Since the birth of poker on the internet, allegations have been widespread that “online poker is rigged”. Such accusations generally come from poor poker players, or those with insufficient experience to grasp the concept of variance. But yes, history has shown poker sites have rigged sites in almost every way imaginable. There’s only few I would trust anymore, and IgnitionPoker.eu (previously known as Bovada) will continue to be the best until dozens of state ran sites take over which will be awhile.
13:07 03 Jun. You hear it all the time whether it is during the conversations with your closest friends or in some topic on the poker forums ' online poker is rigged!' It doesn’t matter the site or the network, for many of us, when we play online, we sometimes have the feeling that the software is actually targeting us, forcing us to give up all of our bankroll.
But let’s discuss the answer that more players feel they’ve been “robbed”. Say you go all in with big slick (Ace-King), and are called by Ace-Queen. You’re a heavy favorite, but on average you’re still going to lose 23% of the time. Even when you go all in pre-flop with pocket aces, someone with a smaller pair is going to beat you about 18% of the time. What many players can’t get their minds around is that little factor called variance, or the statistical measure of how your results will be dispersed. In plain English, the odds may say one thing, but it’ll often take a large sample size for those odds to truly even out. You may be a 77% favorite, but you could still lose that play two or three times in a row. Winning players understand odds and variance, and the difference between them, whereas fish just assume the site must be rigged in somebody else’s favor.
The reason most poker players lose is due to poor bankroll management. Let’s say you had $100 to your name, and I offered to flip a coin. I take 100% of your wager every time it lands on tails, but I give you a 120% payout if heads comes up. It’s a 50/50 proposition, but you’re getting an extra payout every time your side comes up. Surely this is a great deal that every poker player would jump on?
However, what if I told you that you’d have to bet $33.33 on each bet? With only a $100 bankroll, and despite the large advantage I’ve given you, it would be foolish for you to continue. That’s because there is a 14.3% chance that I’m going to win the first three bets, and you’ll then be broke.
Even if you happen to win the first bet, I’ll win the next four 6.7% of the time. If you win that first bet, there is a 3.2% chance I’ll win the next five. And if you’re up three bets on me, there is still a 1.59% chance I’ll win the next six.
This goes on and on and on. But the crucial point is that if you’re a skilled poker player who goes bust often, your failure probably isn’t down to you being unlucky. It’s because you don’t understand odds and variance, and are not properly bankrolled for the games you’re playing.
Do Poker Sites Need to Cheat?
Now that we’ve covered the reasons explaining why so many falsely believe that online poker is rigged, let’s look at the reasons why it isn’t (considering you only play at top ranked sites).
Let’s start with the world’s largest online poker site, PokerStars.com. This company is licensed and regulated by the Isle of Man, a British Crown authority. It was purchased for $4.9 billion in June, 2014, by the Amaya Gaming Group, a well respected Canadian gaming company. PokerStars also operates a live card room in Macau, China, and makes billions of dollars in annual profit without cheating. All regulation aside – and it’s pretty hard to simply discount the stringent regulations that govern these sites – why would a company risk these billions of dollars in revenue just to set up a rigged game? The answer is pretty simple – they wouldn’t.
Smaller poker sites, especially those new to the market, have everything to lose by attracting serious allegations from their players. It’s always important to do a quick search on a prospective poker room, just to look for any player complaints or issues. For that reason, we only have a few left who have realized it’s more profitable to run a legitimate business than rip off customers.
For example, a room called Pitbull Poker cheated players using “superuser” accounts, allowing certain users to see other players’ hole cards. The room only made it through a couple of years, and was dealt a fatal blow once the cheating allegations hit. Pitbull operated out of Costa Rica, a country that doesn’t require online gambling licenses from companies based there.
With larger sites, the risks usually outweigh the rewards of cheating, but that isn’t necessarily the case. Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet, two rooms that made up the Cereus Poker Network, had a similar scandal years before PitBull’s. The details of this scandal are still not fully known, but there are many indications that management was working in tandem with the cheaters.
Cereus, along with Absolute and UB, went down in the “Black Friday” indictments of 2011, when the US Department of Justice busted several large poker sites – including PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker – for UIGEA violations. PokerStars and Full Tilt (via a PokerStars buyout) repaid their players, but Cereus did not. The company is insolvent as of 2014, and owes players an estimated $50 million.
