Former pro and high stakes player here. I don't know the principals involved and as such have no particular strong opinion on whether any cheating occurred, but this particular situation of a ridiculous hero call based on a very specific read is common enough that it doesn't raise any red flags to me.
Mostly I just want to comment to say that any analysis involving her hand equity against a random hand is flawed. For one, bluffs generally don't come out of a random range. Probably more importantly, someone deciding to have undue confidence in their read and acting on it is more common than some people here seem to think. It's pretty clearly a bad call under almost any reasonable analysis, but I wouldn't have been making a living if people made good decisions all the time. In this particular hand, if you convince yourself that the opponent has exactly 8c7c (not hard to do), it's also going to be pretty easy to convince yourself that a hand with the Jc in it is a good enough candidate to snap off that bluff.
Meta-considerations about offering to return money or the likelihood of choosing to burn an exploit for a very marginal situation don't seem particularly convincing one way or another unless you know the principals well. However, if I had to choose one word to describe a high stakes poker player, "erratic" would be a pretty good one. Basically I think anyone uninvolved who's sure of what happened is probably being overconfident.
While I don’t think she cheated, the reasoning she gives at the table for why she calls the hand is really weird.
The first explanation I hear her give is “I thought you were on Ace high,” which when asked “So why call with Jack high then?” she immediately changes the subject. Eventually she states that she was playing him as opposed to playing poker, which is a much more plausible thing to say.
Given that her initial justification didn’t make any sense, I genuinely just think she won by making a bad decision. It’s a perfectly valid thing to do in poker, but I can understand the argument for why she could have been cheating.
People lie about their hands and reasoning at the table all the time. Amateurs are worse at it, but even pros get caught out saying dumb stuff now and then. Normally we just point and laugh at their obvious attempts to save face. At the end of the day I think I've just seen so many weird hands, even from good players, that one more just doesn't move the needle.
One example: I've played hundreds of thousands if not millions of hands, and at least once I've accidentally folded half the pot at showdown because I misread the board. If for some reason that had happened in a tournament and my hole cards were known, it would be pretty easy to make the argument that I was cheating to pass chips to my opponent, instead of the actual reason of me being an idiot and not knowing how to read a hand with thousands of dollars in front of me.
It’s as if people forget why people play poker in the first place, if it was easy to think logically and not make mistakes while playing big pots, it wouldn’t be so popular
Maybe she got nervous and her brain stopped working for a minute? Has happened to me when asked to explain something I've designed or code I've written at work and for some unknown reason I got flustered and once that happens it can take some time before I can remember things that I normally know very well. Could explain making a mistake that makes absolutely no sense, I could totally see myself doing it. (I also think some people don't have this issue as much and might not understand how it can happen).
I saw a comment somewhere that she said she misread her 4 as 3 - so Ace high would lose to a pair. She was trying to avoid revealing her blunder, which is what this is.
While I don't regularly play poker, I would have to agree with you (not sure why you're downvoted). If my oponents knew my thought process, they could use that against me.
From my experience just playing between friends, when we talk about our hands or moves after a game, we would already bullshit each other, to avoid revealing our thoughts for the next game and keep ourselves unpredictable.
This is super interesting, but honestly it was clear from the video immediately that it was sour grapes. Part of being a pro poker player is having an intuitive sense when someone is bluffing. The guy bluffed and was called on it. That he then came up with an elaborate accusation and even cornered her for the money is pretty crappy behavior. Even if she just got lucky with a jack high, it's not unheard of for people to shove in poker with absolutely nothing.
Now that this report came out, I'd say she has a clear avenue for a libel suit against him.
I've been following this case and I'm definitely on the no-cheating side, but it should be mentioned that what made this case weird and polarizing was that the employee of the production team was caught stealing $15k of her chips on the same day. So, you had two big coincidences, a possibility of somebody on the inside being crooked, the player returning the money, and this somewhat understandably caused a lot of conspiracy theories to emerge. It also emerged (noted in the report) that the production booth had live access to hole cards.
Also, note that shoving != calling, so it was definitely an unusual hand. And poker players are very wary of cheating - there was a famous case of Mike Postle in livestreamed games.
It's not enough to know that someone is bluffing; you actually have to have a better hand to win the pot when calling an all-in bet. Even if you were given the information "Adelstein does not have a pair" by an oracle, statistically, J4 is behind a randomly-chosen non-paired hand here.
This arguably makes cheating less likely. If someone in production knew both players’ hole cards, which was the theory, this would be a nonsensical place to cheat. It was still a coin flip to either lose everything or, best case scenario, win a hand with a remarkable call that was sure to draw scrutiny.
