If you have known how to play poker long enough, you have come across stretches of bad luck that seem impossible, and that is twice as true when it comes to online poker. If you have been asking yourself: is online poker rigged or not? Let me reassure you and demonstrate some of the reasons online poker is not rigged, as long as you play at safe and regulated online poker sites.
With so many hands played in such quick succession, online poker can be a truly brutal game, and being on the losing end of one bad beat after another is certainly not fun.
Downswings happen in online poker all the time, and while the pros out there understand why and how they happen, recreational players often express doubts about the fairness of the software they are playing on the moment they run into a bad stretch.
How Randomness Works in Online Poker
Over the years, the poker community has concocted an endless string of conspiracy theories, ranging from sites rigging the games in favor of players from a particular country to games created to generate maximum rake in every hand, etc.
The truth is that major poker sites you probably play at, such as GGPoker, PokerStars, or PartyPoker, have absolutely no control over the way cards are distributed, as they use licensed RNG software for card distribution.
RNG stands for a random number generator, and it is an algorithm in charge of distributing the cards from a virtual deck on a random basis.
While RNGs are not truly random (as it is impossible to create an algorithm for true randomness), they are as complex as you could imagine, and the numbers they come up with cannot be predicted or anticipated in any way.
Even if an extremely advanced computer could somehow predict the numbers generated by an RNG, which it likely cannot, a human brain or someone’s laptop most definitely cannot.
The only question that remains is whether the RNG algorithms used by the poker sites you play at are true or whether the sites use altered algorithms that allow them to change card distribution.
Regulated vs. Unregulated Poker Sites
When trying to answer your question, is online poker rigged, we must always make a distinction between regulated and unregulated poker sites.
The first kind, which includes most of the big sites out there, is regulated by major gaming regulatory bodies such as the Malta Gaming Authority (MGA), United Kingdom Gambling Commission (UKGC), or the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement.
These regulators ensure that all their licensees operate in compliance with the laws and regulations necessary in the given jurisdiction, and this always includes quite a few gaming fairness audits.
On top of these, major operators also have their software audited by third-party auditors like eCOGRA, who have built their organizations on ensuring they only issue certificates of approval to companies running software that can support 100% safe gameplay.
On the other hand, operators without any gaming license or those holding licenses of dubious off-shore regulatory bodies that don’t run such a tight ship may be able to get away with all sorts of things.
However, tampering with the RNG is not a very smart move for any operator, as the players would easily discover any significant tampering, and the operator’s reputation would be quickly ruined.
In fact, there has not yet been a single case where an operator was proven to run a faulty RNG despite many other methods of cheating being discovered and proven over the years.
Perhaps the biggest reason practically all online poker operators distribute cards randomly and use respectable RNGs is due to the fact players can save their hands and run all sorts of analyses on them after playing.
So, if you are not sure if online poker is rigged or not, we suggest you check for yourself by examining your own hand’s database and trying to find any significant inconsistencies in it.
How You Can Find Out for Yourself
If you have played a significant number of poker hands (at least a few tens of thousands of hands at cash game tables), you will be able to tell for yourself if the site you are playing at is “rigged.”
Using a simple poker tracking software like Hold’em Manager or Poker Tracker, you should be able to review all the hands you have played at a site, provided you saved them through your poker client.
Load up your hands into your poker tracking software, and you will be able to run all sorts of analyses and find out for yourself just how lucky or unlucky you have been.
For instance, if you think you lose coin flips every time, you can isolate all the coin flips you have ever played and find out just how much you won or lost in them.
Similarly, you will be able to see how many times the flush draw got there when you had it, how often you lost to a flush draw or any other parameter that you believe to be faulty.
The truth is that hundreds of players have tried to prove online poker is rigged by examining their own and other players’ hand databases and have been unsuccessful every time.
The one thing you should not do is examine a small sample of a few hundred hands and draw conclusions from that, as variance is a big part of poker, whether you play live or online.
If you don’t understand variance and standard deviations, we suggest you do some research into the topic before drawing any conclusions or complaining about poker software being faulty.
Is Online Poker Safe Than?
While there is absolutely no proof or real indication that any of the major online poker sites are rigged in a classic sense, there are dangers you will face when playing online poker.
Even the biggest poker operators are susceptible to being exploited, as was proven by a recent security leak at GGPoker that allowed a player to gain access to winning percentages during active hands, allowing them to gain a massive edge over his competitors.
Less sinister than this is the use of various real-time assistance (RTA) tools, which provide players real-time access to solver outputs, allowing them to play optimal poker despite not knowing how to play at such a level by heart.
More recently, a number of poker bots were discovered on a number of sites, especially unlicensed ones, that were able to automate the use of such RTA tools, making the games considerably harder for the real players in them and taking millions of dollars out of the economy over several years.
So, while we maintain that online poker is not rigged, the game is also not without its fair share of risks and dangers, some of which can be avoided by playing at licensed and secure poker sites.
In either case, it is important to remember that just because a few random individuals might be cheating in online poker in one way or another, that does not make the game rigged or the operators directly at fault for such situations.
Why Does It Still Feel Like Poker Is Rigged?
If you play a lot of online poker and it feels like the game is rigged despite all the evidence proving it is not, there is one hard truth you probably have to face: you need to study and learn how to win in poker.
Online poker is definitely not rigged, and more than a few players are beating every game format across every stake and on every poker site out there by playing better than their opponents and putting in the necessary volume.
If you keep losing, and the games seem rigged to you, it is probably because you are simply not playing well enough to beat other players, and you focus on the bad beats instead of the spots in which you could have won more or lost less by virtue of pure skill.
One thing you need to understand is that online poker is hard and getting harder by the day, and you are not going to win in the long run by playing street poker and “outplaying” everyone.
Instead, you will need to study the game, make good decisions over and over again, avoid tilting and spewing money away, game select, adopt the habits that make a great poker player, and focus on a solid understanding of GTO poker.
Once you become good enough at the game, you will notice your results will start to change for the better, and you will no longer feel like you are getting cheated, like the games are rigged, or like the world is out to get you.
Instead, you will find the spots in which you can win more than you lose, you will learn how to manage your bankroll and expectations, and you will eventually be able to tell the stories of when you thought online poker was rigged as anecdotes from the past.
Start your poker journey today by getting serious about studying the game of poker and things will start to turn around for you faster than you ever thought was possible.
