Zynga May Be Valued at $1 Billion Feeding Off Facebook Craze

I thought that maybe I was just a typical unlucky player who would make such a claim. I feel less sure of that after seeing the "every horrible thing in the book" remark.

I think the sleazy tactic would be to hook new players onto the game by weighting the odds in their favor.

For those who care... what I saw was a lucky streak when I started playing. For my style of play, that meant good hands and good flops. After a few weeks, I started seeing that people were regularly getting sucked out on and losing to very rare hands on a frequent basis. Yes, the former can be blamed on the quality and aggression levels of Internet users playing without consequence (i.e. real money). I couldn't explain the latter.

I saw players call very high bets on the flop and turn and end up with runner-runner straights or flushes on the river. It felt like the game might be rewarding stupidity more often than any decent pseudo-random number generation would dictate. Again, this could just be because a higher number of stupid hands are played in their game than IRL but I think I accounted for the probabilities in my incredulity.

Most damning was that I played for about about 3 hours over a 48 hour period and saw a straight flush and 3 4-of-a-kinds. I've played 4 hours a week of "bar poker" (play for chips, not money) for 1 1/2 years and have seen 2 straight flushes and 2 4-of-a-kinds total that whole time at the real tables. They're (supposed to be) rare enough that I can recall each instance with clarity.