SharePhil Galfond has tweeted about why grinders who believe the game is rigged are doomed to an existence of a losing player. The PLO ninja posted the seemingly innocuous tweet and received more than he bargained for, leading to a detailed explanation about why major poker sites would never fix the action on their platforms.
This is a topic that never gets old, as one poster replied. Losing players have long claimed that the sites are rigged against them for as long as online poker has been around. But why is this likely so? Galfond explains.
“Company Ethics As many have correctly pointed out: Several big companies in poker (& outside of it) have done shady things. I want to be clear that I don’t think all big sites are morally above rigging the RNGs for action. I just think they’d have to be idiots…”
The theory goes that sites are incentivised to create large pots in order to pocket the increased rake. Although that makes sense on the surface, it really wouldn’t help the site’s bottom line much at all and the fraud would create additional difficulties to manage.
“Most major sites have a rake percentage & a rake cap. As an example, at $100nl they might take 5% of the pot, up to a total of 3 big blinds. This means that once a pot is 60bbs, they don’t take any extra as the pot grows. Pushing pots to 200+VB doesn’t help, and…
“Even if they were to push a few more pots to 100bb instead of 25bb, it wouldn’t have a *huge* impact on their bottom line. Still, would a site try to get away with this for a moderate increase to their bottom line? Perhaps, but here’s why it wouldn’t work…”
Galfond explains that the marginally increased rake is more than offset by the fact that creating bigger pots artificially would cause players to go broke and leave, and others to win bigger and withdraw the winnings and also leave.
Liquidity is everything for a poker site, Galfond writes.
Then he delves into the monstrous expense of payment processing, a factor that users rarely consider. Creating extra win/loss flow would also increase costs for little gain.
“So my point wasn’t that big business aren’t willing to take the risk for a little extra $. It was that this isn’t the way. And I know some of you are thinking, “Well then sites could rig the RNG to make people see flops and pass medium pots back and forth!”…”
