A Cheating Scandal Rocking the Poker World
theringer.com
theringer.com
This player continously makes decisions playing poker that are theoretically unsound and manages to always win the maximum and lose the minimum amount of money possible.
So not only are his plays theoretically unsound, there is no observable underlying strategy to his play. He plays conservatively when the player he is playing has the best hand and he plays aggressively when the player he is playing has a worse hand.
The only thing consistent about his play is that his decision is the perfect play he could make if he had access to the other players cards.
This kind of play is possible in a very small sample but this person has been playing this way consistently for a year now.
[0] https://mobile.twitter.com/vdthemyk/status/11798924471424491...
First, the issue is that he's winning at a rate that is 10+ standard deviations above what the typical winning/profitable player is achieving. These results are accomplished across a significant sample of sessions (39 live streamed ones), and across almost a year.
If you consider some of the players considered the best "live readers" in the history of the game (Ivey, Negreanu, etc.), none have won at the rate that he has.
Secondly, he's playing $1/3 and $5/5 poker in a city (Sacramento) that is not exactly a gambling mecca. You would expect someone who is as good as he is to play higher stakes games. $1/3 and $5/5 are stakes offered at nearly any casino.
Third, he's performed well against some elite pros. Matt Berkey (who regularly plays the highest stakes in Vegas) was in a streamed game against Postle, and Postle performed extremely well in heads-up hands. Given that Berkey is playing for hundreds of thousands of dollars on a nightly basis in Vegas, and seems to be a profitable player in those games, are we supposed to believe that Postle somehow has identified body language tells that no one else has discovered?
This is not even considering other facts like:
* Postle used to consult for the production team behind the streaming for the casino
* Postle used to claim to run some kind of app development company, and has since deleted his LinkedIn
* The extreme winning sessions seem to only have taken place during streamed games
Sure, it's possible that there's a benign explanation here, but it's looking far and far more unlikely.
Mighty suspicious.
There is no situation when he bluffed against a better hand.
Not only this, but if he was as good against weaker players, he'd play all the time, not just when it is streamed and RFID is used.
(My poker experience amounts to two years' worth of high-school lunch hours, so admittedly, I'm commenting on something I don't know much about)
Instead it just ends implying he must be cheating because statistics. Great, he probably is. But if he's actively cheating and people are onto him he'll be discovered eventually, just write a real article once that happens.
https://youtu.be/Eg34YTF-meA?t=7502 (yes, url with timecode :) )
Glad to see someone using "literally" correctly.
This would be super easy to test. Since the cards are RFID spied-upon by the House, a player simply has to pretend to look at their cards while never actually seeing them. The RFID chips are still active and the likely source of the leak.
So just don't look at your cards, he'll still know what your cards are even though you don't!
Personally, that's not poker to me. Removing my ability to control the information about my cards - specifically letting the House know my cards before I do! - seems to violate the basic tenets of what makes poker poker. Shouldn't a player be allowed to fold and drop that information into a black hole? It's not poker if you can't do that! Key player strategies have always included selecting which information to reveal to other players. Removing this ability from the players changes the game, dramatically, as seen here.
The control of information has been wrestled from the player and forced into the hands of the House. Any amount of cheating should be expected in such a weird system of convoluted rules and specific data leaks planted into the system on purpose.
You are right. That is not poker. There is no reason for the house, or anyone, but the player to have the data on the cards.
I just caught wind of this here on a lark.
The house knowing the cards is extremely, highly suspect.
Great comment. I agree across the board.
I haven’t seen a copy of the video and audio usage release form _Stones Live_ uses but I find it extremely unlikely a player would be unaware their game is being streamed.
A properly locked down network vastly reduces the potential for external actors using the game state information maliciously. It does not prevent insiders from abusing their legitimately granted credentials but that’s a separate consideration.
No self respecting player should agree to that. There is no real security that way. Everybody knows that. What we can get is good, but never perfect.
Poker has been plagued by bots already. Prior to that, a family member, who can play at top ranks, made insane money online. Bill Frist made that difficult where I live, so we transitioned to table play. Medical issues made that tough...
I put that there because we have played this game. (I am solid, by their teaching and do play on occasion today)
There is the player choice to tell. Sometimes it makes sense not to, and nobody else needs to know.
Publishing card data devalues the game. Makes it less.
A game streamed old school tells anyone watching all they really need to know. From there, start to play. That tells them more.
I do not like the card data being published. Yes, players consent. They shouldn't, but their call.
Same as I get to talk it down. I wonder what Brunson would think about this. I bet not much.
We all have our reasons.
Edit: Ah, missed the comment about not liking sharing of cards in any case. I will need to think about it more but it’s an interesting position if you want purity in the game.
There are things a player would rather others have to work for, or at best, infer at a coarse level, that RFID card play make known.
And that data is out there for future players to benefit from too.
This may impact you as a player.
That is definitely not poker.
Bluff data is extremely high value! It is common to see a killer bluff shared as a sign of respect, for example. But, not sharing it is also common.
