Online Poker: Random Hand Generation
I tend to be the paranoid type, especially when it comes to technology. After a handful of particularly brutal sessions on PokerStars, I sent an email to the site’’s management, asking them to explain how their “random” hands are created. I received the following well written, and intelligent reply. I’m posting it because the information is so interesting. Clearly, they’ve given this more than a little bit of thought. I guess that I’ll have to find a new excuse….
—– Original Message —–
From: xxxx
Sent: 2005/12/11 15:23:16
To: support@pokerstars.com
Subject: hand generation question
Dear PokerStars,
I play on several online sites. Bad beats happen everywhere, but on your site it seems that hands are set-up so that hands like 56 off suit are paired against premium pairs often. And all too often, the board comes with cards that favor the donkey that is overplaying his draw.
Can you explain to me how your hands are determined? Are hands ranked or filtered in anyway, so that these “elimination hands” come up on some predetermined interval?
Thanks in advance for your answer,
—– Response —–
Hello,
Thank you for your email. I can certainly understand your frustration; every poker player can.
Our site doesn”t filter or manipulate the hands in any way, nor is naything “predetermined”, but bad beats are a part of the game. If you doubt this, spend some time watching poker on TV, and you will see some horrific beats. Poker is capable of dealing some bad beats, but that is part of the excitement of the game. It isn”t anything anyone is doing to you on purpose, it’’s just the risk you take whenever you do anything that is determined by a random distribution of events ranging from the likely to the unlikely. Notice I didn”t say “from the sure-thing to the impossible”, as those extremes don”t exist in poker.
Our shuffle is completely random, favoring or disfavoring no player over any other. The computerized methods we use to shuffle the deck are more than sufficient to ensure complete randomization of the cards, and complete unpredictability of the cards to come. You can see the description of these methods at:
http://www.pokerstars.com/security.html
In addition, we track all hands dealt daily to see if there is any statistically significant variance.
In fact, we gave the source code to two independent auditors who reviewed our shuffle algorithm and found it sound and random. You may read the analyses of these auditors at:
http://www.pokerstars.com/rng_audit.html
We have dealt over 2,000,000,000 hands, and have freely given out real money hand histories any time somebody has requested them. Not once has anybody found any indication that our shuffle is not 100% random, and many who have undertaken such studies have posted their findings to the Internet. You may find just two of them here:
http://tinyurl.com/4lfeg
http://tinyurl.com/2nvav
If you have further questions about this, please don”t hesitate to contact us.
Regards,
Dan M.
PokerStars Support Team
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