see 7 misses in a row again a few weeks later, start the tape rolling, and brick out on another 6 flops in a row. Kind of strange, but not too earth shattering. After some time, you start keeping track of your results after a 7 count dry spell. You see 22 more bad flops in a row. Hey, the experiment had an unusual outcome, right?
The correct response to the question above, "Hey, the experiment had an unusual outcome, right?" is actually another question: What experiment are you talking about?
This is the heart of observer bias. You cannot do a statistical experiment by moving into the past to start the experiment. The main idea is that you have already obersved an outcome. You are not allowed to go back in time, design a statistical experiment where that particular outcome would be unusual, and conclude that your statistical experiment had an unusual result.
Just like you couldn't get 7 "looking into the past" outcomes for free in the experiment above, you cannot get 29 "looking into past" outcomes for free in this example.
It's kind of along the lines of a raindrop falling on your head during a rainstorm. You observe a raindrop hitting your head. Consider how astronomically improbable it was that this particular raindrop hit your head among all raindrops which had formed in the sky within a 10 km radius around your position within the last 10 seconds or so. Your head getting wet in a rainstorm seems to be a significant bad beat.
Okay, finally, the conditional vs. unconditional thing. I'll try to keep it more brief.
You sometimes will not see the flop with 22. Why? Due to the actions of other players. Other players' actions depend* on what cards they have. As a result, a different distribution of flops comes up depending on whether you see the flop with 22 or fold 22. Specifically, you are more likely to see a 2 on the flop in cases where you have folded the 22.
The figure 0.12 is (roughly) the unconditional probability of flopping a 2 assuming you are dealt 22. The conditional probability of flopping a 2 given that you see the flop is a different number than this.
Many many many "such and such site is rigged" are generated using incorrect analysis in this sense, almost always substituting an unconditional probability (which are extremely easy to compute) where a conditional probability (which are almost impossible to compute) should be.
ScottyZ
*Most of the time.
If you have, in your entire poker playing history, only seen the flop 29 times with a pocket pair*, and had flopped no sets, you could in good conscience say that this was an unusual event. Specifically, there was a 2.5% chance of this.
If you have seen a million flops with pocket pairs, seeing at least one streak of 29 occurances in a row of failure to flop a set would not be unusual at all. It would be a virtual certainty.
The observer bias comes in as follows. You do not have to be the one who is alone playing the million pocket pairs.
Lots of people are playing lots of poker. They are observing what is going on. They are taking notice of interesting patterns. They may be recording the most unusual ones. For every person who records an outcome that they believe to be very unusual, there are thousands, or millions, or whatever number of (seemingly) not unusual outcomes that go unrecorded.
For every 2.5 people who record a specific sequence of 29 pocket pair brick flops, there are probably at least another 97.5 people out there who failed to record a sequence of 29 pocket pair hands that looked like
nnnsnnnnsnnnssnsnnnsnnssnnnsn
where
n = Brick flop.
s = Booyeah Grandma!
ScottyZ
*And seen the flop every time you were dealt a pocket pair.
By my math the former example is around (7/8)^29 = 2.1%
The latter example is: (1/8)^2 = 1.5%
I'm almost positive the latter must have happened to me at least once on a hot session, yet I rarely think much about it. The former would have me shaking my head for weeks, cursing the poker Gods as to why they hate me so much... Selective memory...
Phew, thanks for the help.
Phil.
(just wondering when someone will acknowledge my hard-core sarcasm)
LOL
ScottyZ
29 flops without making a set....
after only 10000 hands (not much)
the following table show the chance you have x streaks of not flopping a set 29 times in a row
x=0..... 15.5%
x=1..... 29.3%
x=2..... 27.2%
x=3..... 16.6%
x=4..... 7.5%
x=5..... 2.8%
x=6..... .8%
so after only 10000 hands this should have happened to almost 85% of us atleast once!!!
MATH PART
10000 hands * 1/17 Pocket pairs = 588 PP
expected length of streak = 1/odds of making set = 1/.117551020408 = 8.5
# streaks = 588/8.5 = 69
use binomial distribution....
prob. for 29 no set = 0.882448979592^29 = 0.026607162
trials = 69
Dang it. I don't remember having a 29 no-set streak, and there's only a 15.5% chance of that. Does this mean my memory is rigged?
Also, I can't remember ever having played at the Cash Casino in Calgary. Coincidence? I think not.
ScottyZ