Others can profile a successful player and reduce the advantage they have in future games. Doing this old school, by reading people and deduction from known card data is an important skill.
Those who can do that, sans card data, are very potent players.
By streaming card data, players are forced to allow profiling with a precision and accessibility well beyond what would otherwise be possible, and all of it is accessible to any interested player! And archived (you all know it will be) for all time!
All of this not only devalues the game, makes it something not POKER in the most basic sense, even though the mechanics are the same, but devalues players too!
Just putting this here to augment my earlier comment.
And none of it is a slam against the tech. I do not mean that.
But, like bots, this is definitely one of those "just because we can, does not mean we should" type innovations.
Extraordinary ability in poker means you win like 55% of the time. Not 100.
If your answer is very little, you agree he's cheating. Like me.
If it's a lot, then you're saying looking at faces is critical to poker. And yet how much do poker players say about reading faces? There would be other people who'd also discovered that reading tells is useful, and they would be somewhere in between the naive people just reading the cards and this guy, who seems to play optimally given all information, even that which isn't normally public.
While no concrete evidence has been provided, there is a lot of statistical evidence (he’s on a practically impossible part of the bell curve), Occam’s Razor implies that he’s cheating. Moreover he only plays when twitch is rolling. The most likely explanation is that he’s giving a percentage of his winnings to some tech guy processing the feed, probably more than 50%.
Most poker rooms also allow you to use your phone, as long are you're not a participant in the current hand. The alleged cheater (Mike Postle) is said to have hid his phone under the table, in his crotch area. Obviously, it's going to be pretty hard for other players and the dealer to check for that at that angle.
In the end, the no-phone rule in most poker rooms is going to be largely an honor-system based thing.
Edit:
Jason Somerville, who founded one of the most popular poker streaming companies (Run It Up), has described how stringently the Nevada Gaming Control Board inspects casinos that are hosting streams. E.g. multiple inspections of the streaming equipment, a requirement for a guard at the streaming booth, etc. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZS47DB94-vk). He mentioned that California does not seem to have the same level of on-site scrutiny.
Edit2:
On TwoPlusTwo (the popular poker forum), long time players at Stones Gambling Hall (where the alleged cheating took place) mentioned that their poker room did not institute a no-phone policy until sometime into the alleged cheater's crazy run of success.
It's a bit like saying that ASLR and stack canaries are security theatre because they can be defeated by information leaks.
Let's boot the semtex filled laptops right in the middle of the most crowded, heaviest choke point at the airport. Right next to the 30 gallon trash cans filled with liquid explosives and other combustibles we force people to discard.
250:1 kdr. Gg no re. See you later alligator, after 'while crocodile, don't forget to write.
But seriously though, 250:1 kdr at the tsa checkpoint wouldn't have the same effect as a plane being taken down and a much lower kdr. If a clever terrorist was going to create such a device they'd better have a better choice of detonation button than the power switch.
There also better off with one of those monstrously bulky windows gaming laptops than a MacBook air.
Also a bit disappointed the Blaine the mono reference went unnoticed
Or the classified images from Jason Bourne's personnel file.
My only other option was to forfeit my computer. Since I like my computer and don't do anything illegal I allowed them to violate my privacy so I could keep my computer. After they had a good look I was on my way.
From what I understand, the process has changed. These days they just image your hard drive and you're on your way after that. Then they upload your drive to a cloud system that looks through it for illegal activity. No joke. Again, you can forfeit your computer or phone but they will still try to image the drive.
What environment do devices with explosives instead of batteries boot into? Windows or *BSD?
Source: played thousands of hours of high stakes live games, and I'll bet that some of the regulars are among the best Angry Birds players in the world.
Even IF you allow phones though, it seems insane not to make players play in an RF-shielded room so that radio signals can't enter or leave.
This is wrong. Making optimal decisions IS very complicated. Just a heads-up no-limit match between the two best players in the world is far from the Nash equalibrum (a game theory-optimal solution). In the 2017 Humans vs AI match, a bot destroyed very good humans by 14.7 big blinds per hand. This is without caring at all about what strategies others play. If you analyze other players and you find what mistakes they make, you can do better and it's even more complicated. And vs multiple players like here, it's more complicated again (optimal strategy can only be calculated assuming there is no collusion). A 6-person game was only finally beaten a few months ago! https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02156-9
Source: used to play poker (up to the main event WSOP and $5/10 level during the poker boom) and wrote a simple game-theory optimal solver for fun.
* Bet sizes were restricted. E.g. humans and the the bot could only bet fixed bet sizes, like 1/4 pot, 1/2 pot, full pot etc. Creative bet sizing is one of the skills that distinguishes top pros.
* Stack sizes were reset after every hand. E.g. every player in the hand was given the same amount of chips at the start of every hand. How you performed previously in the session thus did not matter. Anyone who has played poker knows that this is highly unrealistic. Larger stack sizes convey an ability to bully smaller ones, and stack sizes greatly affect what range of hands you can reasonably play.
The point being, even a supercomputer running the most efficient heuristic based poker decision making programs has not yet been able to beat humans in a game that resembles what a real 6 or 9 person table would reflect.
