As Bastin rightly pointed out in the last post, I rivered a set and would have won a nice pot had I called. Was it a good fold? The math guys would spit their coffee if they saw the hand history. The 'feel' guys would say "Hey, just trust your read". If the cards were played face up, it was a good fold. If I was a super-user and knew the river card, it was a terrible fold. :)
So did the King on the river bother me at all? Nope, not a blip on the tilt-o-meter radar. I've always been comfortably reassured that like most online poker sites, the deck is constantly reshuffled. Unlike a casino where the deck is shuffled then your fate is set in the cards, online poker sites shuffle the deck on every street. The shuffle of the deck is 'seeded' by the actions of the players at the table. If I had called, had another players took slightly longer to act, had I clicked on a different pixel in the call button etc etc, we should see an entirely different outcome. Why do this? Purely for additional security in case someone ever cracks the algorithm that randomizes the deck.
And so I thought I'd confirm this fact with Pokerstars support:
Thank you for writing us.
The answer is that just as in a brick-and-mortar casino with a real deck
of cards, our "deck" is randomized and then dealt. Once randomized, the
order of this "virtual stub" is never changed throughout the deal. The
cards that come out on any given round are totally independent of any
player action.
Oops! It seems Pokerstars is the exception.
Here's a post from another blogger that also delved into this topic:
http://hardboiledpoker.blogspot.com/2006/07/doing-what-if-shuffle.html
FG
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