I would have let this go because I have zero interest in engaging with you but since you used Alinsky tactics, it shouldn’t go un-responded to. For people who don’t know who Saul Alinsky was, he was a tactician who wrote the manual for how people with bad ideas can still succeed and not have to worry about pesky little things like facts or merit. Of the many tactics he promoted, the use of straw men and misattribution of statements were 2 of his favorites.
Mr. Dirk 1st claimed that unnamed people were making statements that were false and jumped in to correct the record. Of course no one was actually making those claims so Mr. Dirk simply made them up and rebutted them all on his own. When he was called out for doing this, he went to page 2 of the Alinsky playbook and claimed I had made certain statements that he found to be wrong and “hilarious”. Let’s set the record straight a second time and see if Mr. Dirk continues his charade or walks away with some dignity left.
I did not make fun of people for being good poker players. I made fun of people who felt the need to overly complicate simple situations for no other reason than they wanted to sound intelligent.
I have never said that I’m a good poker player - In fact, have explicitly said that I’m a low stakes donkey. Its even in my profile.
I have never claimed to identify “patterns” that aren’t real. What I have done is mention that flops/boards that should only occur once every 400+ hands were appearing at a rate 7 times more frequently than that. What expertise is required to count the number of 3-of-a-kind flops over the course a night?
You did get 1 thing right and that is I did say people are taking this site too seriously. Good for you, you’re batting .250 with your last post, which is .250 higher than your last one.
Alinsky knew that a certain percentage of people would believe whatever tripe someone said, no matter how obviously false. He also knew that people get tired of correcting the record over and over and so sometimes let the malign statements go unchallenged. That is why I am addressing this rather than just letting it go as the nonsense it is. There may be impressionable people here who are uncurious, unintelligent or from Oregon that may have bought what Mr. Dirk was selling.
@JoeDirk - I didn’t go personal with you but you seem to want to go there with me. So, I’ll give you one of my expert reads for free: You enjoy the theory of poker but you don’t actually play it other than here, do you? You like the thought of playing high-level games without actually having to risk anything. Now that’s fine with me but please don’t lecture me about what is and isn’t real poker because I’m pretty sure I’m right and you don’t put yourself out there and try the real thing. Enjoy yourself here. Enjoy the theory and have as much fun as you want with it. I’m happy for you if this is what you enjoy. Just keep the snarky to yourself about things you don’t know much about. You come off like the newly-minted MBA student who thinks he knows how to run a company because he has a piece of paper and a summer internship under his belt. Have fun doing whatever it is you do and try not to go out of your way to argue with people needlessly.
Now it is time for me to leave these forums and hopefully not need to return for anything other than a friendly conversation. Who the hell needs to deal with nonsense like this, especially on a play-chip poker site?
I’ve been watching this for weeks…
-Psychologically, it is pretty easy to think poker is rigged based on 2 factors.-
-First, you don’t see “the process” (e.g. the shuffling and dealing) so the whole “man behind the curtain” thing kicks in.- Second,- More importantly, though, is that online play is much faster. Let’s assume 20 hands per hour live and around 60 hands per hour online. If there is a 1 in 1000 circumstance, you will see it occur 3x faster than in live play. So Online is simply due to the speed of play, So you will see less common occur more frequently.
-Now insert some of the lesser known cognitive biases such as availability bias (remembering something that has happened more recently), negativity bias (remembering negative events more strongly than positive ones), Humans remember “negatives” faster than most other events due to our survival nature, (helps us live longer) and cementing it all together, the confirmation bias (see? I knew this site was rigged! There’s proof!").
-The bottom line is that because of the much more rapid interaction, combined with the mystery of the unknown, people will always believe that online poker, cards, casinos, and other games must be rigged.
As long as there’s no evidence to support either theory, both theories are equally valid, until definite proof is provided.
As I said before, it’s not wrong to keep an open mind to both possibilities, and not take one side or the other without any definite and final proof.
One could give thousands of examples on how human nature can make people more suspicious of normal events.
