I always thought it was ridiculous to think a poker site was fixed. Obviously the whole idea that they would risk everything to fix hands was sort of silly. Also, a lot of big time pros play these sites, so they would likely have to all be in on it, as the big pros would likely spot any regular cheating. Finally, the idea of being able to develop software that could pick and choose which cards to put out next in order to cheat is silly. That type of software would incredibly difficult to write and it would be easy to spot to anyone who got a chance to look at the code.
BUT . . .
Ok, but what about this? How about software that allows the company to know what cards are coming? Not to pick what cards are to come, but to know what cards are coming. So if the flop will be 3AK44, you could know ahead of time that your 34 would beat the AK at the table. This would allow the site to have X number of players sitting in on tourneys and waiting for chances to "bad beat" people.
That type of software fix would be easy to do and harder to spot to an outside observer. Also, it would not tweak anyone looking for alterations to the random number generator.
So how would a site use this? Would they just sit someone at every table and clean up? Of course not. First of all, low limit games and tourneys would produce so little money for them that the risk/reward would be ridiculous. But placing people in the big money tourneys is a different story. And this is where I got to wondering. I've won plenty of money playing low limit on
Poker stars, but whenever I would jump into a big money tourney, the most bizarre shit would start to happen. Specifically, you'd see a guy playing for hours as a rock, then all of a sudden, he puts in the majority of his chips with 94 vs. AA, then flops the 9 and the 4.
So what is more improbable here? That a very conservative player would invest $200 and, more importantly, hours and hours of time into playing in a tourney only to shove all his chips in on 94 before the tourney is even into the money? Or that the guy who looked so conservative actually knew what cards were coming?
So why don't I back all this up with stats? Because there never will be any stats to prove this type of cheating. This is extremely selective cheating. So selective, in fact, that there will never be enough hands played this way in order to prove a statistical anomaly. It only takes a very small number of big hands to make it all the way through if you keep winning the key giant hands. And you can easily play enough losing hands that you know will be for small money in order to make it look less obvious.
So there is no way to prove this, and there is really no way to disprove it either. But I can say that in the small sample of big money tourneys that I tracked, I saw this type of play far too often to buy that it was random. While there are plenty of donkeys who throw all their money in with crap, there are just not guys out there who play tight-conservative poker for hours at a time and then all of sudden turn donkey on the one or two hands that allow them to win HUGE on crazy flops with their garbage hands.
So, yeah, I think
Poker stars is fixed, but only in a very precise and limited way. If you are playing 50 dollar SNGs, no one is stealing your money. Ditto for low limit cash games. But when you get up into the tourneys where hundreds of thousands of dollars are at stake, I think
Poker stars is definitely pulling some shit on people.