You know how it is. You’ve committed all your chips in a huge pot that is critical to your chances of cashing in the tournament. You have your opponent crushed with only three outs to the win and as always they hit their miracle card on the river. After smashing a few things and swearing profusely at your computer screen, you mutter ‘internet poker is rigged’ and promise to never to play this stupid game again. So is there any truth in the statement?

The high profile Absolute Poker scandal from last year confirms that it is definitely possible for an unfair player advantage to exist. In this case it was a handful of unscrupulous individuals lining their pockets as opposed to the poker site itself, although admittedly they did have very close ties to Absolute Poker which got them access to the ‘Super User’ accounts in the first place.

Disturbing as this scandal was, I don’t take it as a sign that every single poker site and poker game out there is somehow setup in a way that I’m pre-destined to lose. If that was the case, there wouldn’t be any online professionals making a living out of the game. Any suspicious results or plays are normally found to be the result of player collusion rather than the site screwing you over (they do that quite publicly with their rake anyway).

Collusion by itself isn’t confirmation that online poker is rigged, so much as a validation of the fact there will always be cheating in any competitive arena where there is a gain to be made. This is seen across many sports, not just poker. The best a discerning player can hope to do is remain vigilant and report any suspicions to the site for further investigation.

A lot of the time the naysayers point towards those occasions when they’ve got their opponent to commit to a pot with the worst of it and then subsequently get sucked out on, e.g you hold AK and your opponent holds AQ with all the money going in pre-flop. The expectation in this situation is that AK is SUPPOSED to win; when it doesn’t our first reaction is there must be something insidious going on. Players will grumble it happens way too often to them for it to be coincidence.

The fact of the matter is you may only be about a 2:1 favourite in this spot – so roughly 30% of the time you can expect to lose or draw. You won’t remember the times when you win because that was what was expected anyway and the norm. The hands that jump out are the ones that are not ordinary. This is accentuated even more if it happens to be a huge pot that is critical to your success at the tables that day.

Volatility and variance can add to this feeling of everything going against you even more. All poker players have reported ‘cold streaks’ where they just can’t seem to catch a break. This is a widely accepted phenomenon across the poker community and something that all players have to work their way through at one point or another.

Poker sites for the most part are well regulated and even have boffins in white coats to make sure there’s no scullduggery and that the RNG algorithms are truly unpredictable At the end of the day we’ve all had suspicions of there being an online poker conspiracy, but I think Mulder and Scully can probably rest easy on this one.