Online poker sites have come under suspicion of being rigged almost since the start of online poker. There have always been rumours flying around the internet that the tables were rigged. People who played on the poker sites online (usually the ones who lost of course) moaned that there was a much higher chance of suffering a "bad beat" online than there was in a real poker game. Well the truth is they are right on one count but wrong on the other. Firstly, there is no way that the major online poker rooms are rigged. These are multi-million dollar a year industries that do just fine the way they are, there is absolutely no need for them to be fixed or rigged in any way. Can you imagine what it would do for the business if it was to emerge that one of the main poker sites was fixed? Their customers would disappear like snow off a roof, and there is nothing surer than the fact that if one of the sites was rigged, the information would find it's way out eventually. If there is anything dubious going on it would have been done by a human being and they tend not to be able to keep secrets forever! Secondly, yes it is true - there is more chance that you'll get a bad beat in an online poker game than in a regular table game at home or in a casino. The reason for this however is not that there are "bent" tables, the reason lies with the players themselves. The online poker player is a different breed from his real table counterpart and bets in a different way. There are a few possible reasons for this, but whether it is because the game doesn't seem as real because there's nothing that's actually tangible, or maybe it's just that the standard of play is much lower online, the fact remains that people playing online tend to bet more and on worse hands than those offline. People will play almost any hand online and often the whole game is just one of bluff and bigger bluff. Almost everybody - especially on the lower money tables - wants to be involved in every hand. So the fact that more people are in to see the flop means that there's much more chance of you picking up a "bad beat". That 2 7 which most people would throw away as if it was burning their hands becomes a whole lot more attractive if the flop is 7 7 2! So the bottom line is that the online poker sites are not fixed or rigged in any way, it's just the players that can be a bit unpredictable! |
