01-17-05, LearnTexasHoldem:

Randomness Of Poker Sites

Question: I am a new poker player that started about two months ago. I play No limit and limit poker exclusively. Prior to two months ago I had no experience with poker, but had enjoyed gambling in its various forms. The poker adventure began with constant invites to play in friendly games with a few different groups of buddies. Online poker and this website were my tools of choice for quickly getting up to speed on basic poker concepts, rules, feel and strategies. To this end it has worked very well, and would like to say that I win quite regularly in my friends' home games. This leads me to my two questions:

Top 3 Beginner Rooms

1)The only rule that I have never really been clear on, is who is reqired to show their hand and in what order must hands be shown? obviously if you fold you don't have to show your hand but what happens when everyone has called the bets? Hope this is clear.

2)I have noticed that many people constantly moan about how online poker sites seem to "juice the pot"(everyone in the hand has exceptional cards) in order to increase the rake from pots, furthermore they always say this doesn't happen in real brick and mortar games (includes home games). This comment is usually by people who have just been "bad beated" or lost the hand never from winners. My thoughts on this are three-fold:

1)The randomness in an online game is closer to true randomness than a brick and mortar game because it takes 57 and a half shuffles to completely randomize a deck of cards. Not many people shuffle the deck that many times between each dealing of cards, where as the function used for randomenss by online games is actually closer to random than two or three shuffles of a deck of cards. Basically, the home game is not a good representation of what can happen in completely random settings where as online poker is a closer representation of true randomness in cards.

2)People play and see way more hands online than they do in brick and mortar game so trends are more pronounced and the probability for everyone having a good hand at one time is increased.

3)They are just sore losers and are the same people who claim "cheat" or "rigged" in brick and mortar games.

I ask what your thoughts on this are and for anyone elses thoughts?

By the way, I am in no way statistical genius, but I do have a statistics background and statistical analysis is part of my profession. The card shuffling stat is one I picked up from a statistics course in university and could be wrong. I could be way off base as well.

Answer: 1

The order in which people show their hands is as follows. First, if someone bets and there are calls on the river, the person who bet has to reveal their cards first. Then in clock wise order, each player who called much also show (or you could muck if you don't have a winner). Second, if everyone checked on the river, then the first person closest to the left of the dealer button has to show.

Answer: 2

First of all, here is the link you sent in regarding randomness:

http://www.maa.org/mathland/mathtrek_10_16_00.html

It is true that people see more hands online than they do in brick and mortar establishments. I'm not sure though if online play is anymore random than offline play.

- most of the time, there is a difference between a professional dealer's deal and what you'll find at a home game.

- even if the cards weren't perfectly random, the flaw wouldn't favor any one player

- I'm not sure if we can apply everything in the study above to poker dealing. In poker, there is also a scrambling of the deck before shuffling occurs. The scramble is where all cards are placed face down on the table in a big pile and the dealer messes them all up in circular motions like a kid might do. I'm sure that adds to the randomness to break apart hands in the previous deal. Also, there is the riffle and mixes the cards from the top and bottom into the middle. I have an automatic dealer machine at my house and sometimes we joke about what would happen if we just put it through the shuffler twice. The deck would come out exactly how it went it because it just layers one card over the other.

- there may very well be a difference between online and offline dealing but I don't think that online cardrooms maliciously rig deals to increase the pot size because every cardroom I've played online already has limits for the rake and it doesn't matter if the pot is $1 over that or $10,000 over it -- they don't make any more money. And that is the ultimate evidence for why casinos don't cheat is because they don't need to. But if you don't feel comfortable at a site, just leave and play elsewhere, there is plenty of competition to earn your business.

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