how many decks of cards when playing online poker?

[roly]

Hi

When playing online poker, does anyone know if its just one deck of cards that your playing with? e.g. is there only a maximum of 4 aces in any one hand?

[Tube Ace]

yes, one deck.

[seeandsee]

1deck man for Texas holdem

[Martin]

Yeah of course. Dumb question.

[gaffg]

always 1 deck, online casinos usually use more than 1 deck

[Ron Bennett]

If the deck is fixed, what's the difference!

Even physical casinos have trouble keeping the decks honest. With an on-line casino the issue is a zillion times worse, since the cards are virtual and computer records are easily forged / purged, but I digress.

Ron

[roly]

Thanks for the replys, i thought it was but wanted to check.

Originally Posted by Martin

Yeah of course. Dumb question.

i know in games like blackjack they use multiple decks of cards i wasn't sure if that was the case with poker.

[polle54]

Poker cannot be played with more than one deck, just for the record.

Ron, there is very few cases of online casinos cheating, and if you play the big ones you can be 100% sure it doesn't happen. Every algorithm has to meet a very high RNG standard and it is often checked up by pokerplayers playing millions of hands.

[Ron Bennett]

Originally Posted by polle54

Ron, there is very few cases of online casinos cheating, and if you play the big ones you can be 100% sure it doesn't happen. Every algorithm has to meet a very high RNG standard and it is often checked up by pokerplayers playing millions of hands.

"you can be 100% sure it doesn't happen" ... how?

Are there reputable, independent casino control boards that monitors off-shore on-line casinos? I suppose some countries may have their own, but how trustworthy are they?

As for how cheating could happen, that depends on the game...

You make a good point about numerous other player's experiences, in say poker, would likely reveal various obvious kinds of cheating, but to assume it will reveal all is wishful thinking.

As for RNGs ... most people have misconceptions about what a long serious of random numbers should look like. For some insight on what randomness really looks like view the archives of 3 and 4 digit number state lottery drawings. Point is looking at a small set of outcomes is unlikely to reveal much of anything.

And as for distributions, a large deviation from expected averages after millions of hands will stand out, but a halfway intelligent cheat will program their system to offset modified hands with other ones so the overall distribution appears normal...

Could you spot some modified hands out of thousands, let alone, millions?

Presumably not and that's the issue with on-line casinos - without physical controls over the computer hardware and program code, there's no way to know - without proper oversight, inevitably cheating will happen by both the casino and players.

Ron