Saturday, June 10, 2006

Poker Stars not so random RNG

How is it that the river brings so many underdog hands what they need to win? What are the odds of seeing runner-runner straights, flushes, three of a kinds? Poker Stars is with out a doubt the most pathetic sites for this kind of crap. I have played on about 7 sites and I must say Poker Stars continues to be the leader of the pack for dishing out bad beats.

They will tell you it is because they deal so many hands that the odds are you will see more bad beats. Well, that is a bunch of BS because you have a separate random number generator dealing each table so it doesn't matter what has been dealt before or how many times it was dealt. Their software is not random, but then again, nothing is. They try and make it random but they come up short.

On Pocket Fives recently a top player posed the question that all RNGs are not created equal and there was a poll of sorts and the overwhelming response was that Poker Stars was without a doubt the worst site for favorite hands not holding up.

My advice to you is if you can, don't play at Poker Stars. If you are happy with the action on your site that you play stay there. Yes, they have a lot of tourneys and such, but does it really matter that you could play perfectly for 4 hours and have it all undone by a 77 to 22 dog in the wink of an eye. It is no wonder so many people will call raises with crappy hands, they know Poker Stars will reward them with their dream cards on the turn or river.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

If you call out the cards that you don't want to see, then there is a much higher likelihood of those cards hitting. Trying thinking of, or calling out, the cards that you *do* want. If you're able to truly believe that your cards will come, or that you'll win the hand (read: 'truly' believe)then your chances go up dramatically. Trust me on this.

Check out the research (published in peer-reviewed science journals) of how RNGs (random number generators - which, as you know, are used for poker software) can be influenced by thought. Participants in these studies were able to affect the randomness of the generators in such a way that they produced more of a certain pre-defined numerical output. There was, of course, a control group. (Dean Radin was the lead author)

Bottom-line: positive thinking + positive affect = better results.

Who am I? Just some dude that played a little bit of full ring with you today, and then looked you up on the teh internets.