I thought I would post about this, for every beginner who sees a few bad beats and suckouts and assumes that online poker is rigged. I have been going through an absolutely awful period of variance in my live game. In the last 9 or so hours of play (about 300 hands or so), in mostly limit and some no-limit, here are my results:

I have been dealt an ace in my hand about 6 times. I did not win one of the pots where my ace paired; I chopped one and lost the others.

I have hit 3 straights. All 3 times, a flush beat me on the river.

I have hit 1 flush. A full house, formed by an underpair that made a set on the river, beat me.

I have hit 5 sets and quads once. On the quads and one set, I won, but in each case nobody bet into me and players folded to my bets and I made very little money. On the other hand, 4 sets have been beaten by straights or flushes, 3 of them on the river.

I have been dealt pocket aces, pocket kings, pocket queens, pocket jacks, or pocket tens approximately 9 times total. All 9 times, they lost.

I have made 2 pair twice. Both times, a player made trips on the river to beat me.

During this period, I have lost approximately $1,400. I have reviewed the major hands and determined that I played each one correctly, getting chips in when I was a favorite to win the hand or when the better hand that the villain had was a small part of the villain's range. Indeed, I calculate that if I had played poorly, I would have lost a lot more.

None of this is a whine. It's all part of poker. If you can't accept the variance, you shouldn't be playing. But my point is, for the above events to all happen probably, in theory, bucks odds of over 100 to 1 against.

But when you take a bunch of bad beats and start questioning the random number generator at an online site or thinking they fix the hands to keep the fish in the game, think about this post. Nobody is fixing the game at the casino. It's just that variance, even extreme variance, is a fact of life in poker.