PokerStars Bad Beat Email

[Burnley Joe]

Just seen this pmsl Thank you for contacting PokerStars. We are sorry to hear you have had a few bad beats recently. However, please keep in mind that bad beats are a part of poker, and happen to all players, whether they play poker in a live casino, at a friend’s house, or online at PokerStars. Statistically, you are no more likely to be beaten on the River than at any other point in the hand. However, because it is the last card and you were the favourite to win the hand until that point, it is more memorable. Thus it seems like beats happen on the River more than any other time. This happens to everyone. People tend to remember a restaurant they did not like, just because the bad experience is unexpected and stays in the memory longer. Nice restaurants tend to be forgotten because people get what they expect, a good experience. It is the same in poker, when your hand holds up on the river, you get what you expect and forget it. When you get beaten on the River, it is unexpected (not to mention frustrating), and hard to forget. Building on this, when the river does NOT help anybody, it is less likely for there to be a showdown (since the drawing hand folds on the river) and hence, the hand does not even go to showdown. This is entirely normal, but it means that when there is a showdown, there is almost always someone who feels unlucky – by very definition, if two people go to showdown, it is because they both think that they have good hands. Since only one player wins, every showdown can cause someone to feel hard done by. PokerStars deals the cards in a fair and honest manner. Once the deck is shuffled, it is set, and the order in which the cards are dealt cannot be changed. The software that shuffles and deals the cards cannot control who wins and loses; it just deals the cards and the rest is up to the players in the game. Our software produces a shuffle that is completely random, which favors no player over any other. The methods we use ensure complete randomization of the cards, and complete unpredictability of the cards to come. You can see the description of these methods at: http://www.pokerstars.com/poker/room/features/s... We arranged for the largest consulting firm specializing in software security and quality, Cigital, to review PokerStars’ shuffle. Their investigation found the shuffling be fair and random. You may read about their analysis at: http://www.pokerstars.com/poker/rng/ If you are a real money player, we encourage you to review your own hand histories and to perform your own analysis. We have dealt over 40 billion hands and freely give real money hand histories any time someone requests them. If you want, we can send you a copy of every single real money hand history that you have played. “Every” proper investigation of our shuffle has found the same thing: That our cards are randomly shuffled. Many who have conducted such studies have posted their findings to the Internet. You can find two of them here: http://bit.ly/de932a http://bit.ly/9ORjbu We hope this information helps you to understand that PokerStars’ games are fair. We value all of our players, and take the integrity of our site very seriously. Regards, Susan W PokerStars Support Team

[averick]

Re: PokerStars Bad Beat Email What did you send them Joe?