On Randomness
Recently a friend who plays online sent a rant in to a poker chat room I frequent. It was a spasm of paranoia about the random number generators (RNGs) used to "deal" cards online.
He is convinced that something is amiss; that someone, somewhere has it in for him - not to mention all the other innocent souls like him who, he suspects, are not on the "inside" of the site and not reaping the monetary rewards of rigged RNGs.
Because PokerListings is a major hub through which most of the world's major online poker sites can be accessed, this seems like a good place to examine my friend's concerns.
His suspicions got aroused by a series of unlikely outcomes, two-outers to be exact, that won large pots in those popular, rapid-fire sit-and-gos (SNGs). "It just can't happen," he howled. "It just can't. It is too wildly unlikely that this is occurring. It has to be rigged."
Actually, no: it doesn't have to be. In fact, it is exceedingly unlikely that the RNGs on the site in question or on any other are being compromised by someone on the inside who is out to get my friend.
Monkeying with an RNG is no simple matter, and controlling the outcome of the virtual cards without leaving your fingerprints all over the place is not simple.
Moreover, what would be the point? It is very much in a poker site's best interest to maintain scrupulously honest games. Any sites that are ever implicated in anything less than 100% honesty get hurt financially - badly.
For a company that operates in the elusive ether of the Internet, the loss of its patrons' trust is a wound that can be lethal. My friend is not being cheated by a "tweaked" RNG.
But he is a sensible fellow, smart, savvy and a pretty good poker player. What's going on here is actually a common psychological reaction to situations where there is a lack of control over events.
Now, of course, in poker we are pretty much used to this. We know we can't control the cards that are dealt to us, and we try to live with this. We often see players change seats or ask for a new setup for reasons that can only be called superstitious.
These requests are usually just a vain effort to try to establish control, to try to do something that will alter the outcomes.
To understand what's going on here, let's continue a discussion begun in a recent column on the concept of the locus of control.
People have different beliefs about where the source of control over events lies. Some are highly "external;" they tend to think that the causes of the good and bad things that happen to them are to be found in the external world.
Others are more "internal;" they are more likely to believe that they are responsible for things that happen.
Externalizers tend to blame others when things go amiss; internalizers usually look to themselves for things they may not have done right. Generally, internalizers do better in life. I suspect that they are also better poker players.
If they get sucked out on three times in a row in online SNGs, they say to themselves, "That's poker" and sign up for the next one with the full recognition that the RNGs dealing the cards have no memory of the previous three games.
But, logic aside, RNGs are a rich source of paranoid thinking. They have no soul, no pity, no patterns, no purpose and no memory. They don't make any sense and we don't have any control over them.
They are random number generators, and people flat-out hate randomness.
And we should. We're a thoughtful species. We see patterns everywhere, we're good at detecting purpose and structure, we have well-developed memory systems.
We don't like it when we can't find these things in the world about us. And when these nutty, unpredictable suck-outs win huge pots, when screamingly improbably outcomes win, they fertilize the more suspicious parts of your mind. Paranoia enters, stage left.
It may be tough to grasp, but when randomness is doing its thing, wacko stuff happens. It has to happen and it will keep happening. There are so many wildly improbably things that can happen in poker that some of them are bound to happen.
Almost everything that happens in poker and the rest of life is unlikely. You flop a set three times in an hour. Unlikely but cool. You win money and forget about it. Three opponents hit sets against you and you chew on the felt for hours, days.
But, of course, there are eight or nine bozos out there, so the likelihood of this happening to you is a lot higher than that of it happening for you. Capice?
One more tidbit to chew on here. Some years ago the Rand Corporation (I've always liked the implied pun in this story) compiled a list of random numbers. This was before the development of RNGs, so they used a series of other methods.
After they had 1 million digits, they analyzed the list for "randomness." It wasn't really random. There were all kinds of odd features to it.
But they could not find any biases in it - in the sense that they could not predict which number would come up next by analyzing the sequence of previous digits.
In short, it was "random." If your brain doesn't hurt now, it will in a few minutes.
Take-home message: Don't sweat the wacko features of those SNGs. Be more "internal" and work on your game.
Author Bio:
Arthur Reber has been a poker player and serious handicapper of thoroughbred horses for four decades. He is the author of The New Gambler's Bible and coauthor of Gambling for Dummies. Formerly a regular columnist for Poker Pro Magazine and Fun 'N' Games magazine, he has also contributed to Card Player (with Lou Krieger), Poker Digest, Casino Player, Strictly Slots and Titan Poker. He outlined a new framework for evaluating the ethical and moral issues that emerge in gambling for an invited address to the International Conference of Gaming and Risk Taking.
Until recently he was the Broeklundian Professor of Psychology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Among his various visiting professorships was a Fulbright fellowship at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. Now semi-retired, Reber is a visiting scholar at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
More strategy articles from Arthur S. Reber:
Comments
3Arty Smokes
2011-06-07It's crazy how many supposedly intelligent and well-balanced people think poker sites are rigged in some sort of conspiracy against them. Why would the site engineer an app that handicapped particular players and gave them losing cards? That would be both difficult to program and kind of pointless anyway, as sites make their money from the rake. (They want people to believe the game is random, so that they will keep playing until they get better luck). It's so much simpler to use an RNG. The RNG doesn't care who is playing; it dishes out cards randomly.
I used to hate how sometimes a fish would get runner runners against the odds, but these days I just laugh when it happens. Yesterday I had 88 and flopped a full with a flop of 855. I shoved, hoping someone had a 5, but one person called with pocket 7s. The turn and river were both 7s, giving him quads. A bad beat for sure, as the chances of it happening were about 1 in 1000, but the thing about random numbers and probability is that the 1000-1 chance does actually happen once every thousand times. If runner runner quads happened more commonly than that I might suspect something is up, but in the previous 1000 hands I saw runner runner blanks.
zyg0tic
2009-03-19Wait a second... you're saying that because the RNG's generate numbers that are perfectly random over hundreds of million incarnations, that is somehow proof that it's not random after all?
Do you even think about what you're saying before you say it?
go to www.random.org there's a 100% perfectly random number generator for free on the internet. If they can do it for free, I'm pretty sure poker sites can do it.
cristi
2009-03-19I have a question:
When poker site's RNGs are checked, the numbers always coincide with the mathematichal probability of the thing happening.
U're supposed to get aces 0.45% of the time (might be mistaken here). Well somehow when RNGs are checked, aces are dealt 0.45% of the time (or really close to that). Since they calculate for millions of hands, long term may apply, but still:
They are Random No. Gen. but they generate so closely (almost perfectly) to the mathematical truth.
So yes they generate corectly, but i think that somehow action is encouraged by these RNGs. For example u get aces 5 times in 1000 hands. Ok. Mathematically true. But u win the blinds 3 times, get sucked out once, and win a small pot the third time.
I think that variance is the shield behind witch RNG operate in the interest of the poker site.