Reply #18: You seriously fail to understand how this works [View All]

[localroger]

First, "temporary runs of luck," both good and bad, are normal. In fact, if you never see such "suspicious" runs it's evidence that the game is not random. (As Knuth once wrote about computer random number generators, if your RNG can't pump out a string of twenty zeroes it's not random -- that result is just as likely as any other sequence of 20 numbers.) It is the fact that we tend to notice and seize on these temporary runs and draw unwarranted conclusions from them that keeps casinos open.

Second, there are a lot of pro players out there who log every single hand they ever play. There is custom software for this which is constantly updated to maintain compatibility with the ever evolving proprietary casino software. And with the amount of data these people collect, any systemic cheating either by players or the casino quickly becomes obvious. In fact this is exactly how the Absolute Poker situation was uncovered, and I can assure you that if the same situation were ever to occur anywhere else it would quickly be uncovered there too.

Casino sites have nothing to gain by cheating. They make as much money as they can haul off by being as completely open and honest as possible, so that people will trust them and play their games. If you have a license to print twenty dollar bills, you'd be a complete fool to risk losing it by printing hundreds instead.

Gambling can be destructive, and very definitely is destructive to some people. That's a valid argument and one can argue that computer driven games are more addictive than old-school tables and slots, because of the animations and speed. This is a particular problem with video poker, aka the "crack cocaine of gambling." But you spoil your argument by singling out one corner of the industry, ignoring the rest, and accusing them of cheating based on a few anecdotes and an historical fraud that was caught by its very own victims with simple pervasive technology.