I typed out the below in a reply to someone saying, yet again, about online poker being a fix.
Since no-one is looking at the original comment, I thought I would try and share it wider:
PROF. CLARI’s ANSWER TO ALL THE FIXER THEORISTS
I like this comment, I really do.
Its such a common statement seen here in games and online in cash games. Its usually a bad beat.
There is a serious element to this though, and one that I am more interested in, and that is all about the nature of random numbers and if a computer can truly generate a random number.
The simple answer to that is no. I have not the time to explain the detail, but my Doctorate has quite a bit of focus on AI algorithms within my field (theoretical physics).
IF you were to play with a simple non-algorithmic random number generator, statistically, and this is fuzzy logic or will sound so, you will see far more bad beats and, again from a fuzzy point of view put in poker terms ABC poker does not work.
I wish I had more time to study this, it is the reason that I started to play poker (two three months ago), but I don’t.
There is a good article about this at MIT’s website, and pay attention to this bit,
‘a CD player in “random” mode is probably really playing in pseudo-random mode, with a pattern that is discernible if you listen carefully enough.’
The simple answer then is, no, Replay is not fixed.