After chess, cheating rows rock poker and fishing
bbc.com
bbc.com
Far more likely was she misread J4 as J3, especially as she literally said “threes are good, right?” during her deliberations.
Cheating in this spot just makes no sense and there has been zero evidence to indicate it was anything more than what she said - she misread a 4 as a 3.
If you watch the video, you'll see that she knows that she doesn't have a 3 - she checks her hand before she calls and also a player at the table asks her if she has a 3 and she says no. Then afterwards she did an interview in which she explains how she thought she had a 3 but that doesn't match what she said at the table.
> She was only 47% to win the hand after her call of the all-in bet and while the play was marginally +EV, it wasn’t much.
It's not marginally +EV to call given the pot odds and she doesn't need to know her exact equity to be cheating, she could be getting binary "you're good" / "you aren't good" signals (and that's much easier to transmit and read without being noticed).
The play on the turn is way too ridiculous. The other thing is why did she return the money after the hand if she won it fairly? Sure, maybe she was intimidated but to me it looked like she cheated, she realised that she's in over her head and tried to make the whole thing go away by returning the money and coming up with a story about the hand she thought she had.
I watched the hand. I've been in that spot. You think you have a good read on someone such that your not-great hand may actually be best, say, they're chasing an open-ender and your high card is good. (Which it would be, barring cards folded by other players.) You're nervous, you're facing an all-in decision, you know the safe move is to fold and move on, but damn all you just can't shake the feeling, and you have to gamble.
Poker player trusting a soul read is the Occam's Razor answer here.
You didn't say this, but I fear that if this were someone like Daniel Negraneau monologuing about what to do and stating his read aloud ("I'm pretty sure you're chasing. I'm probably beat but if you're holding 8 9 I'm beating you right now. I'm right aren't I? sigh I call. Show me I'm beat.") then this wouldn't be an issue at all.
> The other thing is why did she return the money after the hand if she won it fairly?
"He cornered me & threatened me. If he has the audacity to give me the death stare ON camera, picture what it’s like OFF camera. I was pulled out of the game & forced to speak to him in a dark hallway."[twt]
Shit, if I was in that position, and producers/officials pulled me out of the game and put me in a room with my opponent where I was accused of cheating and told to return the money, damn good chance I'd return it just to make a scary situation stop. Maybe you're different, but that doesn't mean intimidation doesn't work pretty damn well.
[twt]: https://twitter.com/RobbiJadeLew/status/1575758837465812992
Right but chasing what - she can't beat J8, QJ, KQ, any high flush draw. Let alone value hands (she's drawing dead against a 10). So she has to put him specifically on 78 (which he had), 68 or 67. That makes it more suspicious, not less.
The intimidation thing makes sense if you believe her story. I can only guess what happened between the two of them after the game. I know that I've seen her change her own story about the hand that she thought she had. If you're questioning someone's credibility, you can't really go with their own story about what happened as a reason to exonerate them.
Fair, there are definitely semi-bluffs that beat J4 here, and of course if Garret had a made hand she's toast.
There's also (and I think she says this at some point, "purely a bluff-catcher" IIRC) tons of pure air bluffs that J4 beats.
I simply do not understand the stance that if a poker player makes a call with a crap hand that turns out to be good, and then holds up, that she must be cheating. Not for nothing, but I have never heard such accusations leveled at a male player like this.
> If you're questioning someone's credibility, you can't really go with their own story about what happened as a reason to exonerate them.
I am not questioning her credibility.
Because there is no reason to.
The only reason anyone thinks she might be cheating is because her heads-up opponent angrily accused her of it. Not even after a bad beat! After his hand, which was never ever the best hand of the two, failed to make any of its draws over a river that was run twice.
I question the credibility of the accusation. Garret has every reason to accuse his opponent of cheating, especially given that he successfully intimidated Robbi into returning his chips, which to me is just insane.
Why the conversation isn't "poker player doesn't catch his outs, demands his money back" is beyond me.
I suppose Hanlon's razor is adequate here - "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".
My sense is that the different reaction would be because of the narration, not the identity of the player (though it would also make sense that a player with a decade(s) long reputation would be given more deference than a newer player).
I think the reality is she just made a shitty decision in the moment that happened to play out well. Anyone who's played poker long enough has done the same dozens of times.
Daniel Negreanu [0] has the opposite read from you:
"The fact that she gave him the money back isn’t an admission of guilt, but likely the contrary.
