I’ve been playing PokerTH for some time and while I appreciate the open-source effort and overall simplicity, I’ve noticed some recurring issues that need attention:
End-game bias – Toward the later stages of the game, the system seems to favor experienced players or those holding larger stacks of chips. It doesn’t feel entirely balanced when weaker stacks appear to get systematically disadvantaged.
Card shuffling concerns – The randomness of the shuffle doesn’t always feel right. In several of my plays, I kept receiving nearly identical hands round after round. This makes the game feel predictable rather than truly random, which is frustrating in a poker environment where fair shuffling is everything.
PokerTH has potential, but unless these core fairness and randomness issues are addressed, it’s hard to fully trust the outcomes. I hope the developers take note because fixing these could make the game far more enjoyable and competitive.
Great effort, but randomness feels questionable
I am a bit new here, but have spent decades in the Backgammon community.
In backgammon it is a game of skill and luck.
The skill is making moves that give the most good moves you can, while at the same time minimizing your opponents good moves.
I have seen it time and time again that players will attribute Good Luck to their awesome skill and their opponents good luck
(or their own bad luck) to cheating dice.
That is the beauty of open source, anyone can review the source, build their own copy and run that.
Along with that what has someone to gain in biasing the dice one way or another?
It would be a lot of work (in public code) to cause the effects that some people say happens.
In dice rolling Double 6's 5 times in a row seems crazy, but since each roll is independent mathematically it CAN happen.
I run Backgammon playing bots and had about 20 of them running and I logged the die rolls from the server for a year
and provided the data to be examined and it was found to be random.
The human mind is a very powerful machine and it tries to find order out of chaos, it's a great at pattern matching.
I think the same thing can be said of the randomness of poker hands.
Tom
In backgammon it is a game of skill and luck.
The skill is making moves that give the most good moves you can, while at the same time minimizing your opponents good moves.
I have seen it time and time again that players will attribute Good Luck to their awesome skill and their opponents good luck
(or their own bad luck) to cheating dice.
That is the beauty of open source, anyone can review the source, build their own copy and run that.
Along with that what has someone to gain in biasing the dice one way or another?
It would be a lot of work (in public code) to cause the effects that some people say happens.
In dice rolling Double 6's 5 times in a row seems crazy, but since each roll is independent mathematically it CAN happen.
I run Backgammon playing bots and had about 20 of them running and I logged the die rolls from the server for a year
and provided the data to be examined and it was found to be random.
The human mind is a very powerful machine and it tries to find order out of chaos, it's a great at pattern matching.
I think the same thing can be said of the randomness of poker hands.
Tom
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counterpoint
- Posts: 4
- Joined: Sat May 30, 2026 4:29 pm
howdy, i haven't played much on pokerth yet but i fully agree with the observations of Blazing Lion with regard to 'randomness' in online poker. it is simply not random at all, and it is very obvious. i can see how to a poker newbie it may seem random but it doesn't take long to recognize the reality. the stack bias and strange 'exciting' action situations are things i have seen over and over in online poker, no matter what site or which software it is. i have never ever played one where i felt it was truly random. yes the mind wants to see patterns, etc, but sometimes things are just clear as day. of course, it is possible to use this awareness to your advantage once you get a feel for how the software works. and no, it does not always do exactly what you expect once you are familiar with it but in the long-run it is pretty predictable