---
Just as reference, on a four-year-old quad-core/8-thread Intel i7-based desktop with 32GB of RAM, to solve a SINGLE hand in PioSolver (the most popular poker solver) from flop through the river takes my machine about 7 minutes. The game tree alone takes up 4 GB of RAM, and in this scenario there are only two players, and each player is restricted to 3 bet sizes.
The idea that this kind of computation can be done on a phone is ludicrous.
Stack sizes were reset to keep the research minimally scoped, taking stack sizes into account likely does not require a quantum leap in research.
This is getting pretty off topic, but the computation could be done online.
I went back and re-read the pre-print here (https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~noamb/papers/19-Science-Superhuman.p...). On page 2:
> To reduce the complexity of forming a strategy, Pluribus only considers a few different bet sizes at any given decision point. The exact number of bets it consid-ers varies between one and 14 depending on the situation. Although Pluribus can limit itself to only betting one of a few different sizes between $100 and $10,000, when actually play-ing no-limit poker, the opponents are not constrained to those few options. What happens if an opponent bets $150 while Pluribus has only been trained to consider bets of $100 or $200? Generally, Pluribus will rely on its search algorithm, described in a later section, to compute a response in real time to such “off-tree” actions.
Good catch, and thanks for the correction.
Regarding the effect of stack sizes, I'm not certain on this, but my intuition is that there is some effect on perceived ranges of the other 5 players at the table if stack sizes vary. Since Facebook AI will not be releasing Pluribus code or pre-trained models/weights, we can't be certain, but things like stack-to-pot (SPR) ratio would seem to matter.
Of course, you could always make the argument that human players in a cash game can re-up/refill to the maximum buy-in whenever they're short, but that's another discussion altogether.
Just interested to see your approach as I’m in the middle of writing my own my own.
I had always thought that knowing the odds exactly just wasn't that useful because there was a lot of missing information and it was more important to read one's opponents.
[1] https://poker.stackexchange.com/questions/1203/pocket-pair-s...
For the mathematically perfect, they spend hours studying solvers which takes considerable processing power to generate the trees. A human player can calculate aspects of it but they can really only memorize what the solver would do. And some high stakes online players are using custom software to augment their decisions.
Depending on the bet size, the solver could call the turn a % of times. And depending on blockers, unblockers and the bet sizing, the solver could advocate to call/raise/fold.
Top pros play millions of hands and if you truly have a knack you remember... everything.
As far as computing "large factorials and binomial coefficients in their heads", I don't know what makes you think that that's what poker math entails. It's nearly all just basic statistics.
honestly I've never played much poker, but I remember doing lots of poker odds problems from my discrete math class in undergrad.
a) most situations that come up in poker just aren't that complicated -- if you're good at mental math, you can compute the exact odds for the most common situations in your head with some practice
b) there are some simplifications/heuristics you can apply if you're willing to be off by a small margin of error -- e.g. "if you have x outs, you have approximately 2x% to hit one by the river for each card remaining" is accurate enough for most players in most situations
c) this math ends up being extremely useful in practice, because "reading" someone (which is usually just logically deducing reasonable possibilities for what is in their hand) is only useful if you can then use the information to determine whether it is profitable to make/call a bet, which requires knowing your likelihood of winning.
The hard part is calculating the implied odds: there you need to play out scenarios of what your opponent might hold, and what cards would cause them to bet or call with a losing hand.
Tells are overrated in poker. It's all about implied odds and grinding it out.
And because the stream is delayed, there is not even a need for hand states to be revealed by RFID. This info can be retroactively added with better techniques.
There are super tiny hidden in-ear earbuds that would easily go unnoticed unless someone really looks for it. https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/E~0AAOSwqABbH4mT/s-l640.jpg Or vibrating devices hidden anywhere else on the body. This paired with some information from the RFID stream, either through some insider or by hacking the Wifi.
As you say there are also lots of other items brought in and worn by the players, looking at the video i see people wearing hats, shades, bags and bulky clothes where you could easily hide all kinds of equipment.
Using phones at poker tables, especially ones without RFID systems, isn't really a risk.
The fact RFID is observable wouldn't make much difference then.
I read the article expecting to find some solid evidence of cheating, but instead is just a bunch of speculation and innuendo.
Why do you suppose that is.
Take a look at this hand you which I find about as damning as any that you will see:
The opponents bet strongly, and both have a flush draw. It makes absolutely no sense for postle to play this hand (as the second hand of the evening) unless he knows that the other two haven't hit a straight or flush. His hand is comparatively very, very weak, and (again, I'm no expert), he isn't even playing a long shot. I don't think there are any major hands he can complete on the river.
Doug Polk is more "user friendly" if you want to learn more about high level poker.
It's a 4 hour video. If you got any specific questions, shoot.
What he’s doing is basically mathematically impossible. Combined with all the other evidence, he is 100% cheating. When he doesn’t have an advantage, he plays dramatically different and does things he never does in the other 90%+ of sessions.