A money hungry scumbag cheat isn’t likely to give money back in that spot.
Felt like she didn’t want to deal with conflict and can afford it."
[0]https://twitter.com/RealKidPoker/status/1575726681117011968?...
Re: 3 vs 4. I think both the cheaters and the non-cheater followers of this story believe that she was rattled and made a bad move. Even if she was cheating and KNEW his hand, she had no way of knowing that her Jack-high would hold up, unless people believe the entire casino is on in it and she knows all the cards coming.
If we accept that she was rattled, and stressed, and made a rash move, and got away with it, then it's equally believable that in the moment she briefly got confused and remembered the wrong hand. Memory isn't foolproof, and in the emotional decision to decide to call she confused the last 2 hands or ipso-facto justified what she could tell was a terrible decision but needed to cover up with bravado because the game had to continue after this hand.
Once you understand all of the above, it's clear she didn't need to cheat to wind up in this position, and in fact it makes LESS sense.
I haven't played running it twice but it looked like there was still importance to secrecy before the second river was flipped given the way they were acting.
> The play on the turn is way too ridiculous
Assuming the cheater doesn't know the deck (which would be extremely hard to pull off). How is cheating in this case logical? She had the losing hand at the time she called by a few percentage points.
Sometimes you call bluffs with a face card figuring it will win. It isn't a good bet but it isn't a terrible one as this hand shows.
Also insinuating that no one would return money when threatened is weird.
It’s +EV because of the money already in the pot.
Not by a lot though, and she played badly in other spots previously.
And it would also match her banter of "you probably got me".
It was effectively a coin flip given how many outs he had and the fact that her hand was better at the turn.
Saying she needed to cheat to win a coin flip is just weird.
Also the fact that it is a coin flip is well known in the poker community. If you haven't heard people bitching about losing to JX you haven't played enough.
I think if she cheated (I don't have any strong opinions on whether she did), that her signal was binary. It makes the most sense given her actions, and inability to explain them.
Buzzer that buzzes when "you have the best hand right now" makes a lot of sense and is easy for a bad player to understand.
It's a coin flip, but she's 55% favorite unless she knows the discarded/dead cards. If she knows them, she has 47% equity which makes her call very profitable given the pot size of 40k.
This is basic "pot odds" or EV calculation, I encourage you to do it.
If she didn't know his exact hand, her play is unspeakably bad. She has virtually zero equity against Garrett's range here. He's holding one of the two or three hands she can beat given his line. Most of his bluffs are crushing her.
Also the whole counterpoint hinges on not believing she felt she was calling a bluff which she explicitly called her plays as being.
He was behind and needed an out. So many outs existed he was more likely to win but "high card beats almost flush/straight".
Edit: And again, not saying this is remotely a possibility here, or has been suggested by anyone. But all the cards were in fact known by the television program covering the table, and there have been cases of someone in the control booth feeding info back to a cheater at the table.
And if she only knew the hole cards, that only tells her she is 47% to win.
I mean, it's still +EV because of pot odds, and it's possible a cheat happened I guess, but it's hardly conclusive. To reasonably allege cheating requires more than a sample size of one hand.
No, there isn't.
In tournaments, players are forced to put hands face-up when no more betting can take place. This is in part so people can see there's no cheating/collusion going on, and in part because it's better for TV.
In cash games, there's no such requirement. Players often don't show their hand because they don't want to give away information to the other players. There's rules about who has to show first, but if she had lost the pot, she could have folded without showing.
> Assuming the cheater doesn't know the deck (which would be extremely hard to pull off)
The insinuation is exactly that, that she knew the deck. (Rather, that software knew the deck and alerted her to a favorable position)
If you're not up-to-date on how that can happen, I suggest you review the mike postle scandal, and other proofs of concept where people are, in fact, reading the state of the entire deck.
The presumption that people don't call with JX is a weird one, unless you have never played poker before.
This assertion belies your mistakes. Giving you the benefit of the doubt, I think you're talking about playing J4 preflop. It's pretty bad, but whatever, people do it all the time. And of course they can win with it.
They don't usually rely on calling a $109k bluff on the turn with jack high to win, though.
> unless you have never played poker before.
I was a professional player before they shut down the big 3 online sites.
Also you're calling out a whole lot of top professional players with that statement.
Unless you can claim you haven't seen a huge bet on Jack Shit then that isn't sufficient evidence of cheating.
