The Math of the Deal.

Several years ago, a computer engineering team (can't remember the exact school they were from) decided to beat the slot machines. They managed to shell out the cash to buy an old model that was still widely used in their state's casinos. They reverse engineered the source code, and found that the slot machine's programmers had poorly implemented a common random number generator: they intended to make it simpler to work with the slot machine's limited computational capabilities, but without that key piece of code, the RNG's output was almost completely predictable based on its last few outputs. The team made over a million dollars playing these machines before they were caught and tried.

It's a fascinating story, but I can't find it at the moment.

However, the points are this: 1) you'd need to know the exact RNG and shuffling algorithms used by the individual poker site, and 2) the algorithms would need to be very poorly implemented. There would be no 'catch-all' solution. Furthermore, I'm willing to bet a large amount of money that the majority of poker sites use hardware RNGs as the source of their random bits, against which this attack would be completely irrelevant.

There's also the fact that a decent, well-implemented RNG would never (again, by "never" I mean "never in the lifespan of the universe") shuffle a deck of cards the same way twice. There are 52! (52 factorial) ways to shuffle a deck of cards. That's roughly 8 followed by 67 zeroes. If you can beat odds of that number to one, you don't need to play poker. Just go ahead and win a few lotteries.

So the database these people are compiling is useless. (Assuming they are even compiling anything, and not just spitting out random answers.)


I asked about this topic on PokerEdge forums under "fuzzy math". I was told that FT runs a reshuffle after hole cards, then flop then each street therafter to defeat any possible reverse rng program from working. The main one advertised states that it will show at least one other players hole cards and 3 cards that will hit the board by the river. I asked if this reshuffling would effect winning odds ie 2-1 of completing 4 flush by river ect. I was told that since it's the same number of remaining cards, that the odds did not change. I asked this after having, as most of you probably have too, my allin flop bet on trips or flopped straight being beat by AXs sucking out a runner runner flush on me.

I've also been card dead (Sklansky group Cool for 30- 50 hands and saw one section of the table getting a high concentration of group 3 and above.
But those suck outs are beyond my control. ie, some donk calling my AA allin push with J4s and flushing me out. When I actually get ITM in a STT, I still place first more than anything else. (20 finishes ITM 11 wins)