It would be kind of like if someone bought a single lotto ticket every week and every week they won the grand prize. You may not have physical evidence that they are cheating, but you also know that they're outside of what should be possible in the lifetime of the universe.
Right, it is a very good clue that something is going on so an investigation should be opened and some of the anti-cheating mechanisms changed / improved.
However, I don't think that you can say you have definitive evidence that there is cheating (as this article does) until you can say how it is being done.
That's basically what you have here. With the added extra of being able to see him check his phone before making ridiculous bets.
If each human who ever lived flipped 1000 coins a trillion times, it shouldn't happen.
If there were a trillion planets, each with a trillion people, each flipping 1000 coins a trillion times, it shouldn't happen. Not even close.
Yet, if you get 20 people in a room, there’s a near 50/50 chance that 2 folks have the same birthday. Equally mind blowing.
So yes, people are pretty bad at probability.
The naive (and incorrect) deduction that one might make is that you start with 1/365 chance, so by adding twenty people you make it 20/365 that is 5%. So instead of the estimate of 5% the correct results that account for all possible comparison ends up being 50% - an order of magnitude higher.
The difference is substantial but it is not on the same orders of magnitude that this problem or the other examples are.
> I mean if a guy wins a coin toss 1000x in a row is that definitive evidence?
That he's cheating, not really. It is evidence that something strange is going on that should be looked at. If there is money being bet on the coin tosses, there is good reason to believe that the strangeness may be related to cheating.
The context here does make it very likely that there is cheating going on, but it still doesn't provide "authoritative and complete" evidence that cheating took place.
I want evidence as to how the cheating took place. The "How" is really far more interesting and important here than just the fact that some cheating took place. If you catch a cheater but don't unmask the methodology you run the risk of other cheaters using the same system in a lower-profile manner.
Nope. Just extremely lucky https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHU-L3BLd_w (Or just spending over an hour and half trying to get 10 alternating sides in a row for a YT Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=917VgVGVkpc)
But even though its extremely unlikely to happen doesn't mean its definitive evidence.
That is: if you expect to see 10x in a row happen in 1.5 hours, you can expect to see 1000x in a row happen in 1,569,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000... (295 total zeros) hours.
Heat-death of universe will happen in roughly 10^100 years from now (one googol). So over the lifetime of roughly googol-squared universes, if you do nothing but flip coins... you'll see 1000x in row.
------------
Encryption is only ~128-bits to maybe 256-bits worth of protection. If you can "guess" heads / tails on a fair coin 128 times in a row, you can "guess" people's encryption keys.
Is guessing 1000x coin flips possible? (forget how unlikely it would be, just that would it be possible?) If the answer is yes then I can't say that if I saw it happen then I could say "that person obv cheated".
I would stake my life and the future of our civilization on the judgement that a coin flipped heads 1,000 times is not a fair coin (or the flipper is not an honest one). It's not random happenstance if that occurs.
Yes, you can calculate the odds of it happening by chance, and arrive at an answer that's not exactly 0. But you can do that for anything else you'd call "definitive". Which means we've created a requirement for that term that's impossible to fulfill.
For example, the poker player in this article. What if we found text messages on his phone that said. "OK, going to the casino for another round of poker cheating!" Would that be definitive? There is a minuscule chance that someone at Verizon conspired to plant those text messages in their records, and use a 0-day exploit to make them appear on the phone. I'd wager the odds of that frame up are much better than flipping heads on a fair coin 1,000 times in a row.
They could find electronics embedded in his hat (with radio and bone-conducting speaker). But there's a small chance that the Under Armor factory mistakenly sent him that hat instead of the normal one he ordered. (The cheater hat being intended for a blackjack player in Missouri instead!)
When we're talking about a small number (0.000...) with a googol^3 zeros after the decimal point, we're talking about 0 itself. At least when trying to determine if evidence is "definitive" or not.
See here is the problem I see with that. The hat alone with the speaker in it would be only one part of the process. How does the hat read the cards? Personally I would say the hat would be just the speaker which is tied back to something that is the actual "tap". So the hat alone but be an indicator but still not proof imo.
See if Postle had some sense (And this is presuming he did infact cheat) they should of got fitted for a pair of Widex smart hearing aids (Or something similar, sure they are costly, but think of it as an investment against your future winnings). Those things allow you to use them as headphones as well as use them as hearing aids and who is going to question the hard of hearing person if they had been wearing them from day dot (Or allowed some time to, say months of turning up wearing them, not cheating before enabling the "god mode" app on the phone)
But at this point the electronics in the hat is just a theory, none have been found as of yet.
Having electronics in a hat that wasn't supposed to have them in stands out like a swore thumb and would be grounds to investigate further, ban them from taking part until that investigation has taken place (Or just outright ban them from taking part ever again), heck even call in law enforcement. I'm not sure of the law's in the state this game is being played as I didn't check where this game is being played but you can be questioned and detained in a Las Vegas casino by the casino's security. But your not going to be labelled a cheater to the world at those early stages as I can see that leading to a defamation case.