This tells me you don't understand the basics of poker. Which is fine, but you might want to be clear about that before opining :P
While the expected percent change of her winning the hand was slightly worse than a coinflip, her pot odds made her call +EV. In other words by calling that allin, she stood to profit. Your comment was implicitly assuming that she can only win as much money as she puts in with the final bet.
So yeah, 53% of the time she's going to lose the hand, but her actual expected value of making the call is positive.
> I haven't played running it twice but it looked like there was still importance to secrecy before the second river was flipped given the way they were acting.
I'm a bit confused by this, could you explain this in another way? If you're saying that there was maybe a reason to maintain secrecy (as far as what hand she had) after the first run, that's not true because she already won a hand therefore she will have to show her hand regardless of how the second river goes.
"He cornered me & threatened me. If he has the audacity to give me the death stare ON camera, picture what it’s like OFF camera. I was pulled out of the game & forced to speak to him in a dark hallway."
Given bad bets leading to threats of violence is not unheard of presupposing the threat wasn't made is baseless.
Hm why would a woman when confronted with an enraged man threatening her seek to minimize conflict…
Giving the money back is also a bad look.
The other odd thing is she's a very new player suddenly playing some of the biggest stakes in the world, and she's now won $100k in back to back appearances, while presumably making amateur mistakes like calling $130k with Jack high.
I agree there's no convincing evidence but it's enough to raise my suspicions.
With TV cameras and thousands of people watching every tiny thing you do, for hundreds of thousands of dollars, I can buy it. I’ve been in televised card games before and it is so easy to make dumb mistakes just because of the pressure of the cameras and audience.
I wouldn’t read too much into this, it can be either.
I’ve given back money during disputes just to avoid drama and because I was certain one way or another the money would come back to me anyway.
That's not what it means to make a +EV call. Expected value is estimated based on the opponent's presumed range. In this case the EV of the call was extremely negative EVEN IF we assume that the all-in was a bluff 100% of the time. Problem is that jack high usually doesn't beat a bluff in this scenario. If you adjust that 100% to something realistic like 60% or 30% or whatnot, it becomes even more severely -EV.
My point was that if she was cheating and knew what his cards were, there is no range to care about. And even then, it’s not significantly +EV.
edit: closer to 20k, i didn't remember the exact pot size
She loses her share/EV (47% per the graphics) of the pot (41.7k per the graphics) if she folds.
So it's worth more like 20k to call, if she knows his exact hand.
Much more likely to be cheating, imo
What would be the logic that a calm, rational, 3rd party (that could even be using a computer to calculate odds) would use that would justify risking $100K+ on that hand?
Also, don't you think that if someone's cheating they would be careful to play relatively conservatively so as not to cause this kind of attention?
If this is the first poker cheating scandal that you have followed, then you are forgiven for not knowing how funny that question is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stones_Gambling_Hall_cheating_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cereus_Poker_Network#2007_chea...
Because her call was +EV. Not knowing Garrett's cards, it was an insanely stupid call that threw away money. But if one knew Garrett's cards, they'd know it was a healthily +EV call.
The fact that Garrett had outs is very irrelevant here. You seem to think that one would only cheat by knowing that the opponent is drawing completely dead. But that's nonsense. You just need to know if your call is +EV or not.
Edit: to clarify, I doubt she knew her opponents specific cards. But she definitely knew her high card Jack had a good shot of winning, which is an absurd thing to suspect without cheating.
That’s a lot of money to give back
If she beat him fair and square, any reasonable person would call him a sore loser and be happy to have taken his money.
A lot of comments in this post are applying the commenter’s context to her situation when judging her actions.
I have personally lost all respect for at least two communities. Supposedly intelligent people apparently are all too ready to turn into a mob too.
Bullying is an effective tactic. If it wasn't effective we wouldn't have so many bullies.
Apparently we're still living by playground rules where if you don't stand up for yourself you deserve it.
I guess they know the odds of different scenarios playing out than I would.
When there's money involved there will be people who cheat.
Even when there's no money involved, some people will cheat.
Per Robbi herself, " i ran it twice because i didnt think j high could be good".
https://youtu.be/9NNKjWscKWo?t=717 (says it at 12:00)
Come on
Monetarily, there's no difference whether you run it once or twice. It just lowers variance.
I'm not sure what you're disagreeing with. She literally says it, I'm not reading into anything. What are you taking away from the video? (I genuinely am not sure what your argument is)
Most likely all she knew was she had the better hand at the time of his all in via someone spying his hole cards and some kind discrete alert system, like a vibration. She just wanted to make a play for the cameras but didn't think through how it would look.
