Ridiculous

[StinkyFaces]

Too many suck outs on turns and rivers. Having the best hand pre flop or post flop gets cracked more often than it should. The site rewards loose aggressive players...the opposite of real Texas Hold Em.

[stillframe]

Too many suck outs on turns and rivers. Having the best hand pre flop or post flop gets cracked more often than it should. The site rewards loose aggressive players...the opposite of real Texas Hold Em.

Are you claiming that the turn and river cards are not random - that they are selected to hit hands of players still in the pot?

[StinkyFaces]

Too many suck outs on turns and rivers. Having the best hand pre flop or post flop gets cracked more often than it should. The site rewards loose aggressive players...the opposite of real Texas Hold Em.

Are you claiming that the turn and river cards are not random - that they are selected to hit hands of players still in the pot?

Not necessarily. My folded hands would have caught winning hands on the turn/river as well, too many times to be deemed random. My claim is that the site rewards loose aggressive players.

[ErikLevin]

So the game has implemented an algorithm that analyses each players play style, to determine whether they are loose-aggressive?

Furthermore, it considers which turn or river card would benefit a specific player, very subtly, and it provides better river cards for loose-agressive players?

The game has done this, which would be a thousand times more complex to implement than just a normal random pull from the deck because...?

[BarnardsStar]

Not necessarily. My folded hands would have caught winning hands on the turn/river as well, too many times to be deemed random. My claim is that the site rewards loose aggressive players.

It does—by not playing for any sort of real stakes. But that’s it.

The site does not say “here’s the river, what cards haven’t been used, ok 9♣︎ hasn’t been used yet, I’ll make that be the river.” No—the site actually shuffles the deck of cards (well, puts them in a random order), which means that you are seriously suggesting that the algorithm can tell who’s going to get which cards, and that putting the 9♣︎ 17th from the top of the deck is going to really make somebody’s day (because the third card from the top was the 9♠︎ and the 9th card was the 9♦︎ etc). You can see this sort of rigging gets tricky, and to do it subtly enough for plausible deniability?? Ridiculously hard.

And for what purpose? “To reward aggressive players”, sure, but why would the site want to do that?

Here’s what I think: you might have a regular poker night with some friends, where you play 30 or so hands of poker once a week, and then you come here and can play 100 hands every single night. Yeah, you’re gonna see strange stuff a lot more often, But the brain only really remembers the numerator: you remember that pocket aces might be something that happened to a player at your poker night twice a month, and you come here and you get pocket aces several times a week!

It doesn’t mean anything is wrong with the randomizer and it doesn’t mean the site is rewarding loose aggressive play. It just means you’re seeing a lot more hands (the denominator) in one month here than you’ve seen in ten years IRL.

[stillframe]

Not necessarily. My folded hands would have caught winning hands on the turn/river as well, too many times to be deemed random. My claim is that the site rewards loose aggressive players.

It does—by not playing for any sort of real stakes. But that’s it.

An interesting point! But still I think not quite valid here.

What matters is not what the stakes are, rather only that the players care about the stakes. We are used to poker being for money, but nothing is stopping players from caring about their results for other reasons, for example rating and arena points. After all, no game on BGA is played for money, but most players still care about winning.

(This is only a tangent. Of course the OP's conspiracy claim is still absurd.)

[tangokuningas]

I don't think OP meant this but his claim is actually true.

The game meachanics themselves are okay, what is broken is the combination of poker + ELO rated games.

The ELO rating system makes each game basically a poker tournament with asymmetrical payouts. If 300 elo and 100 elo players play a match, the lower rated player gains 12 elo on a win and loses 3 elo on a loss. The 100 elo player should go for high variance and set up as many as possible near 50/50 situations. As soon as blinds raise even a bit the lower rated player can be jamming almost any slightly strong hand in the blinds since they are gaining 12 elo points on a win and losing 3 elo poins on a loss. The cost of being unlucky is just too high for the higher rated player so they wouldn't be happy being all in preflop with AK suited against any other connected hand. This truly breaks the dynamics of the game.

I think this is fundamentally a real problem that truly rewards "Loose and aggressive" playstyle in specific match settings.

[Jol_]

I believe this is discussed in another thread before - the 100-ELO "safety net" may reward these "loose aggressive" playstyles. 100-ELO players would easily go all in pre-flop with all sorts of trash hands and this "safety net" makes their all-in riskless. I just had a game with 5 100-ELO players and 4 of them just went all in the first hand. With 3 players eliminated and the fast blinds increase, the rest of the game was just pre-flop push/fold. No one got to see a flop at all.

IMHO this ELO system may make sense in other games but probably not poker.

[ErikLevin]

I think you have cause and effect reversed. Maybe those players are stuck at Elo 100 because they go all in on the first hand.

In general I think many in this thread are overthinking things, analysing why this or that factor encourages certain bad playstyles. Good play will still win more than bad play and those who play good poker will over time accrue higher rating than those who play bad poker. Of course the lack of monetary stakes means that not so great players can stick around for longer without getting tired of losing too much money.

[Jol_]

I believe tango has done a better job than me at explaining the risk/reward dynamics at different ELO levels.

In other BGA games, the better skills/decision making you have, the better the ELO. In poker, it works two-way - better decision making gives better ELO, and at the same time ELO affects decision making.

Tango's post is quite detailed haha - the risk/reward dynamics work differently on players across different ELO levels. In general lower ELO means a better reward/risk trade-off, so in a lot of push/fold decisions it works in their best interest to shove a wider range of their hands. In contrast, higher ELO players need to play super "nitty" and overfold a lot of hands.

To be more specific, if you gain 12 ELO points on a win and lose 3 points on a loss against a high ELO player, a 20% win rate is enough to give you positive EV in terms of ELO. That means until heads-up play, the lower-ELO player could shove all-in with 100% of his range and the higher-ELO player should only call with TT+ (which has around 80% equity against a random hand). And don't get me wrong - this is a positive-EV all-in and I'd call it good gameplay.

IRL poker tournaments there is similar consideration called ICM (I hate to bring this term up) which has prominent effect on poker gameplay. In BGA, it's a more extreme variation. As soon as high-ELO and low-ELO players sit on the same table, the difference in risk/reward trade-off is already predetermined at the start of the game.

My bad for overthinking things.