Back to the coin flip, Sure check the coin after the flips, if you were running a contest to flip 1000x times hand them the coin they need to use to flip. Heck investigate the person after the event. But just the act of it being done imo is not enough evidence to say it can't be done fairly.
EDIT: Btw I'm not saying that if someone comes up to you in the street and says "Hey I can flip 1000x heads in a row" you don't presume that they don't have a trick up their sleeve. But if you ran a contest for someone to do it then you take the act of someone completing the challenge as proof they cheated in order to do so.
I'm not saying its easy, I'm not saying its likely, I'm not saying I would even see it done in my life time if I got the whole worlds population doing nothing but flipping coins for the rest of my years. I'm just saying the act of doing so isn't imo definitive proof they cheated in order to do so.
EDIT: Pasted wrong link first time - sorry https://daily.jstor.org/forensic-dna-evidence-can-lead-wrong...
https://www.innocenceproject.org/eyewitness-identification-r...
https://californiainnocenceproject.org/2012/10/fingerprint-e...
For a light hearted break down of such failures see this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScmJvmzDcG0
To answer your question, I would feel better with multiple forms of evidence as a collective instead of a single piece.
EDIT: Also I'm not saying that this guy isn't cheating. I'm saying it is possible that 1000 coin flips could come up heads in a row and doing so isn't proof of cheating. Unlikely, but possible.
For example I was in court last week for among other things the sentence of a man done for VAT fraud. He'd presented laughably bad forgeries to the inspectors when they put it to him that his claim for a refund was fraudulent, and he continued to say, even at sentence (so after being found guilty) that the documents were genuine. The judge had to more or less tell him to shut up because he was representing himself so he didn't have a lawyer to tell him.
For a jury this will have been easy, the defendant's claim is that these forgeries are genuine, but the jury can see for themselves (no need for an expert on document forgery) that these are childishly bad, incompetent. Is it in some sense technically "possible" that real documents look exactly like a toddler with learning difficulties tried to make them? Sure. But it's not "reasonable" to think that's the truth and so the jury were right to convict.
They need to rip the RFID tags out and watch his performance completely suffer.
But it doesn't seem to be a rule they enforce all the time (as one player said "that would be a good rule to have all the time") but the other players said they liked the rule simply cause people actually pay attention to the game instead of their phones now.
If it is how others have suggested in this thread, he has a tap into the system reading the cards and they if they only have that card reading system enabled during the live streamed games (Postle only seems to play during the live games and would be constantly looking at his phone) then that would be "enough".
If he is using a large reader in a bag or something then surely something powerful enough to read his opponents cards would also be picking up the cards in the dealers hands (the rest of the deck) esp if his opponent is on the other side of the table with the dealer in-between them.
That's just my speculation on the matter.
EDIT: Though he does seem to have his phone in his breast pocket. And if he really does have a tap into the system it wouldn't take much to create some easy to conceal device to feed him data via another mean other than a phone screen.
Some of the other games seem to happily have some of the players wearing headphones and the like so unless there was an outright ban on electronics near the table their would still be "issues".
If he does indeed have an "in" to the system then even ripping out the RFID system and replacing it with cameras (like in other televised poker games could be a data leak unless they ripped out the WHOLE thing and started a fresh with another company supplying the tech.
And yes, you're 100% right, just make the guy play under any other circumstances and see if he's still as good. A few people in this thread are pointing out that there's no conclusive proof, and while that might technically be correct, there are way too many independent red flags here to let this guy continue to play without checking it out somehow. I could believe that a random guy in Sacramento was truly the best poker player in the world without the part where the cards have transmitting technology embedded in them, but with all the facts here you have to admit something smells a bit fishy.
Really interesting story though, I'm convinced he's cheating and I'm really curious to see how (if) they ultimately figure out he's doing it. Seems obvious the RFID cards are responsible, but I'd like to see exactly what information he's getting (his opponents' full hands, or just "CALL" or "FOLD") and how he's getting it (hat? phone? microscopic in-ear audio transmitter? x-ray glasses?).
Why is that even allowed?
Why is he, or anyone else, allowed a phone in the room at all?
I mean, the mere presence of a phone is just such an obvious vector for cheating.
For context: against good players (e.g. perhaps NL1000 in the bay area, and maybe NL50 online), a winrate over 10BB/100 over a long period of time is considered very good.
Also FWIW I think some live cash crushers can land in the 20-40bb/100 range with some consistency. The online cash player pool is known to be much tougher per capita.
Yeah, that's true. Especially in live games where there's a steady supply of players who are happy to show up just to gamble.
The VPIP (Y axis) is on what percentages of hands he voluntarily put money in the pot (i.e. called without a blind or raised with a blind). He is on the high-end for VPIP which means he plays looser, and has higher winnings per hand. This is already looking bad, but playing so loosely should at least mean he has some big losses to go with some big gains, but looking at individual results he really doesn't.
BB/100 is a calculation of how many 'big blinds' the player has won per 100, where big blinds is a specific $ amount. Effectively it's how profitable the player is.
As you can see, he's high on VPIP, which means he bets on a high percentage of hands. At the same time, his play remains highly profitable. It's so far out of the norm there's only one plausible explanation.
