Where can I play Online BJ Tournaments?

[zweeky]

My opinion is not much different from what RKuczek wrote. I have no indication that would make me think it's rigged.

I did notice however, that on ANY online site, many players continually complain in the chat box, especially in poker, that "this site is a joke" meaning it must be rigged. For example, every time the card on the river helps the guy with the weakest starting hand, someone complain about the site's integrity. So many players think they're good when they win and they're robbed when they lose. This is true for ALL online sites.

Recently, Phil Hellmuth was playing in a TBJ Sit N Go at UB. Phil did not chat, but his presence did attract many observers who opened the table and they were talking to Phil. One of them wrote: "Phil, it's dangerous to play BJ online because the computer controls the algorithm". I thought that line was pretty funny!

Honesty can never be proven without a doubt, I think it's for each and everyone to decide what they can trust.

 

[Tourney Cut]

Glad to hear you're doing well there, RK. Love to read about our forum members doing well in BJT's, be they live or otherwise. :cheers:

The "rigged" conclusion came after I personally experienced a run of 50-some BJT hands and won exactly two of those. Someone with a better math brain than mine figured out that the odds of that are in the neighborhood of 1.5 trillion to one. Trillion! Sure, with the variance associated with any game involving playing cards, anything can happen, but to paraphrase Stanford Wong when he addressed the matter of someone claiming to have been dealt three consecutive straight flushes in 3-card poker - "In other words, it cannot happen." When I'd had enough of that and tried to withdraw my balance, it took months to get my cash and it was finally accomplished when I did an end run around them by buying a prepaid credit card to make a deposit then withdrawing the entire balance. This was despite the fact that the account was first seeded with my own money, but they demanded another deposit before they'd pay off.

Obviously RK is enjoying an entirely different experience and I'm glad to hear it. Perhaps all the brouhaha over the poker cheating scandal there forced them to clean up their act. I hope so.

My question with this situation was were you playing BS for all those hands? I would assume that there were some hands that you had to make some odd moves. Would that have screwed the results at all or would that matter very little. That does seem to be an odd number to lose. Likewise I seem to be winning there on what seems to be an odd number of hands (not that I'm complaining). I haven't been tracking them or anything but I've played my fair share of blackjack and sometimes it feels odd to win so frequently. That's what made your post stand out to me.

By the way, I know that without tracking my hands I'm posting pure voodoo but until I feel the swings are going south I may never check the math

 

[RKuczek]

Probabilities

Looking at the odds of winning only 2 out of 50 hands - yes this would be very rare, but, not impossible to have happen. No matter how rare, rare does not equal impossible. Using the Chang BioScience probability calculator, the probability of winning 2 or fewer hands out of 50 would be 4.576493E-10. That's about one out of 2,185,079,273, even rarer than you calculated (using 43% as the probability of winning a hand). However, I have played about 4,000 SnGs and tournaments on UB over the last 3 1/2 years plus, I would guess. So, say, about 8,000 tables, at an average of 15 hands each? Not unreasonable. So, that is roughly 120,000 opportunities for that rare event to occur in my play. That gives me a probability that I would at some point in my playing on UB go 50 hands in a row with only two winning hands out of the fifty, one or more times, of 5.490061E-5, or, one out of 18,215. Certainly not prohibitive odds, though still pretty unlikely. Given the number of TBJ players, tournaments and SnGs, and hands played, which would certainly be far more than the ones I have played, say my personal play represents 1/1,000 of all play on UB, then the odds that a sequence of fifty hands with only 2 or fewer wins would occur, at least once to at least one player, is...5.34%. Not all that unlikely.

Possibly you were just the one who got bitten, Leftnut?

Though I admit, if it had happened to me early on in my play on UB, I would almost certainly have come to the same conclusion as you did.

My bottom line is that I don't think I am such a brilliant player that I could consistently for 3 1/2 years beat a rigged game (though I could be wrong about this, of course), nor could I really see why UB would want to rig the TBJ games, to disadvantage certain players in a small money game, where their profit comes from rake, not from the play. If the probabilities are abnormal, in terms of the cards dealt, then most likely it would affect all the players equally, and there would be a level playing field as a result. So skilled play should still give you an advantage.