The intention was most likely for her to get it first, then even if he called it would just look like she tried a big bluff. Would have looked great for clips and streaming...
It was either a colossally dumb mistake on her part followed by implausible explanations or she bet a ton of money somehow knowing she had him beat with jack high.
Without any actual proof of cheating (especially in this terrible spot) my money is on a fuckup.
"you have the best hand" buzzing in her pocket
Calling with J4 doesn't make sense in any other scenario, so it's hard for us to say "well it doesn't make sense to call in the flip scenario."
It makes way less sense to call with J4. She did something that doesn't make sense.
She also announced that she did not have a pair of threes, out loud.
Also for anyone else who wants to watch it, it was livestreamed, so it doesn't matter if you watch it live or now.
It looks very similar to the vote rigging claims we're seeing a lot more of recently in the U.S. Don't like the outcome? Just blame your opponent of cheating! No need to show any _real_ proof - just make up some vague claims of what _could_ have happened! And just keep repeating it. And this all seems to working pretty well - THAT is the scary thing
Obviously none of this applies in the case of the fisherman, who seem to have been caught red-handed.
After the win against Carlsen, chess.com removed him from one of their online tournaments, and a couple of chess.com adjacent streamers insinuated the online cheating. Under that pressure, Niemann mentioned a coordinated attack and admitted to to cheating at the age of 12 and 16, but not in prize money tournaments.
To see how easy it goes online, here is a video of Carlsen taking a move from Howell during a prize money tournament in Lichess:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NrOv8hxN6g
It can't be compared to deliberately using an engine, but clearly the standards are different online.
chess.com has announced that it will release an additional investigation into Niemann soon. The involvement of an online company into an OTB tournament is unprecedented and comes after the takeover of the "Play Magnus" group.
chess.com also released a private cheating conversation with Dlugy, from whom Niemann had taken lessons a long time ago.
So, out of the 50 cases only those who are "involved" in a win against Carlsen are being targeted. I assume that chess.com will keep the rest of the files for future "use".
FIDE, the real official organization, is investigating as well but will probably not find any OTB cheating cases.
So what? He was 16 yo kid who did a stupid thing playing online. How exactly does that relate to top-level over the board tournament with anti-cheating measures which organizers deemed sufficient to stop cheating? So far there is nothing but allegations.
If chess.com is to be believed this is not the case, and they have informed Niemann about it. According to them Niemann has cheated more often and more recently than he admitted, and lied about it when he made his statement.
> How exactly does that relate to top-level over the board tournament with anti-cheating measures which organizers deemed sufficient
Professional chess has a huge cheating problem: It is very easy to cheat, chess tournaments are under-funded, and anti-cheating measures are expensive. There are worlds between, say, chess and cycling, or chess cheating and card counting.
That sounds a bit conspiratorial - isn't it more likely that both Carlsen and chess.com take issue with cheating and they are in a business relationship, not because?
Isn't the point that finally there is a discussion what a due process looks like?
> Isn't the point that finally there is a discussion what a due process looks like?
What do you mean, 'finally'? People who were appalled by Carlsen's tantrums were insisting on it from the very start. If you have an evidence of cheating, present it. If you don't, stop behaving like a spoiled child and do not bully your opponent.
> What do you mean, 'finally'?
It literally took the world champion to throw a 'tantrum' to get a public discussion about cheating in chess: How should FIDE sanction (online) cheaters? What is the process? What type of evidence is required? What are the statistical methods to distinguish a super GM from a GM with engine help? What anti-cheating measures are necessary?
Regarding a 'tantrum' if Niemann is such a bad vile cheater, why did Carlsen start all this intimidation campaign only after losing? (and losing in a game where there were no obvious computer moves, just a solid play from Niemann and not the best play from Carlsen)
If he has some evidence of cheating, he should bring it to the table. Or just play according to the rules.
Again, I don't get the whole 'campaign' thing, it sounds like a big collusion.
Sure, had Carlsen won, he would maybe not have withdrawn (apparently he still felt uncomfortable with Niemann's inclusion, as did other GMs). But it's a logical fallacy to conclude that the cheating allegations are unfounded. My understanding is it simply was the straw that broke the camel's neck. Likely a false straw, but the bucket was already full at that point.
Maybe it's nothing, but it's not as nothing as you're making it out to be.
