I have been a regular player at NitrogenSports for poker since it started. I had had my share of ups and downs, and the variance, getting bad beats and giving them as well.
Like the doubts many poker players have about online poker being rigged, sometimes I have them too.
Recently, being playing since a long time at Nitrogen, I began to feel that the hands have been hitting a lot of outers specially on all in on the flop or preflop, when suddenly cards would appear on the turn or the river giving them a better hand. Well obviously, I didn't have anything to prove it, and thats something even playing on a rigged poker site you can't prove.
Anyways, so carrying on, Nitrogen recently introduced the hand sharing option -
an example about less than 10 days back. Basically just like stars you could click on the hand id, and it would give you a link to a hand replayer.
The part where It got interesting...
Until last week it used to work fine, but sometimes when I used to try and fetch the link to some of the bad beats I got or some crazy action to share with my friends, then it used to give me an "
Unable to Share Hand Error"
Something like this :
At first, I wondered why it happens, but there wasn't any explanation to it.
Anyways, being a regular on the site and playing almost all the hourlies, and tournaments, I came across more and more of situations where I wasn't able to share the hands. And It clicked to me that it was only the bad beats which I wasn't able to share and was able to share the regular hands.
I tried and tested every possible situation : Preflop all in/Shortstacker/Playing from another account/Playing in another browser etc , but I always got Unable to share in Situations where the hand ran bad. So before contacting Nitrogen about it, I starting recording the hand histories where it happened. And there wasn't any one hand, where I was unable to share which wasn't a bad beat or hitting outs on the turn or river.
I will post
2-3 examples at first, and will leave the rest of the links on here for people who want to go through them.
Before I post them ,
please note that you just have to look at the hand-history(where the mouse icon is) and not the hand, as I used to record after the hand. Also watch the videos in minimum 480p as they might not be too clear1.
Link to first hand((Watch only the hand history)) :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYc1dOfuMuA Watch it in full screen. basically Hand goes like this
dsly : Preflop raises 1500 all in .
Amfee call
Dsly : 3 3 , Amfee: 4 4
Flop: Q Q 3 , turn: 9 River : 4 , Amfee hitting the outer.
Now obviously, it could be a bad beat, but the reason I am sharing this hand is to show that it was only outers and turn or river hitting hands, that were unshareable
There was no other hand, which was unshareable.
In the second half of the video, I go through all the hands in the Hand History browser to show that apart from that particular hand, all the rest can be shared, but its only the hand where he hit a 2 outer, where it became un-shareable.
2.
Link to second hand((Watch only the hand history)) :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkXAhgSsaBEThis time its a PLO hand. It was between 2 other players. One of them(Floppy Nutz) had been sitting out during the tournament and was short stacked.
Basically Hand goes like this :
.keow raises 350
.floppyNutz who is short stacked is automatically all in . Everyone else folds
. keow shows : A♠ 3♣ T♣ 2♥
. Floppy Nutz has : A♦ Q♥ 5♣ A♥
Flop : 4♣ J♣ J♦ - Turn :10♦ - River:A♣
keow Has a Flush
FloppyNutz has a Full House
3.
Link to third hand(Watch only the hand history) :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CySobhljFrwRoyal flush hand
.Satoshi bets all in 7.5K chip
.zuken calls Preflop all in
. zuken shows T♥ J♥
.satoshi shows Q♦ Q♠
.Flop : K♥ 5♠ Q♥ Turn: A♥ River : 5♦
. satoshi has a Full House
.zuken has a Royal Flush
Unable to share hand again. I again show all hands can be shared except that one.
My Analysis on this one: So basically the river card was supposed to give satoshi a full house, and zuen was meant to win this hand from the start.
So the only hand that beats a full house was a straight/royal flush..and A♥ dropped on the turn to give him the royal/Str8 flush .
4.
The rest of the handshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WytWSrP6mxo - Hand happening live
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20P1IUjFcw4https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85BCyeJjSu8I have a few more which I will post later today.
My analysis on the hands is this:
Basically the RNG generates cards for example : 2 6 8 A 2 - then for the hand sharing it immediately, stores them in a queue or stack , or a text file, which is later used for the Hand sharing browser.
Now, if it was a bit off which it look likes , it will have to overwrite that file/queue and will have to go back, but the program of Nitrogen wasn't programmed to do that from what I think , in which case instead of doing that it shows : Unable to share(which is probably a deafult case if a bug appears ) .
Nitrogen , has always offered a good support, but still hasn't yet provided a reason on why did this happen. If the software has been developed by a third party developer, it might be some kind of flaw he knows like a backdoor to take advantage of.
Or it could be programmed as such to have players win/lose small amounts and tournaments, so they stay where they are, generating more rake for nitrogensports.
Nitrogen has taken the hand sharing option offline for now, until they fix it. If it was something on purpose, then obviously , I would expect them to fix it, which is one reason, why I have shared and recorded most of the sessions.
I received a 0.2 BTC bounty and 2 free bets on this, which wasn't great , but oh well..
I would request anyone who has programmed poker games before comment on the fact that these things might happen if they were to do it purposely.
There is actually no way to prove that a poker site is not fair, and it takes for something like this to show that.
I have asked Nitrogen to comment on it as well , once they come up with the reason behind it.
Thank you for your input