If they were that unbelievably reckless, this wouldn’t be the only hand they cheated in. Yet there weren’t other examples of notable calls or folds that indicated cheating.
The simplest explanation in my mind is that this rather inexperienced player made a very loose call and got lucky. I can’t rule out the possibility of cheating, but there’s not enough evidence to make it more than a conspiracy theory.
Yes, there were enough coincidences to at least make cheating a possibility, but without any credible evidence I don’t think the “100% guilty” people should be taken seriously.
Additionally to me it makes much more sense as a cheat than as a legitimate play.
Notice that people allegedly involved in the cheating aren't good poker players. And that as shown by some comments in this hn thread there are people who think that reasoning "I think he bluffs so I call" makes sense.
The whole evening she was setting it up taking how she is gonna read him and call his bluffs, etc. She was fishing for the spot like that. It can come once or twice during the evening or not at all. Of course it makes sense that she goes for it rather than waiting for a better spot that might never happen.
She could have got e.g. a binary signal that her hand is good and didn't bother to rethink if it makes poker sense or maybe she thought it did.
FWIW, after doing a quick scan through the forum post, I could be convinced that Robbi and RIP where using signals to coordinate hands. There did appear to be a fair bit of subtle communication between the two throughout the game.
Of course, if the only cheating they were doing was signaling between each other (i.e. no fancy electronic gadgets), then they would not have had an advantage on the J4 hand. So it is possible that that hand was just plain luck. But because the session was being recorded, and because they were signaling, they decided to give the money back on that hand to try and ward off any accusations.
You’re linking to the “report” by the accuser that consisted entirely of character attacks and borderline paranoid speculation. It contained none of the evidence he had promised.
Similarly, nothing we’ve said is any more than speculation. That’s fine, but that’s all this is.
Yes, he believed the covert cheating device was an industrial-strength vibrator powerful enough to visibly shake the chair she was sitting in. Because that wouldn’t arouse suspicion. Truly a brilliant theory by Doug.
You have to give the "lawnmower engine vibrator" hypothesis some credit for its sheer hilarity. Imagine Lew sitting there getting signals loud enough for the entire table to hear, see, and feel, like the water cup in Jurassic Park
You can't use the fact that she returned some of the money as an indication of cheating, because it doesn't make sense to ever return the money, even if you were cheating.
It does make sense if you have a guilty conscious and think you just got caught. Giving it back eliminates the financial gain. Now there’s much less of a crime since there was no profit.
There’s also motivation to give someone money if you were honest, like trying to make them happy or go away, but it’s an expensive way to accomplish that and probably less common.
The hand is relevant on the calling side. Poker doesn't work on the principle of "I called your bluff and so I win!". If you call a bluff with a worse hand, you still lose the pot.
If you call an "all in", you will have to beat the hand of your opponent. So the fact that she had a TERRIBLE hand is definitely relevant here. No sane person, let alone a PRO player, would call an all in with such an horrible hand as she had, since even if he was bluffing, a simple 22 pair would beat her nothing hand. She was cheating 100%, the fact that she returned the money and didn't call the theft of another 15k, from the guy that probably was her accomplice, is just the icing on the cake, it's the "ok whatever you guys want, just leave me alone and let's not talk about it anymore".
Honestly, returning half the winnings on the spot is the thing that makes me believe no cheating took place.
If you did actually have a strategy that you put months of effort into, you’d deny deny deny. If they’re asking, they’ll already check for cheating (like they did above) and you planned for that. You knew you had to cover your tracks and you know the train had left the station.
I honestly think this was just bulls*er luck and no-one to cry cheat like a pro male poker player who just got a bad beat against an amateur female player.
I think the winnings returning was completely understandable within the frame of a bullied individual caving under the power dynamics that seemed to be at play in this unpleasant situation.
This sums up the problem with the pro-cheating side – the argument boils down to:
“This person didn’t behave how I think I would behave in this situation, so she’s probably guilty.”
But many people get extremely defensive and indignant when caught cheating or lying. Do returning half the money when cornered by Adelstein is evidence of nothing, either way.
I have never been in a hand with a $100k+ pot, but in higher-stakes tournament and cash play ($1000's per hand) you will still see the dumbest bluffs and calls. There are a lot of rich people playing poker, and with alcohol involved people care even less. It drives the grinders crazy but that's the flip side of trying to take money from tourists. It's quite possible the player accused of cheating (who apparently didn't even buy in with her own money) just made a stupid call.
Plenty of dumbfucks make stupid hero calls, and this could clearly be that because only a dumbfuck would agree to return money that she won in poker (cheating or not). This whole thing was overblown and I agree that it would not have happened to a male player making a stupid hero call with daddy's money.
