Can PartyPoker or other sites be rigged by the players?
It happened in the earlier days of online poker, when a group of security experts hacked Planet Poker by defeating the random number generator used to control the deck. In English, they figured out how to correctly predict the entire deal from start to finish: player hole cards, flop, turn and river. Needless to say, this created a shock and buzz in the poker community. Luckily, the security group did release their findings to the public without exploiting their find, so no harm was done (except to Planet Poker's reputation, even though they were using another third-party software on their site).
The good thing to come out of this is that current poker sites have taken big steps to prevent this from happening again, notably by hiring outside professionals to inspect their code. PartyPoker, for example, uses BMM International to certify their deal, while Pokerstars uses BMM International and Cigital (the same guys who hacked Planet Poker) to certify their deal. This all but eliminates the possibility of the deck dealing algorithm being broken, but there is still always the room for that possibility, depending on the implementation of the code. Case in point, a number of years ago, Daniel Corriveau cracked Keno at a Montreal casino not once, but twice, when he reverse engineered the random number generator.
As an aside, here's an interesting read about some MIT whiz kids who cheated Vegas at blackjack:
Hacking Las Vegas (wired.com)
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