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A computer scientist will tell you that it is indeed impossible for a computer to generate purely random numbers in a mathematical sense. The numbers are generated deterministically by a known (to the programmer) computer algorithm, and are therefore by definition not random.However, that same scientist would also tell you that it is trivially easy to generate a simulated series of random numbers that would be essentially impossible to distinguish from a truly random series unless you know what that algorithm is. (Heck, a monkey could do this with Excel in about 5 seconds.) This is ultimat

Those studies may not be accurate, but responses to a message board is hardly proof of that. Even if all the respondents are 100% honest (which is possible but unlikely), we have a serious case of selection bias here. What fraction of the people reading this site and responding to threads are going to be the types that put in $10 (or $100 or whatever), lose it, and never play again? Roughly zero. They're not reading your message, much less replying to it. We don't know how large a group this is, so we can't make an inference on how frequent those success stories are relative to the popul

which is equally useless.I would suggest you reconsider that last statement. No, a live tracker like Poker Edge will not make someone a winner if he has no game to begin with. However, if you're willing to throw away information about the basic tendencies of your opponents (or the texture of the table) I think you're shortchanging yourself. In limit, which is what I play predominantly, you have to play your cards first and your opponents second. A service like Poker Edge can be very informative for the second part. I think some people who use these services forget that, however, and may s

I would like to know what the consensus is for swing in relatively low-limit hold 'em.I started playing online about 4 months ago with a $100 bankroll. I built this up to about $1600, playing, progressively as my roll improved, 1/2, 2/4, 3/6 and even a little 5/10 at the very peak. There were swings during this period of up to $250 each way, fortunately up before down. I'd say I'd played 12k hands over this time, the last half of them at predominantly 3/6, but I wasn't tracking my performance at the time like I do now. My roll had beenrelatively stable at the $1.5k level for about two wee