The greatest poker player that ever lived? :)
Lets not rule out time travel just yet
CERN considers 5 sigma as the level where they are confident of announcing a discovery of new scientific result. 7 sigma for Higgs Boson. Statistical evidence against Mike Postle's game is stronger than that. It also only happens during streamed games with RFID chips in a single casino.
Either world's best player is playing for peanuts (relatively speaking) in single venue using high variance style without variance or he is cheating.
From your other comments, it is clear that you will not allow yourself to be wrong here no matter what anyone says to explain it to you.
that's how DNA evidence works, after all.
Just saying something is extremely unlikely to happen by itself does not constitute proof, after all it just could be that that extremely unlikely thing happened. You'd need to corroborate that with something else to meet the burden of proof that is normally used in a criminal case.
Different legal systems have different standards of evidence before being allowed to consider a defendant proven guilty, as far as I'm aware nobody ever got convicted on math alone. There always was something else.
sure it does.
statistics are a measurement of something in the real world. in the poker example you are measuring the possibility of a series of hands succeeding in a given episode of play. In court you are measuring the possibility of a given DNA sequence occurring by chance.
What distinction are you drawing between the statistical certainty in poker vs. the statistical certainty in court (or in medicine)?
There doesn't need to be anything else, if you have a sufficient statistical level of certainty.
In most cases there is corroborative evidence, but nobody thinks it's necessary when the DNA matches.
That is literally what it constitutes.
Sure, the chance is high. But if there is no conclusive evidence, then there's no conclusive evidence.
That might be enough for angry Twitter mobs, but I sure hope that it's not enough for court.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally_Clark
> Clark's first son died in December 1996 within a few weeks of his birth. Her second son died in similar circumstances in January 1998. A month later, Clark was arrested and tried for both deaths. The defence argued that the children had died of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). The prosecution case relied on flawed statistical evidence presented by paediatrician Professor Sir Roy Meadow, who testified that the chance of two children from an affluent family suffering SIDS was 1 in 73 million. He had arrived at this figure erroneously by squaring 1 in 8500, as being the likelihood of SIDS in similar circumstances. The Royal Statistical Society later issued a statement arguing that there was no statistical basis for Meadow's claim, and expressed concern at the "misuse of statistics in the courts".
There has been bad statistics in some completely different case. This argument uses statistics. We can conclude that this argument is also bad.
Consider if you had 1,000,000 people flipping coins. You'd expect one of them to flip 20 heads in a row. However, if you took the person who did it to court, you'd argue: it's highly unlikely this person could flip 20 heads in a row. They must be cheating!
I don't know enough about this case to say if it's correct, but OP is saying more than "dur people use bad statistics". They're saying it's the same fallacy. In the woman with the babies case, SIDS is rare, but in a country with millions of mothers it can happen to the same one twice. In this case, playing perfect hands is rare, but in a country of millions of players, you'd expect someone to, somewhere, maybe in a podunk town of small scale games.
Of course, the fallacy doesn't make forward predictions. If he continues to win improbably after he's been identified, then it's not that.
The main difference is in the SIDS case, you have a sample size of 2.
In the Postle case, we have hundreds of hands he is involved in; dozens of sessions. Multiple instances of where he makes incredibly good reads, contrary to optimal theoretical play. (the article also notably does not detail any incorrect reads).
We also have a good understanding of how playing lots (50 %) of hands should affect his variance, yet he seems to come out of almost every session a winner. He should be coming away a loser a lot more.
The idea in popular culture that great poker players can "read" other players like a book is overblown, and a bit obsolete. Modern live players have learned to conceal their intentions much better than in the past. Yes some players may still have slight tells, but unless his opponents' eyes are bulging out of their head like a cartoon wolf when they get a flush, that can only account for a slight edge.
So sure, if you take a purely probabilistic approach and say "well, somebody somewhere could go on that sort of run", then it looks like a fallacy. But if you take the other data: That he doesn't play in other cash games, that he cashes almost every time despite a high variance style, that he makes theoretically unsound plays at critical times and they always turn out to be correct, that other legendary players do not have these sorts of results...then it seems to me there is a very high likelihood that he is cheating.
I don't think that's the case.
Got a DNA match on a murder scene? Sadly a match isn't unique and several people can be matched.
Got your suspect caught on the crime scene? Might've just been at the wrong place at the wrong time.
A cop caught the suspect murdering? The cop might be the guilty one and just trying to frame an innocent.
This kind of statistic is as good as proof, proof isn't 100% reliable either.
Even if it's not given in mathematical form, common sense reasoning uses common sense statistics every day. You could always claim freak accident if that would not be the case.
If yes would you say that the chance of your being mistaken is higher or lower than one in 10^100s.
The widely shared preference for certain kinds of evidence over others has nothing to do with certainty and everything to do stubborn human biases.
There's enough opportunity to leak this information in near-realtime via some previously planted backdoor (Postle is a former employee), or a current accomplice from within the company.
