having played poker for 25 years now i thought i would give online poker a try.so i decided to do my homework first before i chose where to play. while serching for a decent room to play in i came across numerous allegations of online poker rooms rigging hands to gain more rake.after taking onboard several arguments for and against i could not reach a conclusion i was sure to be correct so,i decieded to put some cash in and see for myself for the past60 days ive played 6 hours each week day evening and all day sat,sun. a marathon poker session! and this is what i personally think after this research. i am utterly convinced all of the poker rooms ive visited( twelve total) have software that manipulates hands, for example 10 players at a table three or four players with the biggest stack always (and i do mean always) get a hand that even a poker pro would not fold thus bigger pot bigger rake. one or two go bust they are back at the cashier the argument against this is they would loose custom .why!! we are going to play we love the game.fact .you wont move away from the game you just move around so one leaves say vc poker to go to luckyace or whatever someone from luckyace may have moved to pt so on and so forth concider the ammount of people in the new depositors free rolls they are never empty are they. i have come across coincidence after coincidence at every single room ive visited three and four pairs at a time in the hold card jacks kings and aces all going to the chip leaders or rather the depositors hands that should never have been called, called down and beaten, i have hundreds of examles and because ive got hundrers in such a short space of time and not just several unlucky stories to tell my conclusion is they are rigged. i work in a court of law. ive seen murders rapist and drug dealers convicted on far less circumstantial evidence than i have gathered beware of online poker the odds are stacked against you, as soon as you press deposit now.any views or contadictions you can mail me at checkraiza@googlemail.com or just reply here i will give all stats of visited rooms on request.good luck at the tables you will need it

Online poker is on computers, therefore there has to be an algorithm (or more than one) to randomize the cards. It will never seem as random and "fair" as live poker with a professional dealer, because it still has to be contained within the rules of a logical program. This makes it a little different than live poker maybe, but it's not rigged.

Your arguments are that big stacks are getting big hands against each other to make big pots for big rake. It's bound to happen occasionally, and I'm sure it happens in live games. The difference is the number of hands being played at any given time. In a live game, you can only sit at one table and play one game, so you have no idea what situations are happening at other tables, other casinos, other cities. If you look at the hand # each time it's dealt on an online room, you'll see that between every hand played at your one table, there have probably been tens of thousands of hands played on the entire site just in the time it took for you to play one hand.

I'm also willing to bet that if you went and recorded every hand at every table at a bunch of casinos for live games, getting the exact same amount of data recorded as you did online (which would probably take a lifetime), then you would get very similar results.

Talk to any online pro who either makes a living off of online poker, or is just a consistent winning player (there are a few on this forum). They will set the record straight.

Well in script writing there is really no such thing as "random" but the random pattern that is there is so far off you cant crack it, probably somewhere is the trillions.

I say it is fair but when playing at low stakes rakes are so high it seems like its rigged, also a poker room can not function with ought people constantly depositing.

That's pretty much right. Though most methods do technically use repeating sequences, most hardware limitations will end up capping it before it repeats, so it's physically impossible to figure it out. The wikipedia entry on random number generation has a lot on this, if I remember correctly. But still, any programming language API would have a .Random() function and I'm sure all poker sites would use it. They wouldn't go through that much extra work to risk getting caught doing something like that.