To win long term at Poker a positive frame of mind is essential, and people who claim it is rigged or who constantly moan at the suck-outs they suffer from are basically the players who approach the game negatively and only remember the crazy beats that happen online when they are on the wrong end.

I`m nothing special as a poker player, i play too tight and i`m shit at playing certain kinds of hole cards and flops. But i`m a winning gambler on the horses and have been for a dozen years or so and in that sphere my strike rate is usually between 20-25% - so positivity or the ability to think long term are essential qualities one must have. So i transfer those qualities to the poker table even if that means just being a nearly breaking even kind of player.

That's the way it goes man...........end of the day KK is just a pair of kings...

Originally Posted by fenriz

To win long term at Poker a positive frame of mind is essential, and people who claim it is rigged or who constantly moan at the suck-outs they suffer from are basically the players who approach the game negatively and only remember the crazy beats that happen online when they are on the wrong end.

I`m nothing special as a poker player, i play too tight and i`m shit at playing certain kinds of hole cards and flops. But i`m a winning gambler on the horses and have been for a dozen years or so and in that sphere my strike rate is usually between 20-25% - so positivity or the ability to think long term are essential qualities one must have. So i transfer those qualities to the poker table even if that means just being a nearly breaking even kind of player.

I can't imagine the amount of skill needed to be a winning gambler on horses.............too many variables for me man.

Everyone I talk to laughs at FullTilt. I had a classic tourny tonight. Built a decent stack of chips until my AK suited lost to KQ all in preflop. Then (to get knocked out) I flop a straight vs 2 pair. We both get all in, and he catches the boat on the river. Two all ins where I'm up 73% and 81% and lose. OH...it's just one night..it's just 2 hands. hahah. It's EVERY NIGHT at FullTilt.

Here's a thought, if you had 3 times during a tourney where you went allin with an overpair (80% chance to win), the chance of surviving all of them is only a coinflip (51.2% chance to be exact). So while 80% seems like an incredible advantage, over the course of a tourney winning multiple hands is not very likely. And that's with an 80/20 hand, winning 3 60/40 hands only comes out to a 21.6% chance, so basically u won't win all of the 60/40 hands.

That being said, I too get knocked out of tourneys all the time with the better hand. The number of times I've been left muttering to myself how unbelievable that was, then joining another tourney only to have the same thing happen again, and so on. In fact I quit playing PokerStars all together because of how suspicious I was of the fairness of the cards. I started playing FullTilt about a month ago, and the bad beats were kept to a minimum, I built up a nice profit, well until the last 2 days where the bad beats have been horrendous. But that's too small of a sample size to really have an opinion on it.

I won't say online poker is 'rigged', because I know the flaming I would get and this thread would be instantly deleted from the internet. But from bad luck I saw on PokerStars, I was suspicious enough to stop playing all together.

And one last thing, someone could prove statistically whether an online site is fair or not. All you would need is a very large set of showdown hand histories, then you could calculate what the win percentage should be, and compare it to the actual results. The larger the set of hand histories, the closer those values should be. I thought about writing a program to do that, but I don't have enough showdown hand histories to prove anything yet.

Originally Posted by sk8freak_21

play more. do you have any idea what long term is?.. if your playing cash games you need to play around 100K hands. If your playing tourneys, you need about 1000 games to see if your a long term winner.

Yes play more, work on your game selection and bank roll management. There is no shame in playing lower limits until you learn how to win and this can take a long time depending on your skill level. Those that can't win mostly just lack discipline and focus on the negatives and are not honest with themselves about their play. Read and study poker. I forget the book but some poker player wrote a great piece about how the 10th best player in the world was not very good if he was sitting at the table with the 9 people in the world that were better than him. Or if a poker player ran over the games every night and blew it all at the craps tables it wasn't really relevant how good he was at poker because he would be broke.

Also, choose a good place to play poker and get the most benefits you can. Online I think the softest games are at Cake Poker and Bodog for US players.

it's just Stars that is rigged, maybe FT to some extent as well

other sites are just fine, you can play with confidence