How does that idea even get past the whiteboarding stage? Seems so stupid for any poker house to do that. I mean come on, there is real money at stake and you are putting RFID TAGS IN EVERY CARD???
without being overly exploited such as to be recognized as an incident
Edit: Just pointing out the obvious that no self respecting (or just self protecting) poker player would willingly sit at a table with this guy.
What am I missing?
What definitive answer? All I ever see in the article is speculation, circumstantial evidence and statistical analysis this indicates something is probably going on.
This article is very underwhelming and short on actual details.
Article mentions that he was involved with a company that consulted with the casino.
Someone should run some tcpdumps on their wifi.
Does it really matter if you have exposed one cheater who over-used the system when the system still has unknown and unfixed flaws that could be enabling other, more circumspect cheaters?
I'm guessing RFID security isn't the issue here. Insider threats tend to defeat all security theater. So any real-time streaming of all the cards would generate this possibility.
With experienced dealers and players, poker games move quite fast. It's quite normal for 5+ hands to be folded in quick succession pre-flop. Manually recording who had what cards would be really impractical.
The best place to record the information without disrupting the game at all is in each of the player's hands themselves. Traditionally this is done with either under table cameras and see-through spots on the table, or RFID.
As long as the reader has to be within a couple of centimetres of the cards there's really nothing other players at the table can do to get the data that isn't obvious. It's not like you can lean over the table and scan your opponent's cards with your phone without raising a few eyebrows.
I'd guess the transmission of the card data from the table to the servers for the broadcast wasn't secure. Either because someone involved set it up that way on purpose to cheat, or because they had a 'password123' sort of password on it without thinking.
encrypt(concat(ID, random()))
encrypt(concat(ID, chip’s internal counter value()))
He shows a clip with Mike's brother talking about how Mike will do anything he can to angle shoot (eg. cheat). Funny stuff.
[0] https://mobile.twitter.com/vdthemyk/status/11798924471424491...
That casino allows phones at a high-stakes poker table? Duh.
There are some similarities to chess cheating here.
There were defenders to the infamous Borislav Ivanov too (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borislav_Ivanov) even though all decent chess players could tell he was cheating.
In the Borislav's case the cheating method was not found although many suspect it was a vibrating smartphone in his shoes.
Of course there are differences between poker and chess cheating as well.
Pure poker computer without the extra information would not be that much of a help to a good player.
What is similar is that both of these players make superhuman moves consistently.
Less greedier cheaters would not be caught so easily.
Like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igors_Rausis it was very suspicious (mostly because of his age) but until the smoking gun in the toilet it was still somewhat plausible that he was not cheating.
The fact that Postle doesn't cash in on this remarkable ability by playing in higher stake games makes his performance suspicious to me just as people that claim ESP that don't bother to take the casinos for millions makes he skeptical of their claims.
But, what if the data is coming directly from the RFID readers? Depending on which boards they're using to read the rfid cards it could be a simple bluetooth broadcast that his phone picks up. His phone could constantly scan for bluetooth signals -- it wouldn't even need to make an actual bluetooth connection, the card data could be embedded in the advertising signal for anyone who knew the schema to pickup.
I think he has an accomplice. Either someone working at the casino or with remote access to casino computers.
From the 4th sentence of the article:
>and the game was broadcast on a half-hour delay so that viewers couldn’t relay information from the broadcast to the players during the hands
The most likely method seems to be a RFID reader either in his keys or hat transmitting data to his phone, but from what I can tell nobody has nailed down his technique exactly.
While it does sound like he's cheating I don't see how you can get there with just statistics. He could be incredibly good at reading his opponents.
(But it's super implausible that he doesn't play anything but these specific games, and then wins by such a large margin.)
> While his neighbors keep their phones on the table, he always keeps his phone on his chair between his legs, with his left hand holding it in place beneath the table. He almost never brings his left hand up above the table. He puts his head down to glance at his phone before he makes decisions. It all seems so obvious now.
> Like the fact that he starts wearing a hat that has a strange bulge around the brim—one that vanishes after the game when he’s doing an interview in the booth. Is it a bone-conducting headset, as some online have suggested, sending him messages directly to his inner ear by vibrating on his skull? Of course it is! How could it be anything else? It’s so obvious! Or the fact that he keeps his keys in the same place on the table all the time. Could they contain a secret camera that reads electronic sensors on the cards? I can’t see any other possibility! It is all starting to make sense.
> He also deleted his LinkedIn account, which indicated that he was connected to the company that ran the Stones Live broadcasts and had worked for them as a consultant in the past.
> The fact is, the mystery was solved a long time ago. It’s just like De Niro’s Ace Rothstein says in Casino when the yokel slot attendant gets hit for three jackpots in a row and tells his boss there was no way for him to know he was being scammed. “Yes there is,” Ace replies. “An infallible way. They won.” According to one poster on TwoPlusTwo, in 69 sessions on Stones Live, Postle has won in 62 of them, for a profit of over $250,000 in 277 hours of play. Given that he plays such a large number of hands, and plays such an erratic and, by his own admission, high-variance style, one would expect to see more, well, variance. His results just aren’t possible even for the best players in the world, which, if he isn’t cheating, he definitely is among. Add to this the fact that it has been alleged that Postle doesn’t play in other nonstreamed live games at Stones, or anywhere else in the Sacramento area, and hasn’t been known to play in any sizable no-limit games anywhere in a long time, and that he always picks up his chips and leaves as soon as the livestream ends.
