You guys need to stop whining.
Check this out:
w ww.pokerstars.com/poker/rng/
1.
It's simple risk vs reward.
Risk: This site rakes in millions every day from its players. It is in their best interests to keep their players satisfied, otherwise they will move to another one of the hundreds of poker sites online. They serve hundreds of thousands of people. If it ever got out that they were rigging the deck in the favor of bad-beats, what do you think would happen? Everybody would leave the site, never to play there again.
Reward: By rewarding bad players and hurting solid players, what does this do? The solid players are their repeat-customers who generate a significant chunk of the daily rake. Oftentimes it is the bad players that deposit once and are over with. Why would it be in their best interests to rig the games *against* their repeat customers to keep the (oftentimes) 1-time customers there longer?
Nevertheless, let's play devil's advocate. Say you're right...say they're able to increase profits by, say, 10% by rigging the deck. Is this proper risk vs reward? Being completely destroyed when it comes out that they're rigging and losing millions upon millions in future revenue...versus adding only 10% to their already huge profits? C'mon...these guy's aren't stupid.
2.
For every time *you* get bad-beat and lose, someone else was bad-beating you and won. Poker is a zero-sum game (not including rake). For every loser there is a winner. The reason there are so many posts here about this topic is due to selection bias. Each of you has been biased to find threads that complain about poker being rigged and post in them because you have lost money. The winners have no reason to post here because they are not disgruntled. Only people who are losing money would complain in an open forum (meaning: winners would read this thread but not comment).
3.
Poker players take heavy swings in their bankrolls. After reading many of these threads, it sounds like most of you are 1) not practicing proper bankroll management to reduce risk of ruin and 2) are MTT players. MTT players tend to have very large swings. Here's a tip: the max buy-in for a MTT should be 2% of your bankroll.
4.
If these games were rigged, with so many players using Poker Tracker and similar software suites, don't you think it would have be statistically provable and all over the news by now? *YOU* are experiencing either short-term variance or are simply a poor player.
5.
PokerStars is known to be one of the "toughest" poker sites out there. UB, FTP, and others are much more fishy and loose. Had any of you considered that maybe *that's* why you lose there but win elsewhere?
6.
We always remember bad beats much more frequently than the wins. From Rounders:
Mike McDermott: "In "Confessions of a Winning Poker Player," Jack King said, "Few players recall big pots they have won, strange as it seems, but every player can remember with remarkable accuracy the outstanding tough beats of his career." It seems true to me, cause walking in here, I can hardly remember how I built my bankroll, but I can't stop thinking about the way I lost it. "
One of the biggest online poker sites rigging the deck for little to no reason? I don't think so. Conspiricy theories from people who get bad beat, trying to justify losing their bankrolls? I'd believe that any day. No offense people but until someone conducts a statistical analysis on the card distribution methods of PStars, I would be hard-pressed to believe such a conspiracy theory. Stop making claims based on a few hand histories(and, hence, short-term variance and psychological bias) and start modeling the card distributor on PStars. Tell me what you come up with. It'll sure take you a while though...with 52! possible decks to model.
-just my $0.02