Good points, but there are a few things I've observed nonetheless after playing PS for a year.
1. Online high stakes wouldn't need to be rigged in the first place, since new players often do not start at $200 MTTs and whatnot. We'll focus on the lower stakes.
Beginners or bad players who are new to poker need incentive to continue playing. Naturally, luck may hit a few hands, but in the long run they'll lose out, and simply stop or go to another site. Players who are developping knowledge about the game (in a sense, better than new players) but have not yet built a bankroll will end up playing lower stakes, and will be with these newer players. In the long run, better players will win money from the bad players and move up the stakes, and the bad players will leave. Yes this is theoretical, but in the long run, it makes sense - if you're building a huge bankroll, why would you continue playing $1 games? If you're new to a game and in the long run you're getting outplayed by better players, are you going to pump money in the site again? At low stakes, bad palyers are given a chance by getting a few more luck shots on most hands so then they feel inclined to continue playing. The better players that get sucked out much to often blame their luck, and instead pump in more money so that they can continue to improve their skill and win back their losses. Now the site has all those players pumping in money. Repeat customers will move up the ladder, and then face harder players and would then eventually have to drop back down or drop out. There would be less and less players this way. A maximum of 50% of players (it's always less) will be winning on the site. How is the site still holding more and more players? Yes, some of the losing players may continue to play, but not all - but how would that make sense if the site is still growing with a higher number of losing players?
Keeping more players is much more profit than losing them from not being a winning player. The site needs to pump in players - it can't survive with the same players over and over again, who would eventually stop playing sometime or another.
2.
I'm actually a winning player, surprise surprise. Not much, but I play low stakes so not really much I can do there. Poker actually isn't zero-sum with a big site like
Pokerstars. For every winner there are MULTIPLE losers. it isn't 50/50, only theoretically and if there was 0 entropy. Again I claim, with multiple losers, some of them will drop out of the site. How many players will that leave?
3.
Can only speak for myself here. I stick with $1-$3 SNG's and MTT's anyway.
4.
Ask how many new players keep statistics and hand histories right when they begin playing poker. I surely didn't when I started. I didn't even know about sharkscope or think about using statistical programs to record histories. That's why low stakes is an easy target. They take poker less serious on the whole. Serious players who play higher stakes would record hand histories - but as I said before, the site need not to rig that level anyways. I have seen few statistics where playters recorded right from the start. Playing many many games, the result was rigged, but the problem was there weren't enough people who had their proof to justify this argument. It's because not enough peopel bothered to record hands in teh first place.
5.
I only played PS..can't comment here.
6.
Again I can only speak for myself here. I remember just as well my bad beats as well as my suck outs. I record them down since remembering the times where I made a bad call but lucked out helps me away from going on tilt from being bad beat. I recorded, however, many many more suck outs than luck outs. But generally I do agree with this statement as the majority of people only remember bad beats.
In the end, no one really knows except for some of the site staff themselves. Yes they have claimed their random number generator, but how do YOU know for sure it's 100% legit? did you see the code yourself, every single bit of it? I'm not saying it's 100% rigged myself, but all I have is a suspicion and listning to other people's experiences.
Btw, it'snot a few hand histories, there's a lot. I didn't record the first part of my hand histories because I didn't know one could do that when I first started. Though lucky for me, after my 3rd deposit WITHOUT a bonus code, everything was fine and dandy. I'm winning now, and I didn't even change my gameplay at all. Maybe I just had 6 months of bad luck, and then suddenly 6 months of good luck, who knows? but I still believe that there is something at least fishy with the lower-stakes tables of PS. Remember, this isn't only happenign to me, I see other people getting bad beat by newer players. I pay attention to the way other people play and realize that sometimes I see a lot more bad beats in a table than I have with multiple games IRL.