Throughout this post I’ll be making a lot of sarcastic comments regarding online poker being rigged. This is due to the recent comments I’ve received on the post I just linked to. For the record I do not think online poker is rigged in any way, shape, or form.
After finishing off the Poker Stars bonus last week I decided to hit up Full Tilt Poker next where I had $50 in bonus funds waiting to be earned. Bad decision. I don’t like Full Tilt for a lot of reasons.
- Full tables aren’t full…they only seat 9 players.
- The players are better at Full Tilt.
- I can’t stand the cartoonish avatars with the 4 facial expressions. This might be cool for 2nd graders…
- Bonuses are too hard to earn.
- Blinds increase too fast in tournaments and SNGs.
- No hand history files! I can’t use Poker Tracker to watch players or keep an eye on my own play.
- I can’t win at Full Tilt. I ran into bad beat after bad beat in both ring games, tournaments, and SNGs. I’m convinced Full Tilt is rigged so that I lose money.
Overall, the players are better at Full Tilt, but they still make plenty of mistakes. I just happened to run into these players when they were running lucky. I won’t bore you with the bad beat stories, but gut shots and hitting a 2nd pair on the river were the norm against me. After a few days of play I earned a whopping $25 of my bonus and lost about $150 at the tables and tournaments. I had seen enough. I cashed out and will not be returning to Full Tilt anytime soon. If a WPBT event is held there I’ll play, but other than that, they won’t be seeing any of my bankroll until they can get hand history files so that I can use Poker Tracker. They have a lot of great ideas and a good base, but this is a huge missing piece. Maybe by then they’ll remove me from their loser list…you know, the list of players that an online poker site makes lose on purpose because they rig the games. Maybe HDouble could remove me from this imaginary list because of all the Full Tilt pimping I’ve been doing around my sites lately.
After all the bad beats I wanted to go on tilt, but I didn’t. Instead, I cashed out and planned to take a week off. But then I found a special Party Poker bonus code and I’m not one to pass up on a bonus at Party Poker. I made the deposit and found out that I had a month to clear the 500 raked hands. Easy money! Party should be having their monthly reload bonus in the next week, so I figured I better get this one out of the way.
On Tuesday night I fired up the software and saw the Bad Beat Jackpot was higher than it’s been in a long time. It was getting close to $400,000! I’ve only been playing $1/2 lately, but I just couldn’t resist the fish at the $2/4 BBJ tables. For anyone actually playing these tables in an attempt to win the jackpot…you’re probably better off buying a lottery ticket. I’ve played over 100,000 hands of online poker since September and I’ve yet to witness a hand that would actually qualify if I had been playing at the BBJ tables. That’s a lot of poker folks. Your only reason for playing the BBJ tables should be to take advantage of all the fish that come out when the jackpot grows this big. Players that normally play $0.50/1 are now up at $2/4 and it’s easy to see they don’t know what they’re doing.
I only had an hour to play on Tuesday night as I waited for laundry to finish before I went to bed, but I just couldn’t resist. I had some good hands, but couldn’t get a favorable flop. I think I was playing 2 tables at a time and ended up losing about $70 in an hour. No bad beats and no really bad play. I just didn’t hit flops with my good starting hands.
Last night I planned to get in a lot of poker. We’ve been spoiled over the last week in Michigan with weather we don’t normally see during April. It all changed back on Wednesday when the rain came through and temperatures dropped back into the 50’s and 60’s. Basically this means I wouldn’t be riding my bike or golfing, so I’d have time to site at the online poker tables instead. When I logged on to Party Poker I noticed the BBJ had grown to over $400,000. I quickly jumped on a few tables. On one table in particular I was dealt pocket aces 3 times in the first 20 hands and they all held up; twice for pots over $70. I was quickly up over $140 on just the one table.
