Quote Originally Posted by zakalwe View Post
The winner is pre-determined by virtue of the fact that you have invested your money in a venture that makes a promises you randomness. By making that investment you are resting in the knowledge that such has been provided. The software is nothing more than the vehicle in which your currency will travel. What I am trying to say is lost on you.

Your participation in the process puts your funds at risk, regardless of the strength/weakness of your hand. The gentleman that collects your entry fee to this particular show cannot lose as long as he can convince those like you that what you are receiving is a random game. You are taking part in a simulation, the simulation of an underlying concept that to date, to my knowledge, has resisted incapsulation by any method.

Do you truly believe that a software developer/designer can give you a tangible version of randomness?

If you do believe such, perhaps you, can inform me, as to the current whereabouts of the great man. I too would like to live with the fairies, I am led to believe by my little one that they really are very nice and can turn sand into gold.
Yes, the random number generators used in ANY computer program is not random. If you play Yahtzee on your home computer, the dice rolls aren't truly random either. Does that mean that the Yahtzee program on my iphone is rigged to get me to play longer? Or perhaps it is rigged to get me to buy more apps? Of course not.

The fact that a computer program cannot truly generate a random number in NO way implies that a particular program is rigged. Yes, this applies even for online poker games.

Now I will let you in on a little secret. The shuffle of a deck of cards in a casino or in a home game is NOT random either! In fact, its a good deal less random than a computer random number generator. In fact, card sharps even take advantage of this fact by doing shuffle tracking (Ben Mezrich has a book about an MIT team who used the non-randomness of hand shuffles and advanced tracking techniques to win millions from casinos in blackjack). Does this mean that every poker or casino game everywhere in the world is rigged? Wouldn't brick and mortar casinos have the same motive that online ones do to scam their customers? Can you really trust those "automated shufflers" that take the cards from the felt under the table and then "shuffle" them? Of course, these notions are silly, and so is your notion that online poker games must be rigged.

I suggest that perhaps Occam's Razor may be in order here. It is very easy to use an off the shelf open source random number generator and build a computer poker program around it. It is infinitely more difficult to build a non random number generator that can anticipate the play of random stangers to simulate ... you know what, I can't even begin to describe how this would work. Im not going to even try.