A Newbies Dilemma: Online Poker Is Rigged
- Filed under: Poker
- Date: Jan 5,2011
A lot of players who couldn’t play poker due to time constraints or due to them not being able to go to the casino as often as they want can now have the luxury of playing the game in their own homes. While this is ultimately good for poker, it also has an effect that may cause some players, especially beginners, leave the game in disgust.
Variance
If you played poker for long enough, chances are you have seen some weird stuff going on around the table. Players play unthinkable hands for no reason, dummies make unbelievably stupid moves, odd flops happen three times in a row, a single card seems to be haunting you, your AA loses to a 47o when you both go all-in pre-flop. To an experienced player, this is all normal. But to a newbie, when he sees runner-runner two times in a row online, when he was the favorite, he finds that very suspicious, shocking.
In various forums and message boards, I often encounter people encouraging others to stop playing online poker. They site various reasons like in online poker, a small stack can never beat a big stack. Or maybe they say that once you withdraw your money, you will have bad variance for about two months. Whatever reasons it is they site, it is obvious that these players have experienced something normal and immediately concluded that online poker is rigged.
Online poker is an industry that is making a lot of money by hosting the games as is. They provide a site that allows the players to play and in return, they get a small portion of the pot known as the rake. These online poker sites have absolutely no motive in rigging these games as they get nothing in return if they do. On the contrary, rigging their own poker games just runs the risk of the information leaking out and them losing a lot of customers.
Psychology
People are hardwired to hate losing a lot more than they like winning. This is the main reason why we seem to remember bad beats as something that happens more often to us than it actually does. The truth is, bad beats do happen, and about half of the time, we are on the winning end. We just don’t remember it as much.
The players in an online poker game play a lot looser than the ones who play in a casino. This is the reason why a lot more bad beats happen online than live. This is also the reason why variance is very wide in online poker compared to live poker.
You have to have the right poker psychology to improve and be a winning poker player today!
