Are the cards at online Poker sites predetermined?

Question

Are the cards at online Poker sites predetermined?

Answer 1

For most sites, the cards are NOT predetermined before they come out. In essence, the cards are continuously shuffled until the next card is needed.



This means that if you wait 2 seconds before clicking the "Call" button, you will most likely see different cards as your flop than if you waited 5 seconds (assuming you are the last person to act).



This is done to minimize the possibility of cheating. If you don't know what the river card is going to be, you can't make calls where you are drawing to your miracle one-outer to win the pot.

Answer 2

Can you elaborate?

Answer 3

Interesting! Never really gave this much thought

Answer 4

thats poker for ya its variance believe me ive been 8 tabling for a while now and have a lot of sessions that surpass 2k hands. Now there are a lot of bad beats and it seems like you get good cards for a little while and get up some money then go on a little dead streak where theres a lot of folding and maybe youll pick up a few blinds but then comes the big hands again but this time your losing with them it really seems to happen like that to me alot. the important thing is making the right decisions to capitalize ur winning big hands and minimize how much you lose on tough hands and picking up small pots and blinds is very important n the long runn to be profitable

Answer 5

Unless the site is dishonest or incompetant, the virtual deck is 'shuffled' each hand using a well-written randomization routine. Problems have occured in the past because the randomizer was not written in such a way to be really random...the algorithm used never varied so that a pattern could be determined. Now, most sites (at least, those that know what they're doing) have their routine include some variable that cannot be predicted such as taking the time of the hand's beginning down to the millisecond as the random factor.

Answer 6

It depends on the site.



To the best of my knowledge:



For pokerstars, a deck is randomized at the beginning of a hand and then dealt out in that order.



For full tilt the cards are being randomized each time cards are dealt and things like how long you take to make your decision are a factor in the randomization.



Of course I'm sure someone is thinking, does that mean at pokerstars someone could figure out what the cards are going to be? Or, at full tilt does that mean someone could use their time to "pick" which cards are going to come up?



To answers both questions, no, it doesn't work that way.

Answer 7

Janell didn't list a source for that information so assume it's pure speculation.



Whether the community cards or randomly selected before or after the preflop, makes no difference, because either way they're random.



The only way the players' actions might affect the cards is, the algorithm might use the exact time in milliseconds of when the flop cards are drawn. This means the flop would be affected by how long the table takes to act in the preflop round. But it has nothing to do with *which* actions the players make.



Of course, everything I said assumes it's random. The only way to really know how the software operates would be to see its source code.

Answer 8

the cards are predetermined before you play your hand and you folding has no effect... you can look it up when you look at the pokerstars help forum...

Answer 9

Yes they are and they also pick one seat it seems to make it the hot seat so that chair wins almost 90% of the hands dealt no matter what they have in the pocket.

Answer 10

huckleberry and JackAce have the best answers to your question, but I'd like to add one important detail. (and a response to part of what you asked.)



IT DOESN'T MATTER!



WHY??? WHY did you toss that Queen-7 off-suit??? You tossed it because you're trying to become a GOOD poker player! Who cares if a Queen-7-3 comes on the flop?!?



The biggest reaction that should get from you is the tiniest chuckle inside your head.



Ever hear the expression, "Any two cards"? Any two cards can win any given hand. If you played EVERY hand all the way to the river, calling every bet, you WOULD WIN more often than any other player! This is because you'd win those Q-7 off-suit hands sometimes. You'd occasionally pull off a win with 7-2 off-suit, too! The only problem, (and I hope this is obvious), is you would lose TONS of money chasing all these wins.



One more point - Follow these hands you don't play through to the end. Quite often you'll be very glad you didn't play. Your 2-pair that you flopped with Q-7 far too often loses to someone with A-Q when an Ace hits the turn or river. Then you lose a TON of your stack!



If you held 9-4 off-suit, and you see 4-4-4 come off on the flop, just chuckle a little inside your head and be glad your not one of those people who chase the "once in a while" crazy flop like that.