While the above examples might scare players off, the online poker world has come a long way in recent years, as have the fraud prevention and security teams. The era of superusers and cheating scandals orchestrated by operators are likely behind us. However, players should still be alert and watch for suspicious activities by operators.
So What About Cheating? Can an Online Poker Player Cheat?
Well, now we’re on to a topic that might have some substance to it. If you’re not careful with your computer security, a hacker could get access to your hole cards. Such a situation is highly unlikely, and would entail the hacker accessing the data stream from the poker site to your computer, and cracking the poker site’s extremely secure encryption in the process. In all honesty, if you were advanced enough to pull off such a feat of hacking, you’d be more likely to target the World Series of Poker, rather than picking on some poor schlep in their front room. Nonetheless, we can’t totally dismiss the possibility.
We would recommend not playing on public wireless internet connections. Using a secure wifi network from your home is highly advised. In truth though, even here, the chances of being hit are relatively low. The main concern would be that a hacker could access your password before it was streamed to the site, or could possibly get visual access to your monitor. It’s highly unlikely, though, that anyone capable of cracking SSL is going to be concentrating their efforts on poker.
In recent years, hackers have taken to more drastic methods. Thanks to laptop theft, high-stakes players at a 2013 European Poker Tour event in Barcelona were left with computers infected with malware. There was another incident during the World Series of Poker, a year later, where players had laptops and cash stolen from their hotel rooms.
Of course, these players were targeted due to their reputation for playing at higher stakes, but their story should be a warning to all players to be aware of their surroundings. Password protect your computers, and safeguard your poker accounts. If you begin playing at higher stakes, and become even slightly well-known, take extra precautions to avoid becoming the victim of theft or hacking.
What About Players Chatting on Social Media or the Phone?
This is called collusion, and it is the one area where cheating in online poker is a moderate concern. Online poker sites take collusion very seriously. Sites such as PokerStars.com have several security methods to prevent collusion. One of these methods is a charting system, where they log how many hands you’ve played with the same opponents.
If you’re playing with the same opponent more often than the mean, this may cause your account to be flagged by security. Your hands involving action with this opponent will then be run through anti-collusion software, to see if your plays were logical.
If the plays made little sense, and deviate from the norm – as well as from your usual style of play when not seated with this opponent – your account may be locked, and a manual review could follow. At most poker sites, if the audit reveals there is a high likelihood you were cheating via collusion, you can more or less kiss your ability to play at that site goodbye.
If found guilty, you may be subject to fines, and could potentially lose your balance and past profits. Depending on the amount taken, some jurisdictions will bring criminal charges against players for cheating at online poker. Civil suits can also be expected.
In the legally-regulated online poker markets such as Delaware, Nevada, and New Jersey, sites can choose their punishment for the player depending on the situation. The penalties can be light, but cheating at online poker site can range from a small fine to a class B felony. The latter comes with a potential prison sentence of up to six years.
Not all collusion will be automatically picked up on, though. If players only engage in collusion a small percentage of the time, such behavior may fly under the radar. If ever you feel you’re being colluded against, stop playing, and email the site telling them of your suspicions.
If it is found (either now or in the future) that these players were colluding, and that you were the victim, any online poker room worth its salt is likely to refund your money. Your chances of getting compensation will be vastly increased if you’re polite, so write your email using a friendly, non-accusatory tone. Also bear in mind that it can be hard to conclusively prove collusion, so don’t assume you’ll be successful. Just be sure to leave a game once you believe collusion may be occurring. Poker sites are doing their best to keep the games safe and free of cheats, so leave it to them to take care of these matters.
Which Online Poker Site Is Not Rigged?
All in all, collusion should not be much of a concern unless you’re consistently being taken apart in high-stakes games by a team of professional cheaters. In the vast majority of cases, it won’t take long to catch these guys.
Most people who conspire to cheat or collude against other players are also bad at the game. The most common type of collusion involves players sharing their hole cards via instant messaging applications. While this is wrong, and still amounts to collusion, it doesn’t provide them with much of an advantage. Many cheats will resort to such behavior only once they’ve tried and failed to win legally. For the most part, they’re harmless.
If you’re looking for info on which sites are the safest to play at, you can read about that in our article Safest US Poker Sites.
