Ever since the turn of the millennium, the world has seen an enormous boom in popularity of an old favorite. A game that's been around for nearly two hundred years, but has just recently caught on again due largely in part to its success on the internet. In 2003, a lowly accountant from Tennessee named Chris Moneymaker qualified in an online tournament for just $40, and after only a few days of play, walked away with $2.5 million in cold hard cash. What kind of game empowers complete amateurs to take on... and beat... some of the world's best and most experienced players?
You guessed it. Poker.
Ever since Moneymaker's fairy tale victory, online poker has seen growth on an unprecedented scale, with millions of new players scrambling to be the next amateur to crush the Johnny Chan's and Doyle Brunson's of the professional poker world. On any one of the dozen or so major online poker rooms, beginners flood the tables like a deluge of eager hopefuls, playing with frightening aggressiveness and nerves of steel... but more often with the rational judgment of lower primates.
They're referred to as "donkeys", which are mostly inexperienced players who take unnecessary risks, play with reckless abandon, and make extremely questionable decisions with very average poker hands. People like that, with money to flush down the drain and too much time on their hands, are quite deserving of a separate rant all by themselves. However, infuriating as these players are, one particular segment of this dimwitted population is even more annoying than the others. There isn't an official name for them, so I'll just make one up:
FAGBEE (Fucking Annoying Gambler Blaming Everyone Else).
The FAGBEE, a common breed of donkey, is identifiable by two common characteristics:
Characteristic #2 is the main subject of this rant, and for its duration I will present a comprehensive analysis of why online poker sites are not rigged, and why the FAGBEEs who think otherwise are, without question, intellectually deficient in one way or another.
Consider if you will, the online poker industry. From the beginning of 2003 to the end of 2005, the number of real money poker players online throughout the world at any given time has risen from under 5,000 to over 100,000. That means if you were to go on the internet right now, you would find over 100,000 people betting in real money poker games. On average, the pots for the total number of these games exceed $250,000,000 at any time of the day. Now, that amount is not a poker site's profit, just the money that players fight for amongst themselves. However, due to a system known as "rake", a certain percentage of every pot that is won by the players goes back to the poker site's parent company. Rake is usually very small (only a few cents per hand), but with hundreds of thousands of real money gamblers playing in millions of hands every day... rake adds up to major profits for online poker companies in no time.
So, online poker rooms make a huge amount of money... but are their profits legitimate? FAGBEEs claim that they are not, and that every time they lose a difficult bet it's because the hand was "rigged". Let us examine this viewpoint. First of all, every major online poker site uses RNGs (Random Number Generators) to deal poker hands. These consist of extremely complex mathematical algorithms that include Knuth's full shuffle algorithm, the MD5 Random Number Generator, and the SHA-1 crypto logical hash algorithm. What does this mean? Basically, it means online shuffles are even more random than real life ones. Also, on top of all these advanced randomizing systems, the RNGs of poker firms are tested and audited by independent firms such as PricewaterhouseCoopers and BMM International to ensure their legitimacy.
FAGBEEs either don't know anything about this, or they don't care. To a FAGBEE, the results of his play are the main determinants of whether or not his cards were rigged. For example, if a FAGBEE wins a hand on a very low percentage "suckout" (beating someone else's better hand by getting exactly the cards you need), he will not claim that his cards were rigged. However, if the situation is reversed and the FAGBEE loses, he will truly live up to his name and blame the entire universe for his "bad luck". Apparently, FAGBEEs simply fail to realize that occasionally losing very difficult hands is just the nature of poker. However, due to human psychology, a person will usually remember bad beats more than he will remember lucky wins, so the incessant whining of FAGBEEs can certainly be explained, if not condoned.
Other points that FAGBEEs don't take into consideration are fundamental entrepreneurial responsibility and basic economics. In other words... the fact that poker companies have no good reason to rig their cards. Just think about it. They're making money hand over fist anyway, so why would they risk their entire business just to give their patrons a bad experience?
If an online poker room was caught rigging their cards, their entire livelihood would be destroyed within a day. All their players would abandon them, their profits would evaporate, and they would most likely be threatened with severe litigation. All this just to make their players unhappy by causing them to lose?
I have a hard time understanding FAGBEE logic, but I've come to the conclusion that they just don't get it. If you lose a large amount of money playing online poker, it is because you risked too much of your money to begin with, not because the world is out to get you. The old saying is true: you can't lose what you don't put on the table, so if you can't afford to lose money then just don't play. I've personally seen dozens of online poker players complaining in poker chat rooms that they lost thousands of dollars, and that, "<insert name of poker site here> ALWAYS SCREWS ME, DON'T PLAY HERE, ITS A SCAM, EVERYTHING IS RIGGED", etc. Of course, you'd think that if their online poker room of choice was actually a scam, they'd just leave– but they usually don't. They just keep on playing and losing, screaming about it all the way.
Here's a startling revelation. If you lose consistently at online poker... it means you aren't very good at it. First, stop bitching. Failing that, stop playing. Either way, stop blaming everyone else for your lack of restraint and personal responsibility.
...and stop making me write rants about it. After all, I must have been forced to!
[EVula's Note: This was emailed to me on March 8, 2006. If you'll notice, it wasn't added until almost a year after Pikeman sent it to me. Real life sucks sometimes...]