Re: Online poker RNG...

Gerry wrote:
I do appreciate the answers. (I appreciate the advice about colllusion,
too, btw, although, as a professional player, I already am aware of it
as a possibility online and in B&M casinos -- actually more in the
latter, for many reasons -- and happen to agree with Bill's (If I'm
right, Henry quoted Bill's blog.) assessment.)

I still don't understand this, though: what, specifically, has changed
since the publication of the 1999 article? From a mathemetical
perspective, I mean. (That's why I posted here.) I know I'm asking for
expert advice in lay terms, which is a tough nut to crack, but if one
you can do that, I'd appreciate it. BTW: For sale online are the hand
histories of almost every player at almost every site. A cheater would
have access to these hand histories in order to seed a database with
millions of hands in an effort to reverse-compile the algorithm, no?

Seems to be what pokerrng.com claims, and THAT is what I worry about...

I can't help but feel like you're out to just accuse people who win
consistently at poker of cheating. And perhaps your feeling is
justified, for there are plenty of ways to cheat with online poker.

Pokerrng.com is not one of them. I don't know if the programmers
intended it to be a scam or were hoping for actual results, but to put
it in lay-person terms:
1. It could store every hand played on every major site ever, and it
would still be useless.
2. Knowing the seed and the algorithm will indeed tell you the next
card being played. Knowing the cards being played, even millions of
them, will NOT give you the seed and the algorithm. In nearly every
case, it won't even come close.
3. The testimonies are to be statistically expected. Assuming a
reasonably large number of people who bought into this, some will win
(even significantly) immediately after purchasing the software. A shame
they don't publish the letters that read something like, "this software
was of absolutely no use."

And I'd easily believe some poker websites inadequately picked
algorithms for generating the cards and were cracked, but if you're
using a site with significant amounts of money or reputation involved,
pokerrng.com is useless. You'd have possibly valid concerns that two
people are conspiring, but to the best of my knowledge, that hardly
ever happens, when compared to the number of people who play
legitimately. To put it in perspective, anytime you win out of nowhere,
I bet someone on your table thinks you're cheating....

.

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