[huytersd]

I was under the impression that online poker rooms are low key rigged and at the very least just cycle through preexisting card combinations rather than doing even a programmatic randomization (let alone using a true external source of randomization).

[LegibleCrimson]

I doubt almost any of them would be rigged. Especially with the rake, having a fully fair online poker game still makes bank on almost no risk without any rigging at all. There's not really any reason for them to be rigged.

I played a little for fun on some Bitcoin poker sites about a decade ago, and the sites I used were verifiably fair and gave you the game's seed when you were finished. I don't think I'd ever play for real money on a site that I couldn't verify to be fair. You don't want true external source of randomization for anything other than the seed, otherwise you couldn't verify the game.

A rational fear would be more about a site using a predictable RNG, or somebody being able to exfiltrate or deduce the seed of a running game, or players colluding with each other or an employee. Nowadays, an AI assistant (or full-fledged poker bots) probably largely makes playing online poker a crapshoot anyway.

There's not really any point in a poker site itself rigging a game when the house always wins anyway.

[chelmzy]

I don't know about rigged. But there is a lot of RTA (real time assistance) usage on the sites. Essentially clients that inform you of the best decisions to make according to GTO principles.

[whoami_nr]

Author of the post here. Yes RTA are common. Botting is common. RTA based on simple GTO solvers is common. I have built bot/fraud/collusion detection for the websites along with being on the other side as well. I recently built the poker platform for an Indian decacorn.

[oh_sigh]

Seems unlikely, unless you're hitting up an extremely shady online poker room. A more likely source of rigging is either multiple players at the same table colluding with one another, or players just feeding table data into a bot which tells them how to play

[PaulRobinson]

Source?

That behaviour quite likely lands everyone involved in jail in regulated (think big name entities with licenses in Malta types) companies. These can be FTSE listed companies with valuations in the billions, and subject to intense regulatory and legal scrutiny.

If you play with crypto on the dark web, you deserve everything you get. Rock up to the established brands, you can expect some minimum standards.

[mschuster91]

> That behaviour quite likely lands everyone involved in jail in regulated (think big name entities with licenses in Malta types) companies.

I wouldn't trust these Maltese companies either. They've been embroiled in lawsuits here in Germany for ignoring gambling laws - and after a lot of gamblers won said lawsuits and demanding their losses be repaid, Malta actually passed a law limiting asset seizure orders from other EU nations, in a move likely to be brought towards the EU court system [1].

[1] https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/malta-gluecksspiel-100....

[treme]

there was one major scandal @ UltimateBet where ex-sys admin had superuser access to people's holecards. But besides that, most rooms are legit, the rooms have decent incentive to make sure their RNG is robust since pro poker players are smart enough to pull data to figure things out if things are shady.

as another comment said below, RTA is probably biggest ways people take unfair advantage nowadays.