I would hold out it is possible that UB might want to cheat individual players at regular BJ, and, if using the same software algorithms for their TBJ dealing as for their regular BJ dealing, then individual players could be affected adversely by this, increasing the probability of losing a hand, or, possibly hands with large bets, etc. Or that there could be abnormalities that would adversely affect players who use a certain style of play? All is possible, with poorly regulated on-line casinos, for sure. I certainly can't disprove that this type of thing is happening, though I can't prove it is either, it is simply impossible to track enough hands and players over enough time to determine if it is, either way. So one can enjoy whatever level of paranoia one wishes. I happily have my paranoid moments when the highly improbable hits me.

But I do know, without doubt, at this point in time, that the EBJ tournaments and SnGs on UB are beatable over the long term, which gives me some faith they can't be too crooked or skewed.

 

[felix215]

My rigged questions

I went from winning consistantly over a very long period of time in their MTT elimination tourneys to rarely making it out of the 1st round. It continued for several months until the game died. It got to the point where I would just say my goodbyes before the elimination hand started. I don't have statistics to back that up. My results are comingled with poker results at the time.

When you play multiple tourneys per week for several months (at least 3 months) and rarely make it out of round 1...you wonder, especially when you are one of the better players...

Helmuth won their last big $100 entrance fee tourney...hmmm

 

[RKuczek]

Streaks

I am pretty well convinced that for BJT, you need at least 10,000 tournaments to get a reasonable basis for evaluating your play/ROI. Maybe at 1,000, you can get an extremely crude ball park guess as to whether or not you may be better or worse than average. I think that there is that much variance in the game. The same for poker tournaments.

I wouldn't assume that one is a good player because they started out with a very long winning streak, nor a bad player because they had a very long losing streak. Nor would either indicate cheating necessarily.

What I have noticed on UB, is that I will go along for a considerable period of time, with heavy play, and produce quite consistent results (a while back tracked almost 500 consecutive SnGs, and had a 35% ROI), what would appear to be fairly normal deviation around a predictable long term mean for ROI; then, the bottom will drop out of the game for anywhere from 50 to 200 tournaments/SnGs, where it is almost impossible for me to cash. After I lose back some money, 'click', everything returns to normal. The losing streaks definitely appear to be outliers, not just the worst of normal variations. And they occur with a regular, almost predictable, pattern. That makes me very suspicious of UB. But, haven't gotten anything which I can point to and say, this is not just bad luck. I have been collecting hand histories since last November, and need to get them into a data base to analyze.

 

[Monkeysystem]

Monkey = Stick In The Mud

Hate to be a stick in the mud, but see Monkey's First Equation in my signature below.

Facts are, UB and the other online sites have very little incentive to deal from a fair deck, and much incentive to deal dirty, especially in the low limit games.

In TBJ, they can generate ploppy excitement by having the dealer bust hand one of every tournament round two-thirds of the time. Also, they can kiss all in and split bank bets with 20 one-third of the time and BJ about one-tenth. Not that I've been keeping track of Club U Win, mind you..............

In hold 'em they can deal drawing hands that are made on the turn and river much more often than the game's math would normally allow. This trains the low limit players to stay in too many hands, and stay in them too long. Thus this inflates pots, which are raked. It gets to the point where you can predict the turn and river cards with about 50% accuracy.... not that I would ever keep tabs............

Not that I would ever accuse unregulated, software controlled online gaming sites of anything other than the most pristine of motives...

 

[RKuczek]

On Line Play

An individual cheating at poker in a cash game or tournament - yeah, that's easy and profitable, if you can see the others players' hole cards. And the site wouldn't really care, as you aren't taking money from them, but from the other players directly. That's what happened at UB/AP. But a piece of software, that was left active from the development process, was used to allow players with administrator status the ability to do that. That was a separate software routine from the actual gambling software. I would think that same routine might very well work to show the dealer's down card in bjt or bj as well, and also any down cards for other players (doubles). The fact that two (at least) bjts with winners getting entries and trips to UBT tournaments were won by known cheaters/superusers is highly suspicious. It is very possible that superuser cheating happened in some bj tournaments as well.

