The Internet is a great place for a conspiracy theory. A sensible demeanour, an authoritative writing voice, some carefully chosen "facts," and suddenly you are an expert in your field, no matter how much rubbish you actually talk about and how little truth is contained in your missives.
Internet poker has its conspiracy theories. Like all great examples of its type, the underlying nervousness about the integrity of the dealing of hands is based on some long-distant facts. Right back at the start of things, one of the then popular sites had a weak random-number generator - which effectively is the card-shuffling mechanism - and this was exposed by some "white hat" hackers. No harm was done, except in terms of reputation, and this was about eight years ago.
Today's theories come and go, although there are two stalwarts that I will examine a little later. One that seems to have gone past its heyday is "action flops." The idea behind this one was that the poker site deliberately created flops that got players involved: set over set, flush over flush, and so on. There were two fundamental problems here. The first obvious one was, why would the sites bother? Sure, they would get a degree of increased rake, but its unclear how much benefit this would be, considering how easy it is for them to take their $1-$3 anyway. More insidiously, would this actually be a bad thing for the players? As long as everyone got his "share" of action, it could be argued that such a site would be a profitable place to play - and quite fun.
The paranoid delusions that have stayed have a similar feel, although they are presented by true believers quite differently. Let us call them "the cash-out curse" and "the kill switch."
The cash-out curse is a fairy tale that turns "Grimm." Our hero starts the adventure by depositing some money on a new site and promptly turns into a dollar tornado, sucking up all the money in every game he plays and getting Scandinavians shaking their heads in living rooms across the Net. Nothing can go wrong - until he makes the fatal mistake of cashing out his easy-gotten winnings. Then, the curse kicks in. Runner-runner follows runner-runner. A-A loses to 7-2 offsuit. Quads for stacks are rivered by a straight flush. Before he knows it, our hero has lost all of the money he had previously won, his own initial deposit, and more. The Scandinavian economy returns to its usual buoyant self, and our hero travels the oh so near but tragically far distance from the penthouse to the outhouse.
The kill switch is similar, but more obscure. Some evil power in a poker site's headquarters, probably twirling his moustache and stroking a white cat on his lap, decides that a winning player shall henceforth be a tragically losing one. The kill switch is depressed and suddenly a wave of relentless bad luck cascades onto our hero. His made hands are cruelly outdrawn. His draws never get there. Up becomes down, and all of the basic premises of a winning poker career are turned upside down.
So, what truth is there in these "theories"? Not much, I'm afraid. First off, let us look at what are the motives for this. The main one, certainly for the cash-out curse, is site liquidity. Every poker site needs a healthy balance so that funds can be transferred in and out without a hassle and problems don't occur, causing a "run on the bank." The truth is, most of the major sites are fully aware of these issues and have put procedures in place to keep a healthy slush fund in place. Does this mean that you are 100 percent safe from fraud? Of course not. All financial investments are prone to even small amounts of institutional fraud. But keeping liquidity high is a very unlikely motive for putting such high profit potential at risk.
An easier way to puncture the paranoid bubble is to look at how feasible such software would be to work. Most people have an overinflated view of the power of software programmers, including most software programmers. It's a plain fact that poker has not been solved from a programming perspective in the same way that, say, backgammon has. And poker site software is basically very straightforward. Its main objectives are to be robust - and those of us with long memories can remember the fun of playing on the early software platforms that blinked on and off like erratic traffic lights - and to have an effective and fair random-number generator. The software isn't intelligent, and does not understand poker beyond knowing that a flush beats a straight.
This would mean that creating bad beats for particular players would be very problematic. Not only does the software not understand poker, so the idea of a draw would not even be in its frame of reference, but it would also have to be able, in fractions of seconds, to decide whether the draw-out artist will hit his long shot, and what form it will take. But how does it know the fish will call with two undercards to the flop? And how does it do this for potentially cursed or killed hundreds of players across many thousands on its site, instantly, without crashing, and then understand what the outdraw needs to be and make it come in? I have no doubt that creating the software to do this would be much more challenging than the original software running the site in the first place.
So, why do people believe such things? The main reason is denial. Bad luck happens. Most players are losers. Credit-card statements do not lie. Whilst real-life gamblers can delude themselves in many ways, the truth is very apparent in plain black and white to their Internet brethren. This is coupled with most players not keeping very good records and not understanding how common running bad really is. So, we look for reasons beyond ourselves, some evil electronic poker deity, to blame.
Now, can someone explain to me why the flag is rippling in the wind on the moon-landing?
David has played poker all over the UK for the better part of a decade. Originally a tournament player, now focused on cash play and almost entirely on the Internet for the last three years, David makes a healthy second income playing a wide range of games.
