Good morning everyone. This is a common perception created by our brains.
When I started playing poker in 2018, I had the impression that the sites were programmed to favor the players with more chips, especially in K.O. MTTs. Over time, I started watching videos from very successful players explaining this subject, and I began to understand how it really works.
Think about this: there are many extremely intelligent players who study the game using solvers, study GTO, analyze database statistics and hand histories, and constantly check whether the results are consistent with poker's mathematical probabilities.
For example, take your hand history and look at all-in situations where you had AA against lower pocket pairs. If you have a large enough sample, you will see that the statistics tend to match the expected probabilities very closely.
If
poker sites were actually favoring certain players or manipulating the results, it would probably have already been identified and exposed by these players, especially professionals who analyze millions of hands and use statistical tools and solvers.
Besides that, the major poker sites, especially the best-known ones, generate a significant portion of their revenue from
casinos and sports betting. It doesn't make much sense for a large company to manipulate poker to favor a particular player.
In poker, the site mainly makes money through the rake collected from hands or tournaments. From the site's perspective, it generally doesn't matter who wins or loses. What matters is that players keep playing and generating rake.
That's why we often get the feeling that the site is favoring the player with more chips or that we are experiencing an absurd number of bad beats. But this can simply be a perception caused by variance and the way our brains tend to remember negative events more strongly.
Poker is a game of probabilities. Even when you make the correct decision, you can still lose the hand. And that doesn't necessarily mean there was any manipulation.