IS ONLINE POKER RIGGED?

There is undeniably no chance that any of the major online poker rooms are rigged. Some people will adamantly believe that poker rooms are rigged, making it incredibly difficult for players to win money. However, these statements are usually either based on a lack of understanding of the online poker world, or come from players that are frustrated that they are unable to win any money from online poker.

It would be a very dangerous game to play for rooms to rig the cards that are dealt to players. Poker rooms are already making millions every week just from players playing naturally at the tables, so its not as if the poker rooms are in a hurry to find a way to rig the cards to help them make more money.

With so many suspicious players and governing bodies out there, there would be no chance that any slip up by the poker rooms would go unnoticed. If any poker room was caught rigging cards, they would be very heavily fined and lose all respect form players, and therefore lose millions in revenue. So I can’t imagine it would be in any room’s interest to rig cards for that little extra, when the penalty for rigging cards is so severe.

A lot of players like to think that hands are always rigged against them, for the benefit of the poker room. But if you think about it logically, what benefit is there to the poker room if you end up losing your money? The only way the poker rooms make money is from taking rake, which is a small amount from every pot that is played. So it does not matter how much money you are losing in the poker room’s eyes, as the only beneficiary of your bad luck would be your opponents at the table, and not the poker room itself. So from the poker room’s perspective, they would rather you keep your money and play as many pots as possible, rather than lose it all and stop playing.

Another popular claim by some players is: “How come I see far more bad beats online than I ever do in live poker?” This is actually a very fair claim, but it still does not prove that online poker is rigged. It is true that you may well see more bad beats online, but this is because of two factors that are unique to online poker. Firstly, you will see far more hands online than you will in live poker, because the action is so much faster as you do not have to wait for dealers to deal each individual card and so on. Therefore, more hands = more bad beats.

Furthermore, you are unable to see the other players at the table, so players are not going to have any fears about being ridiculed for making exceptionally bad plays like they may be at the live table. So if more players are happy to make bad calls and bad plays more often in online poker than in live poker, it leaves lots of opportunities open for lucky outdraws and bad beats. This coupled with the fact that you will see more hands online than live, means you have a better chance of experiencing bad beats online in your poker sessions than in your live poker sessions.

Every poker room uses a RNG (Random Number Generator) to help make sure that every hand and card that is dealt out is done so completely at random. These RNGs are thoroughly inspected and tested regularly by independent bodies outside of the poker rooms, and so there would be no chance that the rooms would be able to rig these to try and improve the amount of rake that can be generated at the tables. You can actually test the RNGs, as you can pick up programs like PokerOffice that will record every hand you play and display data on them. So if you play a few thousand hands and analyse the statistics, you will find that there is nothing out of the ordinary taking place.

I can almost guarantee that a new claim that online poker is rigged is popping up every day in a conversation or on a forum somewhere. However, with all these claims and believers that online poker is unfair, how come nothing ever gets done about it? The fact of the matter is nobody actually has any proof that poker rooms are rigged, and they claim that online poker is rigged just to try and excuse their bad and unfortunate losses at the table. Blaming the rooms is the easy way out, when a lot of the time players are either playing badly or are just in the middle of an unlucky streak. So have no fear that online poker is rigged, because I can confidently tell you that it isn’t, and there is no ‘rigged’ claim that is going to scare me away from the tables any time soon.

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