When online poker is good, it’s great. You hit every flop, get away with every bluff and take down every pot you play. However when things go bad, it can sometimes get almost unbelievable. After enduring bad beat upon bad beat, every poker player has wondered at least once in his life: Is online poker rigged?

Mabuchi probably feels like this live hand was rigged…

This is something we can never know with 100% certainty, but can speculate upon. Whenever you are playing online poker, you are placing a great deal of trust in the site you are depositing on. Sites with large online poker traffic like PokerStars and iPoker are under far more scrutiny and are much less likely to be rigged. Larger sites will often get independent companies to audit them. The smaller the site, the more careful you should be.

For most people wondering to themselves “is online poker rigged”, their focus is on the Random Number Generator (RNG). People will claim that they lose more often than they should, or that certain cards hit (or miss) a disproportionate amount of the time.

Statistical evaluation of these hands will almost always be within the expected norms, indicating that people are instead suffering from Cognitive Bias, where they remember the times they lose far more profoundly than the times they win. This altered perception leads to a sense of unfairness, and the belief that the Random Number Generator is not in fact random at all.

Another reason why people feel like online poker is rigged is that they simply do not understand variance. People claim to understand that poker is about the long run, but fail to understand how long the long run really is. Ten thousand hands is nothing in poker. One hundred thousand hands is nothing in poker. One million hands? Now we’re getting somewhere. Don’t believe me?

Have a look at this Variance Simulator. It is not at all uncommon to have a bad luck stretch of 100,000 hands. When such a stretch of bad luck happens it can feel like even the poker site is against you.

So if you’re trying to make money playing online poker, make sure you do your research about a site before you play there. You can never know with 100% certainty that a site is not rigged without auditing their complete systems yourself. Therefore, it is important to find a site that you feel like you can trust.

Make sure you join us next week for the following article The Online Poker Bot: Man vs Machine. Find out more online poker bots and why they never get angry over bad beats, or tired after long hours playing. But finding out more about them can help you stay safe.