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Shuffling
When playing the MTT I often fold poor/marginal hands only to see that the community cards would have given me a set, flush, full house, or even better. It seems to happen a lot more than I think would be random.
If not in any kind of practice mode are the cards truly dealt at random?
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The hands are always dealt randomly. I think you may be experiencing either some high variability (which happens in all games in any venue) or some observation bias (feeling it is happening more often than it actually is). Even in 3,000-4,000 hands you can have variability where you can hit an unusual number of hands (or would have if you played them), but that will eventual balance out over time.
Just to add one more thing, when you play as many hands as you can on this site (probably 10-20x as many as you typically would in an hour of regular human play), you are going to see things happen 10-20x as often as you see them in real time. I think that's the biggest bias I see from people using this site. It seems like you are drawing out on people more than usual. It seems like you are getting bad beats more than usual. It seems like there are more pocket AA than usual. But in reality, the distributions are completely random and in line with probability distributions.
In the past when I've had customers really push back on this (incorrectly of course), the way I can sometimes "prove" that it is a bias is by directing people to their performance->hands report https://www.advancedpokertraining.com/poker/reports/performance_hands/?time=1&gametype[]=1&date_from_input=&date_to_input= When you hover over the individual hands, you can see how many times you have been dealt hands and your overall winrate with them. What people typically see is that if their sample is large enough, the number of times they got hands, and their overall win rates with those hands, tend to map out to what you would expect - equal deals of hands, and better hands winning more. Of course, if you have been playing a lot of non-random hands, the times hands are dealt will be skewed, but usually people questioning the randomness are playing random hands.