So what? Just because someone has cheated in the past does not in any way prove that they've cheated in this particular case. It only proves they've cheated in the past. Is it suspicious? Sure. But any accusations of cheating are still pure speculation.
> Officials literally found weights inside the fish. Both of those are in this story.
And I specifically mentioned this in my comment.
Getting caught for cheating has an impact on credibility. Credibility is a big deal and a hard problem. The boy who cried wolf is not a story of no wolves. Are you surprised that cheating impacts credibility?
In a court of law we might have standards like preponderance of evidence or reasonable doubt. In everyday human relations everyone is free to develop their own theories of credibility and to act upon their freedoms accordingly. You are free to judge whether Microsoft is trustworthy even without proof that they will betray your trust in the future, which nobody really knows.
It's your call if you wish ignore to medical credibility when evaluating your doctor's advice. Perhaps you'll engage in a discussion about how their medical credibility is not adequate evidence, but at that point, isn't it time to get a doctor you find credible?
where’s your evidence to the contrary?
i’m sure you’ll find fault with it as yet another arm chair expert
what evidence do you have for your position?
> He’s either the greatest chess player alive
Ridiculous, nothing about his play suggests he's the greatest chess player alive.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33085649
but i’m sure you have quite literally nothing to refute this with but the autistic cries from the ether
cc @dang
My position is that the statistical analysis is flawed: just think critically about it for a bit and you can understand why. It has been beaten to death already.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33085649
what analysis have you published publicly to be scrutinized?
i’d love to see any substantive comment from you though
But there should be a balance somewhere.
Lance Armstrong cheated in cycling and won 7 championships. The fact that he came out as a cheater later absolutely demolished the integrity of the whole sport. And I feel really bad for anyone who competed honestly all that time with zero chance of getting anything done given that the field is rife is cheaters.
So that extreme is also pretty devastating and chess lovers done want chess to fall into that state either
But in chess if you're outsourcing decision-making to the algorithm... why even have human players at all?
I agree with your assessment about Armstrong vs outsourcing decision-making. It wouldn't surprise/bother me to find out chess players are taking ritalin or whatever to increase their focus, but using a computer is troublesome. That would be like Armstrong riding an electric bike.
You usually don't get these with elections either, unless the cheaters are lazy and just add 1000 votes in a 100 citizen area. Usually, you'll see weird things that are very implausible which will lead to investigations, i.e. a perceived battle ground state going 99:1 to one side. It's possible, there's no clear evidence of cheating (yet), but it's extremely unlikely.
No one accused Stu of cheating.
https://www.pokernetwork.com/forums/main-noticeboard/28541-s... https://www.pgt.com/news/did-stu-ungar-cheat-at-the-wsop/
Also the cheating schemes are hard to understand sometimes. Here is an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_sorting
So.. is 3:45 the point where people think Robbi smacks the table and removes the ring?
It looks to me that the slap just moved the ring to the side. At 3:58 There’s something that appears to be the red ring still on her hand. Not to mention that before that moment, I can only make out one ring on her middle finger, and that ring band is still on her finger after.
I imagine they’ll look into that ring during their investigation. It’ll be interesting to see what comes of it.
This is definitely quite the statistical anomaly.
These players, especially in poker absolutely need to be paranoid or they will be robbed.
At a certain point we are going to need to subject suspicious players to cavity searches.
That doesn't make it right to accuse people of cheating without any evidence beyond "well a _normal_ person wouldn't have done something like this, so they must be cheating!".
It's much more nuanced than this. Magnus said that there's more he'd like to say but he'd want Hans' permission to speak openly - https://twitter.com/magnuscarlsen/status/1574482694406565888
Just because he can't immedially dump all the information that he has doesn't mean that he's obliged to keep playing chess against someone he believes is cheating.
> he's obliged to keep playing chess against someone he believes is cheating.
No one is obligated to play anyone, that much is true. Magnus has gone quite a bit further than that with his statements.
Show the metal detectors, finding a hidden device that transmits signals to her, about what the other person's cards are.
That is evidence. Nothing that you mentioned is actual evidence of cheating.
if you’re in a whiteboard interview and a candidate can’t explain their solution they regurgitated, do you think they know anything about that solution?
That would be actual evidence. Give the name of the person who was giving her signals, and then use the video footage, from the 30 different cameras that were pointed at everyone.
