[Triple_D_Bet]

Originally posted on 08/18/2013:

Triple D is smart & I know he's not full of $H|T when he posts. Pavy doesn't mince words either, if he's posting something it's because he believes in it & thinks it's relevant.
That being said I am going to say something that will not sound very intelligent but, I have said it here before.
I think the software is rigged but not for any one player in particular.
The larger the pots the larger the rake & that is generally all that a poker site is concerned with. RAKE.
These good "starting hands" & "action flops" create action & action generates rake.
They're not trying to cheat for Pavy anymore than they are trying to cheat for Prior22 or me.
They just want alot of callers & a lot of chasers to achieve the maximum possible pot, therefore collecting the largest possible rake.
So, everyone is getting disproportionately good starting hands & hitting disproportionately favourable flops.
It's to create action but, usually not for one or two specific players.
Just my 2 cents.

I'm sure pavy believes what he's saying the same as you do Jay..my point is that you believe it without proof. The number of hands you'd need to see to be able to show even a slight tendency towards "irgging" is well in excess of the ones you've seen lifetime at SBR, and forget the fact that the ones you remember as significant form an even smaller subset.

Our brains evolved to be able to extrapolate from a few examples and draw conclusions to keep us alive (caveman get sick after eat plants. therefore, those plants bad). Unfortunately, games with an element of chance are probability driven, and as smart as any of us might think we are, we don't have the hardware to be able to draw valid conclusions from a game with as much variance as poker. When it comes to poker and most forms of gambling, our brains are wired to draw the wrong conclusions (I had a rare hand (KK), other dude had a rare hand (AA)...two rare hands must be extremely unlikely, therefore it must be rigged). Add in a supposed motive (SBR needs to maximize rake) and the picture looks complete, regardless of how wrong it is (is SBR going to all this trouble to maximize rake in some pots when they can't be bothered to tailor an annual contest given excessive player feedback?).

Is it possible SBR poker is rigged? Sure...the hands needed to prove it are the same needed to prove it isn't, and I don't have those. However, given the circumstances it seems a bit unlikely. We either have SBR customizing their poker client and meticulously coding it to be action-oriented (which presumably takes up so much time they can't be bothered to serve up a Ryder Cup that tailors to most of their customers), or we have a gambling website which bought a cheap poker client and made minimal changes to customize it to offer another feature to their membership. The simplest answer usually being correct, the latter is probably the case.

The other amazing thing about our brains is how resistant they can be to correction. You see it all the time with conspiracy nutters, and we've got some good examples of it in this thread as well. The fact that the people who tend to believe these things are rarely winning players should tell you something though