Throughout the night I logged on and off a couple of times while taking care of things around the house. As it neared 11:00 I decided to call it a night, figuring I was up over $200 for a few hours of play. Before logging off I decided to check the status of my bonus. I only needed to play 36 more raked hands, so I fired up a few tables and managed win over $100 more at the BBJ tables in about a half hour. Once I cleared the bonus I logged off, even though I hated to do so. The games were that good. I must have been put on Party’s 4/20 winner list because it was one hell of a night.
Before hitting the pillow I opened up Poker Tracker to check my stats. I held AA six times, winning all six for a profit of over $220. $220 just on those 6 hands! In fact, the last 16 times I’ve held pocket rockets, they’ve been winners. I’m king of glad online poker is rigged or else I would never win this many times in a row. I was over $380 ahead for what appeared to be about four and a half hours of real world time while playing 3 or 4 tables at a time. With the $100 bonus, I had added over $480 to my bankroll in one night. It was easily the best night of poker I’ve ever had (besides the WPBT win). I sure hope the BBJ hasn’t been hit so that I can play some more tonight.
If you aren’t playing on Party Poker you need your head examined. With over 70,000 players (many of them clueless) logging on each night there’s a a steady stream of cash from the bad players to the good.
In just a month and a half I’ve regrown my bankroll from $300 to over $2000 where it sits now. That’ll happen when the ‘roll increase by over 25% in one night.
In other news, I ordered Super System II and Harrington on Hold ’em from Amazon yesterday. I’m looking to work on my lack of no-limit skills and from what I’ve heard, Harrington’s book is the shit.
Nick Momrik 
Hi
I really like your site. I’m new to the poker blog scene but not new to poker. 🙂 I’m essentially playing for a living right now ($15-30) and this year my goal is to meet a great deal of poker players to make new friends and learn from them. I’m trying to create a little community and learn more about the different players who blog. I’d love to get more traffic on my site. If you like my site, would you mind linking to it? Also, I hope you don’t mind but I linked to yours so I can read it frequently.
Travis
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If you want to play against fish, try Noble Poker. I found out about it from the Stripper by Night blog. There aren’t many people there, but the bonus is sweet (100%) though it can be a bitch to work off. I put in 150 earlier this month and its over 600 and I only play 2/4
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I’ve heard that in places Brad, so I might have to check it out. I like the big bonus, but it only counts hands in which you put money in the pot, which I really don’t care for. Maybe once I get some other bonuses worked off I’ll have to check it out.
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The site’s are not rigged…. however, if they were rigged in favour of poor players, the sites would make more money.
My Blog – Is Online Poker Rigged?
Again, I don’t believe they are rigged, but the sites stand to make more money if they were.
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This is one of the better critiques on FTP I’ve seen. I agree with most of your points, and we are working on the problems you mention– hand histories are coming in the next month, and as we grow, we get more bad players.
As for you winning? All you had to do is ask. Let me flip this bit right here…
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just a bonus comparison i found today:http://pokerdiv.blogspot.com/2005/03/full-tilt-v-party-poker-bonus.html
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I am 100% convinced the intire internet is rigged!
there is not 1! site you can trust, cash out NOW!
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can only agree – my impression is that fulltilt is rigged like hell. never saw so many bad beats, runner runner, AA against KK or QQ in only 1200 hands, AA against quads. First two days I was on their winners list, hitting very flop, next two days the 100% profit and the deposit wnet throught the funnel – not really bad play, but mostly unbelievable hands – btw – not taliking about one table, but 2-3 tables at different levels. I actually had the same impression already a couple of months ago – Went through the same shit at that time (deposit, win, lose, since I won on ohter sites without a problem (sites where I can use PT) I considered to give it a second try – it was for sure the last one. Will stay with Stars and Party
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yes it is rigged!I could not agree more it favors poor playes and was painfully obvious I pitty people who play there
Chillywill420
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Wealth is hard to come by, but poverty is always at hand.