Show the video, of the hand signal. Directly say which person, in the room, was giving her info on her opponents cards. And explain exactly how it was done, with video evidence.
> why does she have to have a device? why does it have to be metal?
I was giving an example of what evidence would actually look like.
Ok great, have you looked at the device? You say it was a ring, then prove it. Show me the picture of the internals of the ring, and show me how the ring was giving her signals.
Thats evidence. A picture of you opening up the ring, and showing a hidden computer or whatever you think the cheating ring is doing, is evidence of cheating.
If you had evidence, you'd have shown it.
So things like a picture of the device giving her answers would be evidence.
A video recording of the specific other person in the room, giving her info on the other person's cards, would be evidence.
And now you just say "lol" proving that you do not have actual evidence here.
your responses indicate you’ve likely never played poker at a high level. you may have never even played in a casino. what basis do you have to defend this person?
i don’t think anyone in poker who won a hand they played badly just offered to return the cash. that alone tells me everything.
edit: someone also paid for her entry into this game and she’s an amateur playing with phil ivey and GMan. https://twitter.com/haralabob/status/1576643133583937537?s=2...
Imagine that we're flipping a coin and it keeps coming up heads every time, and I make a statement that I don't think the coin is fair. By your standards I shouldn't be able to speak until we examine the coin directly and no number of further flipping will convince you that the coin is biased (because it's technically possible that a fair coin does this too). Well, sometimes in real life we can't weigh/measure/scan the coin directly, we can only make judgments based on the flips that come out and we should be able to say that they look fishy.
But, I have yet to see any evidence besides Carlson's claims of cheating. I'm not even looking for "how", but I'd like to at least hear what Carlson thought was so strange in the match that it could imply cheating.
Him showing up for a single play of a rematch and then quitting after the first move seems mostly like a tantrum.
I'd be much not sympathetic to something like "these 4 moves we're so it of the ordinary that I can't see a way he would have taken them besides computer assistance"
The question is not whether Niemann cheated in this specific game against Carlsen (he likely didn't) but to what extent Niemann has cheated in the past, how (online) cheaters should be treated when it comes to over-the-board chess and if the chess profession will finally take cheating seriously, i.e. introduce anti-cheating measures similar to other professional sports or gambling.
As has been stated several times in this thread: Niemann has a history of (online) cheating, admitted to it, and while doing so likely lied about the extent and recency of his (online) cheating.
I'm not a chess expert at all but, from my understanding, he is known for some unconventional play. I could see Magnus having done a calculation ahead of time of a very unconventional opening and, seeing the counter being the exact optimal choice, being convinced of cheating.
All that I really know is he has a lot of credibility and the person he's accusing does not. I think it's a big story because it's dramatic no matter how it turns out.
There is neither of these, though. There is only people speculating that they MUST be cheating because they didn't behave exactly as they were expected to.
> By your standards I shouldn't be able to speak until we examine the coin directly [...]
I never made any such statement or made and indication of specific "standards".
We should absolutely look at the coin if it's behaving this way. But we can't just conjecture that it must be weighted with zero evidence of that.
I don't think any of the accusation that have been brought up in this thread have been with zero evidence. I think we have very different understanding of what's evidence and how much of it sufficient to speak up, and we're kind of talking past each other (the last part seems very likely).
"WE GOT WEIGHTS!" felt out of a movie. Those dudes were MAD.
This was a $30K tournament and supposedly this cheating team cleaned $500K last year.
Go back an hour in the footage, and she's calling with Jack high on a KQK board against the same player, and she calls for extra time before eventually folding a bet on the river when she still has Jack high. It's apparently not unlike her to be trying to catch bluffs with hands that lose to the bluff. She's new to poker and playing against sharks on TV. She's nervous and embarrassed and doing and saying things that don't make sense.
> calls for extra time
So its consistent that she’s acting exactly like she’s waiting on external input in situations where she might have the potential to call a bluff even though she has nothing to call with. And you’re making that out as if that reduces the suspicion?
Especially since it works sometimes, it can become a huge trap.
"...Anonymous surveys done after elite athletics events in 2011, in which 57% of competitors admitted doping compared to under 4% in WADA test results..." https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/aug/29/sport-doping-s...
"...In addition, of the 81 different riders who finished in the top-10 of the Tour de France during this period, 65% have been caught doping, admitted to blood doping, or have strong associations to doping and are suspected cheaters. ..." https://www.businessinsider.com/lance-armstrong-doping-tour-...
