Can online poker be rigged?

My acquaintance with poker began with The Warcraft 3) One of the clan leaders went into poker and started making good money there. Once he offered to go to poker with the fact that he already easily made several thousand a month there. But I did not immediately believe him

I started reading about poker and the first thing I met with is that everything in poker is rigged. There was a person named Robin Hood on the old famous poker forum and he told everyone how everything in online poker is dishonest. And imagine, I believed him and did not study poker. But six months later, when they were still giving $ 50 free on a deposit, I decided to try it, anyway I risk nothing. It was from that time that my ascent began. It turns out that that person was just a fish and couldn’t earn money normally, so he thought that poker is just one giant setup

How often we come up with thoughts explaining the reason for the loss without taking into account their actions at the time of failure during the game?

If you explain the failures as irrational reasons (the RNG is rigged; the opponent sees my hands; everyone except me is lucky and the like) and at the same time continue to believe that you are playing exclusively correctly - you fit the “Fish in Psychological Issues” characteristic from the book by Jared Tendler and Barry Carter's „The Mind Games”. This book is entirely devoted to the psychology of poker. You can find proven methods for improving control over tilt, gaining confidence and motivation, an adequate reaction to variance, and much more.

The book states that the fish in questions of psychology are people who do not understand what they can control in the game and what is beyond their control. You can be a strong regular in the game but at the same time a fish in psychology, which will affect the results.

Justification through luck, an improper table, a bad field and the like is associated with a distortion of perception, known in psychology as the “Fundamental attribution error” when a person explains failures with external factors that are not related to him and considers luck to be his own merit.

To understand why your “impossible” explanations of the reasons for failure are untenable and dangerous for you, let's analyze the most common “excuses” and try to understand what is wrong with them.

Everyone plays badly, but they are damn lucky!

For this reason, you can often find “lucky fish at the table”. I choose this explanation for the first, because, in my opinion, it is the most dangerous for the player. Look at the list below and answer the question for yourself, how often do you think something like this?

1. I lost again - I’m constantly unlucky.

2. I already play well, I just rarely get lucky.

3. How could he play such a bad hand so badly?

4. Everyone plays badly today, but they are lucky.

5. We must sit at another table, this unlucky one

If you often think of such and similar thoughts - your mind plays with you, hiding your own personalities behind luck - the least controlled part of poker and therefore

the easiest to explain failures with its help. Human psychology is a mastery of substitutions. Behind the illusion of a poor game of opponents, coupled with high luck, our own mistakes are often lost.

You can test yourself by remembering the last hand. What often comes to mind - victories or defeats, your opponent’s trains, or your trains? If your answer is “always second” - you are the victim of a classic cognitive error (perception error) when the bad is remembered better than the good. Memory selectively captures negative events, especially if they cover something even more unpleasant - for example, your incompetence.

All this does not mean that opponents will not be lucky or unlucky from time to time, even taking into account good and correct made hands. However, the distance puts everything in its place, so even if you beat your correct rally once with “luck”, you will earn income over time, while the supposedly successful player risks being left with nothing.

The best way to get rid of the justification of your failures through someone else's permanent luck is to analyze your own game. Disassemble your base, analyze how you play your hands in terms of tactics and behavior of your opponent, pay special attention to those hands where you were sure of the correctness of your game, but your opponent was lucky again. Learn and improve yourself constantly, otherwise, you will easily find yourself in a situation where you think that you are already playing well but lose steadily because you are “out of luck”.