One could also give thousands of examples on how human nature can make people juice things up in their businesses to attract more customers.
So many examples could be given to support both theories. But as long as there’s no hard evidence, they’ll always be theories.
No, you will not see the less common occur more frequently. You will see the same frequency but in a more condensed timeframe. A 1:1000 event should still occur 1 in 1000 times but the 1000 events may take 50 hours live as opposed to 16.67 hours online. Frequencies of results are independent of how often the event being looked at occurs per X amount of time.
Interesting thought that the greater the number of instances per hour (despite the same frequency) could affect someone’s perceptions though. I hadn’t thought about that before and will need to let that idea germinate for a while to see if it makes sense. It sounds right from 1st read even though it doesn’t actually matter from a mathematical standpoint.
I am a nerd about this stuff but words matter and definitions matter.
On the idea of repetition, do you have any sources you could point me to so I can read a bit more about it? The idea that people may get different impressions from identical frequencies occurring at different speeds sounds very interesting. I don’t know of any studies on how this has been observed and I’d like to read about it.
I guess someone who receives compensation for promoting a point of view cannot possibly be biased…but is free to assign various biasses to dozens of others because they hold a different point of view.
I’ll put this bluntly.
I do not accept the idea that it is appropriate for a Replay Rep to suggest that some kind of bias has colored my opinions, but it is inappropriate for me to suggest that a Rep’s opinion might be biased by the fact that they are receiving compensation from Replay.
If silencing people is how this debate is going to proceed, why have it at all?
I will leave you to do whatever you choose, You have your mind set. And the fact that I volunteered to be a Rep gives you more options to state your opinions, then so be it. I won’t fall for this. Just stating things that you can look up yourself. I’d start with college papers from Harvard, or Princeton under the topic of “Bias Studies”
Didn’t see a friend request and I’m sorry if I mistook that comment as meant for me. It followed my asking a question about where to find these studies so I assumed it was. Post has been deleted by me.
Your post went to my email, and I thought it was funny and did not get offended, But I did see how some, possibly many would have. Not because you were attacking me, but because you were hitting a whole group. If you think “I am Bias” that would be fine (I’m not, and really don’t worry about what others think) but you can’t classify others as if they were me. hope that clears up things for you.
Updated numbers. I added in the number of boards with 3 cards to a flush showing by the river. I also corrected my count of boards with a 4-flush - my total before incorrectly included turns with a 4-flush that didn’t reach the river.
Times seen
% happened
Times expected
% expected
Flop with 2-flush
1115
53.89%
1139
55.06%
Monotone flop
113
5.46%
107
5.18%
River board with 3-flush
472
32.66%
496
34.33%
River board with 4-flush
63
4.36%
62
4.29%
River board with 5-flush
2
0.14%
3
0.21%
Paired flop
336
16.24%
351
16.94%
Flop all same value
2
0.10%
5
0.24%
Overall it doesn’t seem like there is anything here that is out of line from what you’d expect from random chance.
How did you track this? Manually? Very small sample size to get a handle on the lower probability events but its informative nonetheless. The only large deviation from expected values came from the 3-of-a-kind flops - seen at less than half the expected rate. Because they are expected to occur so infrequently, there isn’t much significance in that finding.
Haha, I love numbers, it’s true. However, even I am not number-crazy enough to count thousands of flops by hand.
From the activity page, I expanded the sessions so that all of the hands were loaded. Then I copied the source HTML into Excel. Excel magic from there to manipulate it into something usable for calculating.
Agreed on the sample size. It would be much better to run this with say 100k hands instead.
I was expecting to see, for example, 3-flush boards occurring at a slightly higher rate than expected because people so love to chase flushes meaning boards with that potential are more likely to get to the river. On the other hand, there are removal effects - there are fewer possible flush cards to fall if there are flush cards in someone’s hand - so maybe this cancels out to some degree. All of my expected probabilities were calculated based simply on drawing 5 cards at random from the deck.
