Is Online Poker Rigged?

Every time 100 poker players lose a hand online, at least 50 of them will blame the poker room and the poker client. The idea is that the evil and cruel people behind the software should somehow deliberately have single out specific players to lose in a given hand.

"It's rigged" – meaning that someone purposely tampered with the cards – is one of the outbursts you'll read most frequently in the chat, after a player has just lost a hand. And it really is striking how often players automatically blaming their losses on the poker room and the software instead of maybe themselves are also not very good players.

The game is not rigged, and the software is not programmed to make certain people lose at certain times – no matter how many disgruntled players will claim the opposite after yet another lost hand.
It's fair and random. The poker room simply has no interest in any particular player losing.
The one and only interest the poker room has is to maintain as high a degree of integrity and credibility as possible. This is the only way to ensure that the players keep coming back to play.

"Random" is the key word in the software, and this is where the very core of the programming lies.
There's an immense focus on the randomisation of the virtual decks of cards used at the tables, and in the programs running on the poker rooms' servers this is done by a so-called "RNG" – a "Random Number Generator". This "RNG" controls the exact composition of each and every deck of cards in every hand at every table.

At Full Tilt Poker for instance, the complete randomness is achieved by the "RNG" in fact shuffling the virtual deck of cards four times during a single hand of Texas Hold'em. This is done mainly to secure a uniquely high degree of randomisation but also to prevent any kind of cheating.
The deck is shuffled once before the hole cards are dealt, and it's shuffled again before the flop, the turn and the river. And the reason why the deck is shuffled again before the flop, turn and river, is that this effectively prevents even the most clever hacker from installing any kind of software able to "peak" at the cards in the deck.
It simply doesn't get more random than that.

Bad streaks and unlucky beats are parts of poker, and from time to time you'll feel like no matter what you do, you still lose. But even the best of hands will on occasion lose to pure junk, and even the best of players will experience losing to absolute ignorants.
Some players just find it much more convenient when this happens to blame the poker room and the software for their loss instead of facing the fact that maybe they just got unlucky – or maybe the played their hand really poorly. It's probably an ego thing.


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