Is there any validity to the myth that online poker games are rigged? That depends on your definition of the word “rigged.” That’s kind of a coy answer, so I’ll say it this way: there have been a few high-profile cases of cheating on the part of poker site operators, but even these cases don’t really indicate what I would consider the rigging of games.
The word rigged implies intention. The implication is that poker sites host games designed so that players lose more. One common version of this myth goes like this: poker sites deal cards in specific patterns that ensure bad beats for the players. The details of the accusation may change, but the implication is always the same – that the games provided by poker websites are intentionally designed to screw players.
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But no evidence exists that this kind of behavior has ever actually happened. In the high-profile cheating scandals at Ultimate Bet and Absolute Poker (for example), the cheating occurred among a few consultants who had access to backdoors that allowed them to peek at player’s hole cards. That’s cheating, and it’s reprehensible that it happened, but it isn’t really rigging, is it?
In case that all sounds like hogwash – a language-based argument against the rigging myth, and not an out-and-out denial that rigging occurs – I would invite anyone who still thinks games are rigged to provide evidence. Accusations of rigging are as common as pennies in a fountain, but proof (beyond a user’s anecdotal experience) is just not to be found.
Do I think that some poker sites conduct business poorly? Yes, I do. And I acknowledge the “super-user” cheating scandals of 2007, and I fully understand that people have trust issues when it comes to placing real-money bets over the Internet. But it isn’t fair to accuse the industry of offering “rigged games” when there’s no proof, and it isn’t even a sensible argument.
Debunking the Rigged Poker Rooms Myth
Take the following three facts under consideration when considering any online gambling rigging myth.
Games of chance and skill don’t need to be rigged in order to be profitable. Technically speaking, the rules of the games are already “rigged,” in the sense that these games and services are designed to turn a profit. When a poker room charges rake, that’s one way the site offering the game rigs it for profit.
Many accusations of rigging are due to a misunderstanding of how online poker works. When I read poker players lamenting the unusually high number of bad beats they see online compared to their real-world game, I just have to laugh. Of course you see more beats – online poker games see way more hands dealt overall. Online poker is fast, and the speed with which the game moves makes it different from traditional face-to-face games in a lot of ways. Most accusations about rigged games are born from the simple fact that the game moves a lot faster on the Internet.
Proper licensure and regulation are an easy way to tell if a site’s games are fair or not. Licensure from a respected gaming authority (Alderney, the UK, etc.) is a sure sign that a poker room’s games have been tested for randomness and fairness. If you only play at reputable poker rooms, you’ll never have to wonder if your games are rigged in the first place.
How to Find Non-Rigged Poker Rooms
Maybe the best way to learn how to spot a non-rigged poker room is to look at examples of rooms that currently do business and are definitely not running rigged games. The thing is – pretty much any poker room with legitimate licensing will do. Concerns about rigging are ungrounded. There are more important aspects of a poker room’s business than whether or not they rig their games.
Here are three sites whose licensure I respect that serve as good examples of non-rigged poker rooms.
Full Tilt Poker has a bit of a checkered past because of the way the company handled the UIGEA bill (and Black Friday) in 2006. Since that time, Full Tilt has been acquired (by the parent company of PokerStars) and all suits against them have been settled. Full Tilt is licensed by the Isle of Man, with endorsement from the UK Gaming Commission. You can be sure that Full Tilt’s games aren’t rigged, because licensure by the Isle of Man requires that the site abides by certain codes of conduct and have its software tested for fairness and randomness.
Sky Poker is another site I am fully confident does not offer rigged games. That confidence comes from their gaming licensure authority, which is Alderney. This authority has some of the strictest standards in place for their licensees. Sky Poker is also operated by a company based in the UK. Those two facts right there are enough to convince me that Sky Poker is not hosting rigged games. There are just too many regulations in place to prevent that sort of thing at this particular poker room.
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You could write a really interesting (and really long) book about the history of gambling myths. The idea that online poker rooms rig their software to increase the pot, to ensure bad beats, or for any other reason is ridiculous. Other more legitimate reasons for concern exist – rogue sites that actively rip off their customers still exist.
In the face of actual threats like those posed by black hat poker rooms, the notion that poker rooms rig their software is ridiculous. Provided you do all your play at a room licensed from a legitimate authority that requires software testing, you don’t need to worry about playing a rigged game of poker on the Internet.