Systematic cheating of individual players in tournaments, either poker or bjt, just to foul up play and increase variance, through manipulating cards dealt, would require a fairly obvious distortion of the probabilities in the gambling software itself, not an administrative facility as was used. Also would be of questionable value to the site. Doubt if it would really generate more rake in the long run. But I could see a site wanting to prevent individual players from winning large amounts of money and cashing out, in casino games such as blackjack, or slots, or roulette. That's taking money directly from the site itself. So shifting player's cards probabilities slightly when someone wins too much, so that they lose back, yeah, that would benefit a site, in the casino games. Just a few more bust hands than usual, or an increased probability of drawing a ten when you hit a hard twelve, etc. would significantly affect a player's results. And we know that a casino software provider actually offered for sale casino software that would do exactly that, and advertised it as such.

If the blackjack was rigged, and the same software to deal was used in the tournaments, such a 'fix' could carry over to the bjt games, disadvantaging specific players.

But, I keep going back to the fact that over close to four years of on line play on UB, and thousands of tournaments and SnGs, I have made a profit. And, moreover, started with a very small amount and have cashed out much, much more than I invested. That's with strange, inexplicable losing streaks, etc. I am not satisfied that UB's bjt is fair, nor that their probabilities are normal, but have no data which would conclusively prove that they are not dealing a fair game with normal probabilities. I think my experience has shown that UB's BJT is beatable. And that one does not need to be the best player in the world to do so.

 

[Monkeysystem]

Trial and Error

Actually, RK, I've been trying the same thing at UB that you did, just to see if I could do it. I made a $50 deposit a few weeks ago and have been playing low limit games - almost all $2. So far I've got my account at about $116. And, to be fair, I haven't noticed anything rotten in the cards (yet). I've gotten both incredibly lucky and incredibly unlucky, which is no different than in a brick and mortar TBJ game.

 

[RKuczek]

grinding

I remember reading about a professional poker player, can't remember the name, who opened an online account, put no money into it, and started playing the freerolls. Within a year he had built up to $10,000. As he accumulated money he moved into the micro-blind cash games and cheap tournaments, etc. - and just kept working up.

If you play enough, you eventually will have some horrible losing streaks, as you will have some very good winning streaks, but, you just need to play well within your bankroll. I try to keep my buyin levels to where I can have a catastrophic losing streak, and still keep playing comfortably at the same level, without reducing to lower buyins. I realize that this approach may cost me ev and long term profits, as I could, over the long term, win more money playing at the higher levels, even if I would occasionally have to 'reload', as the sites put it. But it also means I don't have to sweat depositing around the UIGEA regulations, and never have to alter my level of play or approach to the game. I can just keep grinding on quantity of play, and not sweat winning or losing any individual table.

After more than four and a half years of live and online play, I have reaffirmed my opinion that there is nothing you can do to make yourself win a tournament or advance a table, winning is luck/variance, and that is it, either the cards work for you or they don't. However, you can play so that you make yourself lose; yuk. So playing boils down to 'don't make yourself lose', and play to maximize the number of wins/advances/cashes you will get over a long series of tournaments. And then let variance work, knowing that it will work out for you over the long term.

So good luck Monkey; if it seems like your not building up the bankroll fast enough, just think, 'in four years I will have $20,000 and can cash out and buy me a couple of new Kias'.

 

[Monkeysystem]

So playing boils down to 'don't make yourself lose', and play to maximize the number of wins/advances/cashes you will get over a long series of tournaments. And then let variance work, knowing that it will work out for you over the long term.

Excellent way of putting it!

In a way it's like chess. The best players are the ones that make the least errors. Kind of like poker too.

 

[mociferous]

Club UBT

We pay the quarterly fee to play every three months on Club UBT. We have ALWAYS won more than our cost for however long it's been there--3 years?? AND Randy won a cruise for us by winning a tournament! That doesn't mean that we don't wonder when someone new doubles all-in their 6/9 against a 10...dealer has 20 and magically the new guy gets a 6!!!