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.
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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.
That's exactly what I would do. If I provided the coin, and someone flipped 1,000 heads in a row, then they either figured out how to control the outcome of those coin flips, or they swapped coins. There's no chance they accidentally flipped 1000 heads in a row.
1/(10^100)^3 is === 0 for everything we make judgements on in life. If every single atom in the universe (about 10^100) were to do these flips for 15 billion years (about 10^19 seconds), we would not expect to see 1,000 heads in a row, never mind your lifetime. That's how vanishingly small the odds are!
You are far, far more likely to win a lottery jackpot (about 1 in 10^9) every single time you play the game, for the rest of your life, than you would be to flip 1,000 heads in a row. But if there was such a person, we'd know for certain they were rigging the game, right?
Any other explanation is going to be overwhelmingly likely against those odds.
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.
FWIW, I think the '1000 coin flips' thing was an exaggerated analogy used to illustrate the point; I doubt the evidence here is anywhere near that strong, even if it is extremely strong.
But the problem that people are trying to point out is that you seem to be asking for a literally impossible standard of proof (think about it: for any evidence you could possibly gather, there's a non-zero chance that it has all been fabricated, or you're consistently misreading the data, or your memory is playing tricks, or...).
If your point is not that 'proof requires literal 100% certainty', what is it? It seems that you might be bothered by the idea of convicting someone based on certain types of evidence? (Maybe you're intuiting that when someone claims statistical evidence at the '1000 coin flips' level, the actual chance of a false positive is much higher than the claimed amount, because of the possibility of human error or mendacity?)
The only explanation for observing 1000 coin flips coming up as heads is that something other than random chance made that happen.
Simply observing a series of events does not immediately explain the source and reason those events occurred.
Naturally, there could be several explanations - the overwhelmingly most likely is that he was cheating.
> Naturally, there could be several explanations - the overwhelmingly most likely is that he was cheating.
But you can't have it both ways, You can't say their could be several explanations and something other than random chance made that happen for the same thing.
I'm not trying to say its likely. Just thats its possible and because its possible that can not be the sole basis to prove guilt. You say "overwhelmingly most likely" and yes I agree its very unlikey but its still possible and because it is possible we shouldn't use that as the sole basis to prove guilt.
Use it as a pointer to start digging into them sure. find other things to build your case. But don't use that sole thing as the basis of guilt.
All I've been saying all this time is that its possible. And because it is possible that I personally won't "throw someone under the bus" because its improbable and not impossible.
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?).