Is Online Poker Rigged?

Complete Tests:

 

Is Online Poker Rigged?

Test Results by Site:




Is online poker rigged or fair? At online poker watchdog we analyse millions of actual hands* for evidence of rigging...

Mission

Our mission at Online Poker Watchdog is to monitor online poker for fairness, while looking for cheating or rigging. We aim to test individual poker sites using statistical analysis and then publish the results openly for the public to see.

We are proud to be independent and objective. We let the statistics talk for themselves and publish the results of our analyses no matter how they turn out.

Innocent until proven guilty! We assume that each poker room doesn't cheat but we put them to the test by analysing millions of hands for anomalies that could show rigging or cheating in online poker. We use hand histories from hands that have actually been played and we analyse these hands from shuffle to showdown - this is a much more rigorous test than the RNG tests that the poker sites provide. See this article for some reasons why.

All this takes time and money so why bother? At Online Poker Watchdog we are poker players too. We want to have confidence that the games we play are fair. We feel that independent, objective testing is an essential part of helping prevent rigging or cheating in online poker and to maintain fair games.

Good luck at the tables!

How We Survive

After running the first few analyses it became clear that continually running and publishing new tests would require some financial input. We had been funding the site from our winnings at the poker tables but we quickly realised that this would not be sustainable if we wanted to continue this research long-term. It costs money to get the web-page updated, hand histories are cheap but we use huge volumes for every test and then there is the time spent designing and running the analyses.

The solution for us was to support the site through earnings from affiliate links and advertising to web-sites that offer high-quality products. Simply put, if someone clicks through from one of our links and then purchases a product we will earn a small percentage of the cost of that product. In this way, we hope to continue to run tests and analyses for some time to come.

However, we don't place affiliate links for just anyone. We feel that it is vitally important to maintain our objectivity.  So we don't place affiliate links to sites that may have vested interests in the results of our tests. For example, we don't place affiliate or advertising links directly to the poker sites that we are testing.

Also, the quality of the products we link to is really important to us - we see our affiliate and advertising links as a recommendation and only link sites that have products and services that we would be happy to use ourselves. For example, we do place links to the sites that we buy our hand histories from and sites that offer good quality tracking software*.

We also maintain independence from sites that we place affiliate and advertising links to - they have no control over our content and don't endorse us in any way.

We feel that it is important to be clear which links are affiliate and advertising links and which are not. To be totally transparent we have placed an asterix* beside every text link that is an affiliate link (all banner links are affiliate links).

For example PTR* and HandHQ* are affiliate links to hand history providers and these links could potentially help us to fund more tests, but Noted Poker Authority is a normal link to a good article by Ed Millar about potential manipulation of the deck.

If you found these tests useful and want to see more please donate:

 

Contact Us

Please feel free to contact us at:

[email protected]

We are usually happy to exchange links with other relevant, poker related sites. To submit visit our directory.