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Comment by paggle | Hacker News Reader

How do you falsify his claim that he can read his opponent's faces and tell what cards they have? Isn't that a common skill in high level poker?

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A couple of responses here:

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.

Not definitive by itself, but the hat is very suspect: https://www.vegasslotsonline.com/news/wp-content/uploads/201...

I find it astounding that personal accessories like hats and sunglasses are not only allowed but apparently not adequately inspected in a game where the subtlest body language and facial tics can affect who ends up winning thousands to millions of dollars.

(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)

Yeah, looks like a high probability of electronics in the hat.

well then let's just hope those electronics don't fall out of the hat the way he moves it around...

https://youtu.be/Eg34YTF-meA?t=7502 (yes, url with timecode :) )

less suspect that someone with actual headphones? https://youtu.be/Eg34YTF-meA?t=13155

Did anyone else read to the end of this linked story expecting the "discovery" or answer at the end? Like... how he cheated?

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.

The real, true secret answer is obvious enough... He's a mentat.

"It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of Sapho that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains, stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion..."

Does no one here who downvoted have a sense of humor? or a memory of Dune. It was a joke, that's all.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7609289

Trouble is maybe 10% don't have a sense of humour / don't get it and they downvote more than the others up it.

Not to mention the guy is earning close to a thousand dollars an hour playing low stakes poker. If he were that good on his own he would surely play higher stakes or play as much as he possibly could. Instead, he only plays at this one casino and only during the streamed matches that include RFIDed cards.

Mighty suspicious.

I remember reading somewhere that most good poker players are better at taking money from less skilled players than other good players. It's not ridiculous to think someone simply likes to play with less skilled players in general. It's easy money.

He is not playing just against less skilled players, he is playing with very good players as well. Regardless of the opponent he can always make the right decision and only time he loses is if he bluffs and someone makes a extremely tough call with a weak hand (something most people wouldn't do).

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.

I think you mean there is no situation in a god-mode session where he bluffed into a semi-nutted+ hand.

I was trying to talk in laymen terms, not everyone knows poker lingo. Exactly, either Postle has superhuman mind reading skills or he gets info from outside. It's not certain whether he knows exact hands, maybe it is just "AHEAD/BEHIND" which can be really easy to pass along.

There are hands that make this virtually impossible. In one well-known hand where both his opponents have AKo and Postle goes all in. AKo is a very good hand, but it's a much worse hand if two people hold it. Even if Postle had magic face-reading abilities that allow him to always discern good and bad hands, it's absurd to claim he can read exact rank and suit from faces.

This argument makes no sense. People throw away quads because they sense something or get scared. By a small fraction cards aren't the winning factor in poker.

We're talking about pre-flop actions. It's literally impossible to throw away quads pre-flop in hold-em. You may be thinking about a different form of poker.

Sorry no previous poster talked specifically about pre-flop actions.

Maybe saying "opponents have [2 cards not 5]" indicates pre-flop? The communal cards are often referred to as what someone "has" despite being communal.

np, I was probably sloppy in my description. In the hand, two players hold AKo, there's another deadcard king in a folded hand, and Postle calls a all-in pre-flop with 54o. That's a +EV call, but only because of the exact combination of cards held by multiple players. There's no way a tell can give him this information.

> It's literally impossible to throw away quads pre-flop

Glad to see someone using "literally" correctly.

Cards aren't the winning factor... only to the extent that the winning factor is figuring out what your opponent's cards are better than they can figure out yours. Knowing them because you're cheating is a pretty effective way to do that!

He only plays in the specific circumstances that are set up for this particular streamed event. He could easily prove himself innocent by playing and winning similarly in literally any other poker venue.

> How do you falsify his claim that he can read his opponent's faces and tell what cards they have?

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.

RFID on the cards?

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.

This isn’t the case of a casino tagging cards without the players knowing it’s happening. RFID’d cards are used because these are publicly streamed games. To provide a high-quality experience for the viewer requires someone (or something, in the case of a piece of software) to know the table state to build display graphics and compute in-hand odds.

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.

I don't care. The games can be streamed without the cards data also being public.

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.

In theory there is a thirty minute delay between live play and streamed play...except in cases of manipulation and an insider shares the information in real-time.

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.

It is about our agency as players. Being forced to show all bluffs and or body language as cards received, depending, means being more transparent than likely intended.

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.

After thinking some, I realize streaming card data actually forces a player to share high value information whether they like it or not.

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.

It's not high level or high stakes. It's a $1/$3 game--the games Vegas weekend warriors and tourists play. If he really has this superpower, why isn't he playing 100-1000x those stakes in Macau?

Isn't that possibly self-explanatory? He could play the lower level because it maximizes his profits. Better players might bluff better or mask their tells.

Sure. There are "whales" at every stakes level, but maybe he's decided that this particular $1/$3 game at this particular casino [using those particular RFID cards] is the combination that maximizes his profits. It's an amazing story and I can't wait to see the run-out.

No, it's not. It's just something that happens in the movies. Real people at high stakes poker tables don't exhibit tells, especially not ones that allow you to be 100% accurate.

Personally I'd be willing to believe that he has some extraordinary ability, as humans sometimes do. But only if he could win anywhere, not just in a particular streaming venue with RFID in the cards.

I played poker professionally for years. Nobody has the ability he'd have to have.

Extraordinary ability in poker means you win like 55% of the time. Not 100.

Imagine if you had a video of every player (a huge dataset across players and events), along with just the information that you're supposed to have. Now you code up a neural net or whatever fancy algorithm you can think of. How much do you think that extra data is actually going to help?

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.

The easiest way to tell would be to compare his performance at games with cameras vs without

If that was the case, why isn’t he playing with the big boys? If he was this good, he should be making millions and millions a year. Even if he doesn’t have the money, someone should be willing to sponsor him for millions or even tens of millions.

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%.

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