Is Online Poker Rigged?
As an aftermath to the Absolute Poker scandal that recently went down, we felt an article on this topic was a good idea.
One of my favorite lines that appear in the chat box after a player has been knocked out of a tournament or cash game is “Rigged”. There are so many rumors flying about that online poker is rigged and I’m going to let you all in on the reasons behind these rumors and then put them right.
I’ll start with how poker rooms work, they use a ‘Random Number Generator’ for their deck of cards for each and every hand, they don’t pick which seat will get which hand or anything like that, the computer randomly deals the cards one by one to the players sitting at the table.
The main reason why players believe online poker is rigged is because they ‘seem’ to be suffering a lot more bad beats than they would online. This is in a way true, in online poker your more likely to get more bad beats over a set period of time for example 1 hour because, the amount of hands you can play in online poker compared to live poker is more than double the amount.
Online poker rooms don’t need to worry about having the cards all put back into the pack for them to be shuffled after every single hand, and it’s this that causes us to play fewer hands in online poker. Therefore you’re not actually getting a lot more bad beats in online poker, it’s just the more hands you play, the more bad beats you’ll see.
The above is then doubled, if not trebled when players start ‘multi-tabling’ which is when they start playing more than one table at a time. Another theory behind why bad beats are more frequent online is because it’s a lot less embarrassing playing online poker.
Players aren’t sat face to face with each other, their sat thousands of miles away from each other at the other end of a computer. If a player feels he could get ridiculed in live poker by the other players sitting at the table he is more likely to fold his ‘drawing’ hands and save the embarrassment he could have received.
However when it comes down to online poker, there’s no worries for this to happen, all the player may get is a line of text in the chat box which they can usually live with so a lot of these players make more calls on their drawing hands than usual, so in theory the standard of the online game is of a less standard than in live poker, hence more ‘bad beats’ leading to the good old “Rigged” quote.
What you need to put in to perspective is that the big online companies are checked by a gambling authority for aspects like this and get certificates from these authorities to show that they are a fair gaming company.
These online poker sites are multi-million pound companies who don’t make any money off you by giving your opponent a heart on the river to make his flush and beat you. Why would they risk a multi million pound enterprise for making you take a bad beat and losing say $50.00?
So to wrap this article up with a nice simple little conclusion, poker sites are not rigged
