It still pains me that in Colorado one has to play on a sketchy unregulated poker site against what is likely a large number of bots while people can gamble on the lottery, play daily fantasy, and sports bet.
I miss pre-black friday.
I miss pre-black friday.
That being said , its kind of the golden era of live poker right now. Games are growing everywhere.
the ESPN2 streams suck, they seem like they don't know what table they're watching and the commentary is usually below-basic pop-culture and memery, and the WSOP commentators are equally childish and unprofessional.
poster was right though, it seems far from what it was as far as general non-poker interest goes.. maybe the increased size of the poker hall/tournament attendance is evidence of another effect; gambling tends to go up in poor economies.
my .02c: i've seen a lot of my favorite casinos close their poker rooms or convert them in the past five years. my neighborhood games are all mostly dried up, and all of my cohort I network with about poker stuff is essentially still just enjoying 10-20 year old Poker After Dark eps. The coverage sucks and only the huge games or private tables are worth watching, and that's a whole other cash grab. The personalities are largely non-existent, and the ones that try angle don't do that great a job.
It all sounds like sour-grapes nostalgia, and maybe it is to a degree, but it's a common opinion that poker is in a rut lately.
At the peak before black Friday, it was pretty routine for 3 or 4 people I knew from work to be on Full Tilt at the same time and I only really knew about 15 people at this company.
Long term, people store their hand histories and this shows up plainly in analysis.
The server knows what cards everyone is holding. Even if the cards were randomly assigned and weren't changed after the fact, users have no logs of the order of cards remaining in the deck. Its pretty trivial to have software that selects community cards that usually lead to a larger pot.
On the other hand, that still doesn't prevent cheating in the form of the server providing information to some participants via a different channel. There's nothing cryptography can say about out-of-band communications.
So maybe fair shuffling is cute but ultimately pointless.
The much simpler way to cheat is to just give some players more information. Or, run bots that take up guaranteed payout seats in tournaments and such, which I've heard rumors of happening on certain sites. Or both.
My point was simply that an online casino could seem completely legit even if you can compile audit logs of every players' hands at the table. Controlling the community cards is completely undetectable and more than enough to push larger pots, and therefore larger rakes.
Most pots already hit maximum rake.
As far as I'm aware, you would have to know the full list of cards in the shuffled deck before the hand was played to know they didn't change the community cards.
The community cards are subject to the same frequencies as the hole cards.
(And you can see them more often, so they're actually easier to analyze)
And yes, both the types of cheating you've mentioned have happened.
Some players getting more information is called "superusing" -- see Absolute Poker scandal.
Empty seats being filled with bots in tournaments with a guarantee -- ACR
Doubtless there are scummy poker games, but for most of them the money comes plenty easy, and the existential risk of faking cards to increase pot sizes just isn't worth the marginal benefit.
Of course everyone, winners, losers, and impartial bystanders will see these patterns in completely random deals so every site will be accused eventually.
This applies to sanctioned sites, sketchy sites, or physical machines.
The incentive is just too damn high for it not to be a cheated system made up of black boxes.
Quite often I would be at a table with someone I know and chatting on the side.
We wanted to beat each other though for bragging rights so never colluded. Thinking about what could be done though if sharing card information is really bad. There are so many spots that knowing for certain 2 cards have been removed from the deck would be an absolutely massive advantage.
I can't even imagine the schemes real cheats have come up with.