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.
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.