Poker Tips and Strategies

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If one had but a penny for every complaint and allegation concerning the supposedly rigged nature of online poker, one would probably be an extremely rich man. The problem is though that if you were to get a penny for every such allegation backed by solid evidence, you probably wouldn’t be able to buy a loaf of bread with it.
Just reading around various poker forums and blogs, you’ll come across countless stories of consecutive bad beats which the author regards as statistically improbable and therefore holds as proof for online poker being rigged.
I admit it: I used to be one of these frustrated players seeking ways to let the world know about my anguish. I used to complain on various forums myself but somehow, after such a spell I would usually calm down and look at things in a different light. I remember back then my main counter argument to considering online card-rooms cheaters was: “at the end of the day, you’re just a nickel-dime, freerolling, low buy-in SNG playing nobody. Who on earth would care to swindle you out of your 10-30 bucks? The sheer effort it would take to cheat me out of my dimes and nickels would probably cost the room much more than they’d ever “steal” from me…”

In time, I climbed up the limits and found other, more logical reasons for doubting my own frustration-fed suspicions. The most often brought up arguments when it comes to “rigged” complaints are linked to bad beats. The truth however is that in poker bad beats happen. Just a few hours ago I had my pocket Qs cracked in a tournament by an opponent’s pocket Jacks for a pre-bubble elimination. Sure, I had the best hand before the flop, and certainly, pocket Queens are going to beat pocket Jacks to the pot most of the time. That however, doesn’t mean that by pitting my QQ against someone’s JJ presents any sort of guarantees towards my winning the hand.
The frustrations and the anger produced by such bad beats have deep psychological roots. We all tend to forget bad beats we pulled on others easily. Whenever we suffer a bad beat though, we feel like something that was rightfully ours was taken away from us. Having been brought up inoculated with the idea that everything is either right or wrong, the feeling of injustice enrages us and eliminates logic from our thinking.
The reality of the situation is, your A,A can lose the 7,2o and sometimes it will too. Over the long-run, it will certainly beat the crap out of the 7,2o, but there are no guarantees that it will over a single match-up.

If the number and the nature of the bad beats you suffer are what push you to proclaim that online poker is rigged, take a look at some of the live hands played at the WSOP for instance. You wouldn’t believe how many runner-runner bad beats there are at the live tables. The fact that one will generally play many more hands per hour at an online table than at a live one may increase the frequency of online bad beats, but if you take a look at an equal number of online and live hands and compare the bad beats that they yield, you’ll probably discover a remarkable similarity, provided the RNG used by the online cardroom is not faulty.

The bottom line is, until someone backs up his/her claims with empiric evidence yielded by consistent hand-histories, thousands and thousands of hands big, in the opinion of this player, online poker cannot be called rigged.
Instead of wasting your time fuming over spilt milk and frustrating yourself over stupid bad beats, why don’t you sign up to a rakeback deal and take some of the rake you pay back from your poker room? Rake rebate deals like the Ultimate Bet rakeback and the PKR poker rakeback offer you a nice rebate and an edge which is extremely easy to secure.

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