New spying technology often uses schemes that may not be fully understood until years later, or is so brilliant that it takes someone of equivalent brilliance to figure it out.
tbf I don't know poker but it looked like an unpleasant, bullying response from a bad loser from the outside with very poor visuals considering the power dynamics.
"The playing cards all have RFID antennas in them" feels like intentionally creating a bunch of security vulnerabilities that you simply don't need to have, in order to be high-tech and I guess simplify tracking what's in people's hands? I feel like there would be some sort of computer vision or manual solution for this that wouldn't be so potentially exploitable.
I'm sure they considered this but it fascinates me that they're not doing something like 'when a card is dealt it runs past a scanner' to track who gets what card.
> feels like intentionally creating a bunch of security vulnerabilities that you simply don't need to have, in order to be high-tech
Making unique ids for tracking is not being "high tech". IDs provide traceability, which is protection against unauthorized modification/deletion, which is part of information security, etc.
Casinos live on their reputations of running an honest game. I guess "smart cards" can further that cause. But there's a risk that the opposite can occur.
All true, but when A) your entire business model relies on keeping those IDs hidden and B) you’re storing them on intentionally “promiscuous” media (RFID), it definitely increases the attack surface in a big way.
I’m sure this is a calculated risk, they probably feel confident in their ability to detect unauthorized attempts to read the tags.
Couldn't you just have serial numbers on the cards and check them at the end of the hand? Why an antenna that can be read at a distance through obstructions?
The RFID chips are there so that they can show exactly what everyone has during the hand. Televised poker is much more interesting when you know what cards everyone has.
They used to require players to put their two cards on a transparent spot of the table so that a camera below could id them for the television feed. RFID is much more secure than this, and it also reduces the times when cards can't be read because the player doesn't play them right.
Putting the cards past a reader or scanner while dealing would alter the flow of the game, and would also introduce other attack vectors.
"HCL is currently using the Clear-Com FreeSpeak II system, which runs on the 1.8Ghz and 2.4GHz frequency bands. The current system is vulnerable to eavesdropping with specialized equipment such as a Software Defined Radio (SDR) or specialized parts that are not easily found anymore or needs to be built from scratch. A potential attacker would have to have advanced knowledge of radio and engineering to craft or program a device capable of eavesdropping."
For anyone who hasn't been following this, it has been hilarious. It's the dumbest witch hunt of all time. The YouTube videos analyzing the "cheating" are dumb as shit. I didn't think this could get funnier, until I read:
> HSPP has spent more than $100,000 and significant hours of its time to conduct a thorough investigation.
They didn't really touch upon the fact that any decent electronic hobbyist of late could probably build a usable TENS unit with wifi and battery, and hidden into areas not easily checked. That would give plenty of distance to get to the commentator booth.
If it uses wifi it needs an access point to connect to or it does peer to peer, but either way it is broadcasting its presence to everything around it.
Adelstein had both an outside strait and flush draw; ie went all in knowing they needed the flop to win. It seems highly plausable that this could have been "read"; at which point Lew did know exactly which two cards they were playing. Is it 25 to Adelstein vs 19 to Law; not ideal but concevable you might call (against a stronger player who would eventually bleed you; a near evens chance if winning can sound quite attractive)
Here's some irony: while it's unlikely that cheating occurred; the huge amount of attention on the potential to cheat has likely inspired multiple future attempts to cheat in these hypothesized ways.
So there's a significant chance that the theory was wrong, but will become true at another event.
All I got was a broken page and "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. In ullamcorper eget euismod orci. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis."
Very interesting read - but ultimately it is gambling, maybe she just felt lucky?
Invariably that way these things seem to work is if someone wins it’s because of their mad gambling skills, and if they lose it’s because the casino cheated and/or other players poor strategy took “their” cards. Must be maddening for casino employees to have to put up with that day in and out. Imagine how much money was spent in this audit.
Mostly I just want to comment to say that any analysis involving her hand equity against a random hand is flawed. For one, bluffs generally don't come out of a random range. Probably more importantly, someone deciding to have undue confidence in their read and acting on it is more common than some people here seem to think. It's pretty clearly a bad call under almost any reasonable analysis, but I wouldn't have been making a living if people made good decisions all the time. In this particular hand, if you convince yourself that the opponent has exactly 8c7c (not hard to do), it's also going to be pretty easy to convince yourself that a hand with the Jc in it is a good enough candidate to snap off that bluff.
Meta-considerations about offering to return money or the likelihood of choosing to burn an exploit for a very marginal situation don't seem particularly convincing one way or another unless you know the principals well. However, if I had to choose one word to describe a high stakes poker player, "erratic" would be a pretty good one. Basically I think anyone uninvolved who's sure of what happened is probably being overconfident.