Review: Glaring error- Sorry
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 04 27, 2013
I had written a glowing review on the "Abbey" and thought it was tremendous!, this book was not quite as good IMHO and would have liked a little more character development and background.The issue I have is "*MINI SPOILER" alert, Our Heroine explains (Made all the worse as her characters father played poker and they were on the road alot) that she had uncovered a poker site where "Bad beats" were happening at a rate of every 25,000 hands instead of 200,000 hands that it was supposed to be and she concluded that the site was rigging the games.She further explained that a "bad beat" is where each opponent has a strong hand and keeps betting and betting until each bet everything and the loser receives what is called a "Bad Beat"...... I am presuming something like AA vs KK? This is a Cooler hand NOT Bad Beat.This is so totally false and totally misleading, it saddens me because this is not some secret hard to explain concept a quick google would have corrected any error.For the record a "Bad Beat" is hand you are statistically "supposed" to win but due to your opponent getting a card etc he beats you, e.g You have AA your opponent has 88 the cards on the board show A822,  .....at this moment the player who has AA has a full house (AAA22) the opponent has a LOWER full house of (88822) at this point the AA player has about a 98% chance of winning because the opponent NEEDS the last 8 to give him a winning hand, now if the 8 comes the AA player would consider himself having received a Bad beat.Bad beats are a part of poker, the other glaring issue I have  is that a Poker site would not Rig games like this, Players online pay what is called a "Rake" a fee for playing poker.So e.g if you and opponent have $100 each and both go all-in on a hand, the winner receives about $194, the "rake" is $3 for each player and THIS is where the site makes its money, so the whole rigging bad beats is a non-issue because poker sites do not care who wins because they get the same amount of money regardless? Their income is derived from players "playing".