[dezza]

I don't know if this is true or not but someone (some support guy from a poker room trying to explain how random and unpredictable the numbers are) told me that the software uses each player's info (possibly the player's local time) as a random seed and therefore hard for others to predict due to the different mix of international timezones for a table.

Somehow it seems real because during a bad run of cards, all I see for 5 hours is 4 and 2 in one of the hole card 98% of the time. I've even observed a table eyeing for a seat that seem to get good cards and patiently waited for the seat and when I sit in the vacated spot, the 4 and 2 kept appearing. Similarly, a maniac on a table seems to get away with everything. All his draw hits, his crummy hole cards turn to gold on the flop or catches a miracle river card time and time again. The odds doesn't seem to want to correct itself.

I hope this is just a myth otherwise in certain situation, your info may cause the RNG to produce undesirable cards for you that seems to follow you to any table. The poker room doesn't have any intention to cheat but the side effects of this type of algorithm is questionable. I hope this guy is just pulling my leg.

Maybe we can start a conspiracy section just to let off steam and have a good laugh. Call it "Fishie's believe it or not"... then again.... maybe it's true !!!!!!

[Beat The Fish]

Dezza,

Thanks for the post. It's certainly an interesting topic for discussion. Your bad run of cards sounds similar to the holdings I've been looking at the past couple of sessions. Sometimes it just goes hours and hours without you picking up anything to play. Unfortunately, those sessions are just going to cost you in lost blinds unless you manage to bluff a decent pot or two. Just try to be patient and play through it until your cards pick up again.

Regarding the online RNGs, that poker room representative is doing a terrible job misinforming you. Back in the earliest days of online poker (about 1997 or so) there was a scandal with Planet Poker - the first online poker room. They used the local time of their servers to generate random results that would then be assigned actual card values. Perhaps their worst mistake was publicizing this as a claim to how their cards were truly random and could be trusted. Unfortunately, it wasn't long before some figured out how to decode this system and were accurately predicting which cards would be dealt next. Planet Poker pulled this system shortly and instituted a better RNG that hasn't been cracked since.

All major online poker sites have a much better RNG than the old example with Planet Poker and are regularly tested by independent agencies. I trust the major sites not only because I can win but because it is in their financial interest to run clean games. Don't worry about the randomness of the cards as any quality site is overseen by their respective government agency. I'm all for conspiracy theories, but this one simply doesn't hold water and doesn't really have any evidence supporting it.

If you want to see more about what I think on the subject, you can check out this article I wrote a while back: Why Online Poker Isn't Rigged

[Tesseract]

As a former Computer Scientist, let me put your mind at rest. Even if the Poker webite used a combination of times from local player clocks or personal details then this wouldn't put any one player at an advantage or disadvantage. For someone to cheat, they'd need to know the clock time (or details used) for every player at the table plus the algorithm used to combine these into a seed, *and then* the specific random number generator used. Once they had all *that* info (which they couldn't possibly collect) they'd need to construct a program to determine where in the random number sequence the game is at by studying the cards which fell over several hands.

And all this would change completely whenever a player left or joined the table. They'd need to start again from scratch.

I'm familiar with the scandal mentioned in the previous post. That was back in the days where they just seeded the RNG from their own server clock (ie one source only, and not difficult to obtain), and then actually published the algorithm used to generate the numbers. Insanity.

Nowadays most sites use Entropy Based RNG, which means they collect random electronic noise from their systems (or even from a radioisotope) to seed the RNG, and then reseed it regularly.

I cannot even begin to imagine how someone might crack that.

Rest easy.

[Tesseract]

They might actually be using the local clock times or details of EVERYONE logged in their site to generate a seed, which would make even more sense.

Imagine 9000 players online. The seed would change every time any one of them logged off or a new player joined.

Utterly impossible to crack, unless you were logged on under 9000 identities from all over the globe, and also happened to know the details and algorithma used -- provided of course that no other players logged on to upset things.