Online gaming is safe! It is arguable that on-line gaming is actually safer than land casinos. It is not possible to manipulate decks of cards, no one can peek at your cards, and cards cannot be marked.
Unfortunately, collusion is something that happens in land casinos that some cheaters do try to get away with online. This occurs when players share information and play their hands in order to help each other win.
Collusion is not tolerated in any way at Golden Riviera Poker or anywhere on the Prima Poker network, to which we belong. We have gone to great lengths to try and stamp this out. With the use of Microgaming's software and their years of experience in this market, they have developed tools that, among other capabilities, tracks all play in real time.
Every hand played at Golden Riviera Poker, as well as through the entire Prima Poker network, is automatically and instantly analyzed. The software watches for and recognizes in real time any and all plays used by colluding players and, whenever any suspicious plays are detected, the players' hand histories are brought up for examination by our experienced, expert staff.
Colluders will have their accounts frozen and be banned from Prima Poker and all its affiliated sites worldwide.
Shuffling
Independent third parties review our shuffling to ensure that our cards are fair all the time.
Additionally, we make use of a shuffling algorithm that guarantees a truly random deck is always used. This algorithm is based on using a random number generator to provide 232 variation extracted from a 4096 bit entropy pool.
By way of example:
Random numbers are assigned to each card
This method eradicates the issue of single pass that the Knuth shuffle has, involving the modulo bias. It is possible to reduce this effect by using a multi-pass Knuth shuffle, but we have decided to select a superior shuffle algorithm instead.
Interesting numbers
A deck of cards can have 52, which is approximately 8x1067 permutations. This number can be determined simply fairly easily. The first card dealt can be any one of 52 cards. The second card can be one of any of the remaining 51 cards. At this point there are 51x52 different permutations. The third card can be any of the remaining 50, so to find the number of possible shuffled decks you calculate 52x51x50x49 ... 3x2x1 which results in approximately 8x1067 different combinations.
Given a true random data source, the initial permutation available using our shuffle method is (232)52. This is roughly 8x10500. Since we use a 4096 bit entropy pool, this means we are pulling our numbers from any one 24096 different possibilities which is significantly larger than the possible number of combinations we use. This means that there are 10433 different ways that we can generate data to get any given random deck.
For comparison, it is 10382 times as likely that one could randomly choose the same molecule of water from the ocean twice in a row than it is that we would ever generate the same set of values to create a shuffled deck from.
Hack Attack
To ensure further player protection, cards are sent exclusively to the player's computer. In other words, cards directed at PLAYER A are ONLY sent to PLAYER A and none of the other players at the table, or anywhere for that matter, will ever have any message sent to their software about the values of those cards. This completely disallows the possibility of hackers 'looking inside' their client software to see what the other cards at the table are.
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