I definitely agree. I think there are bots or paid players that have access to opposing players cards. Sites have been busted for it in the past, and I think it still goes on today. It's one reason I play lower stakes games online...besides being a broke ass.
Yep: UB fiasco (the guy who was "potripper" said in
"secret tapes" that Annie Duke cheated as well, though he claimed it was by using a delay -- not sure how that would work). At a minimum that confirmed that there is such a thing as a "superuser" account. Absolute Poker was a skin of UB, and administrative cheating happened there as well. Then of course there's the Full Tilt ponzi scheme shit (demonstrating it's criminals that run this stuff), and the Dutch Boyd thing further back. A buddy tells me there's a book by a hacker who claims to have helped design poker software for companies in Costa Rica (several offshore sites are headquartered there); hacker says he designed the software to spread out winnings. Haven't read it, but am going to try.
What's weird to me is that I'm playing micro limits (pot limit and no limit), just to see if I can figure out what's going on, and it's totally bizarre, like the poker version of calling some place for customer support and you get a voice from India. The impression I'm getting is that ACR is maybe 1/5 to 1/3 shills, and what they do is have some weak/clueless shill sit on a table to start games, and then if you kick that player's ass the more able shills descend (all at once, like 3 at a time, not one at a time), and they are very hard to beat -- partly because they run good, but also because it's like they can see your cards (though not the board cards before they hit). At first, I thought, This can't be. Why would they have shills and crooked shit in micro limits? Next thought was that a 20 or 30 buck a day win is a lot of money in third world economies. Catching cards well, you can easily win 50 or 100 a day in .10/.25 PLO or NLH games. Half of that is a lot of money in, for example, Nigeria, so maybe it's not that crazy.
The solution seems to be to play hi-lo games like Omaha hi/low and Stud hi-lo. You will still run cold if you double or triple your buy in with winnings -- like really, really fukin cold -- but in the hi-lo games if you play them well your skill edge is so big you can still win even running very cold. This makes sense if you think of how much more complicated hi-lo games are to play as far as the math part, what makes a good starting hand,
The sit & go's play like they have 1 house player in the game that is very hard to beat, despite not playing well. On other sites, in the past, sit & gos were the least rigged feeling situations. I can tell you a very high percentage winning strategy for sit & gos privately. It's a simple strategy that makes blind stealing much more effective. Blind stealing is the key to S&Gs.
(Fuck not reading all that.)