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Internet Poker is totally rigged. I find it hard to believe that after all these years people are still wondering and asking that same question. There is nothing random about the so called RNG they say they use. The only way to make a huge profit at the end of the year is to deal ACTION. Internet Poker is nothing more than a business. The more people that play the more money they make. The less people that play the less money they make. How long would the bad players stay around after losing their money day after day? 1-2 weeks maybe? How long would a bad player stay around if he could get his win every now and then and have fun too? Forever? We all know that if a website has lets say 30,000 players that atleast half or more are bad players. So, if after a few weeks of losing money day after day a bad player would simply leave and probably never come back and play for real money again. The Poker Sites can’t make billions like this and they know it. The only way to make the Billions of profit each year is to keep everyone happy and playing. From a business standpoint it is a great idea. I also think that it is the only way for a Poker Site to survive with huge profits. If a Poker Site had only great players you would only see maybe 3,000-6,000 players on a site at any given time. They could not make it work off of that. Also, if the site had only the great players playing you would not have as many hands being played. The Poker Sites can’t even come close to a healty profit at the end of the year and they know this. They also knew all this information before even opening up. A Poker Site is not cheap to open and operate at all. They have to keep a lot of players playing all the time or they just can’t make it work. A site could not stay in business if they didn’t make a lot of action happen. That is why cards are being handed out like they are. In cash games it is to max the rake – In tournaments it is to knock people out so they can enter another tournment. All you have to do is sit in and watch for a while. You will see so many premium starting hands being dealt and then huge action flops to guarantee big play. You will see so many stacked hands dealt, like: AA – KK – JJ hand after hand.(sound familiar)? Action flops – like a open end straight draw and a flush draw and 2 pair all on the same flop – hand after hand – These types of hands and flops are very rare and hardly ever seen in live Poker. I’m not saying that you will not see it from time to time because you will. But, I am telling you that you will not see “nowhere” near the times you will on Internet Sites. I know alot of people use the defense that it is because you see so many more hands than you do in live play. But, in fact you see just that more many bad beats. A great way to see how true random cards are delt: Try this – sit at your kitchen table – shuffle good and deal out a full tables worth of cards(9 or so hands) then turn all the cards up and see what all the hands look like. There will be maybe 2 hands most of the time that are worth playing at all. Play all the hands though – Also deal the flop-turn and river. You will notice that most of the time 1 pair will win- every now and then 2 pair or a flush will hit – even with playing all 9 hands. Just don’t try it one time, do it as many as you have time for. You will only see pocket pairs being dealt every now and then in the same hand – you will only see pocket pairs like AA and KK being dealt in the same hand once in a blue moon. How often do you see that on the net? Usually if you do deal 2 pocket pairs in the same hand it will be more like a AA vs 55 or something that the two players would not get into a big preflop war with.. I am not saying that Poker Sites are out to robb you of your money. But, I am saying that Poker Sites are not giving you what you are expecting – A true game of poker> They are just doing their best to keep everyone happy and playing. My personal belief is that if they had to deal a straight-fair game of poker hand after hand they could not stay in business. You will never see a totally regulated Internet Poker Site for that exact reason. Live poker is a game of skill – Internet poker is more like a lottery. Luck!
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I have no doubt in my mind online is rigged. Its disgusting how many bad beats i take and see. I cannot make money online because best hand does not hold up preflop or after the flop. only solution is not to play.
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If you all have that many bad beats,there must be the same number of players having good cards. These won’t complain here. Think about it
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There is something very suspicious about Full Tilt Poker.
After half a dozen times being seated at a table that had 0, 1 or 2 other active players (people present at the table) during the early stages (> 3000 people remaining) of a 7500 or 10000 person tournament I emailed full tilt support questioning the oddness.
They responded with some general comment of seating distribution probability.
After the email exchange the frequency increased dramatically and has stayed high.
This week I have played 8 tournaments at full tilt. Six of those tournaments I have been seated in the early stages of the tournament at a table with 0, 1 or 2 active players. That means there are 7, 8, 9 people not even at the table.
In essence the table is dead.
Once at the dead table there is no way off it until some of the dead/inactive players blind out.
By then the blinds have gone through several levels and I’m way way behind. That is unless I get blown out from playing heads-up.
It happens so frequently that I truly believe something is crooked at full tilt poker.
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