So, does he have an RFID reader in his keys which communicates data to him via his phone or his hat?
Or, does he have a backdoor into the non-delayed feed with an accomplice?
Either are possible and he's definitely doing one of the above. If he wasn't cheating, he would be a world class all star poker player.
- a guy is doing something highly unlikely(not impossible, just unlikely)
- lots of speculation
- the whole internet seems to be out to get him.
In 2009 German speed skater Claudia Pechstein was banned for 2 years from the sport based on irregular levels of reticulocytes in her blood. Nobody could prove that she was doping, however this was the first case of a ban based on circumstantial evidence alone; no forbidden substances were ever found during her repeated tests. Later it turend out that she had a rare genetic disorder called Hereditary spherocytosis. While the court-stuff is still ongoing, science papers have been written, and the IOC has refined the test. still she lost 2 years at the top of her game.
I must admit that figuring out this riddle is rather tantalizing, I have been nerd-sniped by good riddles in the past, however my Cpt. Picard-sense is tingeling. let's keep the pitchforks at bay, shall we?
A phone in between your legs, though suspicious, is not enough evidence.
And who thought it was a good idea to put RFID in playing cards?
The article says he worked for the casino as a consultant at some point in the past.
So he has a connection that works on the livestream production that has access to the RFID-provided hole card information in real-time (perhaps through a software backdoor?)
Then he has some kind of device attached somewhere on his body that receives some signal that tells him what other players have, sent to him by the insider setup.
This could be a BLE device connected to his phone that vibrates morse code or some other signal, etc..
Some way of transferring the info to him is rather easy, then, either by his phone or hat.
He hasn't done that.
His cheating can be taken as matter of fact.
I would not let any student of mine do any of those things in an exam.
I used to play 10/20 and 25/50 PLO, and while the game is different, the pattern described is pretty typical. Big multiway pots and speculative hands are the rule, so if a draw completes and there's 4 players in the hand, someone has it.
This doesn't sound like cheating, just a typical higher stakes game but on TV.
I have played poker professionally for more than 10 years and I am 100% sure he was cheating.
It's not that he is playing well and making good reads. Actually often he plays like shit but happens to make some correct decisions postflop. Decicions that in long run would be really bad but in those cases were perfect. One nice example is where he went allin preflop with 45o against two players who both had AK.
Please check some of the streams and come back here to comment. You can start from Doug Polk videos. If you don't see that he is cheating then you are not a winning player and probably never have been.
In addition, his abilities magically go away on the days that his friend on the technology team is absent.
Also, he only ever plays when the cards are marked with RFID tags. He NEVER plays when they are unmarked, even against the same people that he supposedly has an edge against.
He is absolutely a cheat.
Who is his friend?
I'd rather see some evidence of wrongdoing, you can't prove he's cheating simply because he's on a heater...
Not to mention there's no buy-in limit on these stakes, BB/100 means nothing if they're playing above the expected stakes (happens often if the biggest stakes are relatively low).
Again, none of what you're saying is actually proof.
Even if the average hands are playing 2x or 4x above nominal stakes, that's still an outrageously high, many std-dev above elite, win rate.
Yea, it's hard to prove things generally, but I don't really feel like the standard of "proof" matters here. I'm 99.99999...% sure the guy is cheating. I'm not saying put him in jail because of it, but definitely raise the alarm and don't play with him. Would you play with him on the Stone RFID table?
Admittedly I haven't seen a ton of his hands, but just watched a few, it's not that unusual. One used as 'proof' of cheating where he plays low connectors and hits a pair with a draw to a straight, then he bluffs off a passive player with an over-pair. If he actually had the info wouldn't he fold? Dunno, seems to me he's just a pro preying on fish. His play is pretty standard for good cash players. It's his opponents that seem unusually bad, but whom observers are overrating.
- Bluffs river with 9 high, gets check raised by 6 high, 3bet jams for barely a min raise, it gets through obviously
- Check folds TPTK on the flop on a dry board when other player has a set
- Check folds top pair and a gutshot when other player has nut straight
- And here are some more https://www.pokernews.com/news/2019/10/10-suspicious-mike-po...
This is as egregious a case of cheating as you're ever likely to find.
There are objectively better and worse ways to play poker if you make some assumptions about the behaviour of the other players. In a small sample those assumptions may be false, but in a large enough sample it's extremely unlikely to be the case.
So it's extremely surprising to see a winning player employing crazily non optimal strategies (like betting 54o AI pre flop in a three way pot). That is just a losing play in the absence of information about the other players holdings.
The idea that he's reading people is absurd, even independently of the evidence of him not actually looking at people while betting. Live reads (to the extent they help at all) are incorporated in the win rates of the best players already.