"...For a nearly year Serena Williams was allowed 'Therapeutic Use Exemptions' (TUEs) which involved LOTS of steroids. Date for use/Date given/Substance
Oct 2010 - Mar 2011/23 Dec/Hydromorphone Dec 2010/23 Dec/Oxycodone Nov 27-Dec 1 2010/23 Dec/Methylprednisolone 12-19 Mar 2014/13th Mar/Prednisone 21-30 Mar 2014/2 Apr/Prednisone 7-21 May 2014/8 May/Prednisone 10-17 Nov 2014/3 Dec/Prednisone, Oxycodone 5-10 June 2015/8 Jun/Prednisolone https://www.tennis.com/news/articles/tandon-a-closer-look-at...
"...Oral corticosteroids reduce the pain and inflammation that often occurs with extreme exertion. Athletes have reported that corticosteroids help them push through the pain of extreme exertion and allow them to recover faster for the next event..." https://truesport.org/clean-sport/5-facts-about-corticostero...
What is obvious is that the lady made a mistake. If someone were helping her cheat, there’s no way they would have told her to call, especially after the flop.
She was behind the entire hand after the flop, and even after the turn she still had a disadvantage. She shouldn’t have called it at all and there was no reason to even think about it. If she were cheating her accomplice would have told her under no uncertain terms to fold. Who would advise anyone to make a 6 figure bet on a coin flip???There’s no circumstance under which her actions make sense except in the case of her making a mistake.
She made a mistake and got lucky, that’s all there is.
A not small number of well-known pros don’t think it’s so simple:
https://preview.redd.it/e4x1y513wer91.png?width=1409&format=...
Most of the pros think it was just a new player who did something stupid that she didn’t understand, having seen that at the table many times before. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable take.
That said, she has several other issues that need to be addressed beyond making that specific hero call.
I don't have that impression. I follow about 100 pros on SM.
I’m just basing it on what I’ve read on Twitter.
I have not read a random sample.
There are plenty pros (as shown in the linked list) who are not convinced more than 50% that she cheated.
Given the circumstances, I doubt there will be a smoking gun unless someone confesses. As such, I think it’s really tough to fully rule out either side of the discussion.
I also doubt this will resolve, it's going to be the next Postle scenario.
It’s way more than one hand.
1. She used a time bank chip to tank a turn bet by Garrett when she had J8 (no pair no draw — same J-high situation) against Garrett’s made full house. In that case, there was an over or two on the board, so it was even more ridiculous to
2. Her changing story is not a good look. It could be because she was lying. It could be because she had no idea what she was doing and was just making up poorly-constructed possible explanations on the fly.
3. If you’ve ever played poker at a competitive level, her reaction when she makes an absolutely super thin hero call and is good and just sort of smiles is different than every other hero call I’ve ever seen. It’s super suspicious. To be fair, she could have been on something (Xanax?), so that’s a possible explanation.
4. She played really tight the other two sessions she played on HCL. Why was she all of a sudden including super thin value calls for this session? There are many good possible explanations, but someone deviating this much from their normal strategy and be right both times is suspicious.
5. Her undisclosed backer who was also at the table mouthed something to her during the session. What was that about? I was super suspicious, but could just be something simple.
I mean, a simple explanation is that she is a relatively wealthy person who was on a heavy dose of Xanax, and she was tired of getting bullied by Garrett (a top notch pro). She made a stand at a relatively random time, and she happened to be right. If that was her story, no one would bat an eye.
But she’s going with various whackadoodle stories that don’t really make much sense unless you start engaging in some random theorycrafting like she’s a narcissist who can’t admit that she had no idea what she was doing (possible, but who are we to say?).
Well, I can offer a counter-example that proves you wrong. I played professionally for a decade (so I'm not a person who "knows very little about poker") and I am claiming that she's cheating. I would be very confident making this claim based on her turn call alone, but when you add in the contradictory follow up explanations and the fact that she RETURNED THE CHIPS, I'd rate her cheating at >99% probability.
I paid for college partly through poker. Early in my career I used speech play to tilt a guy and get him to call when he shouldn’t, winning a big pot.
The guy was furious and cornered me afterwords, yelling “we don’t do that here. You better give me my fucking money back!” And so on.
I was 19 and not used to defending myself against angry adult men and I gave him the money back, despite definitely not having to.
I wouldn’t do that now, but if you have a loud angry man yelling at you, it’s definitely possible to just want it to stop.
(And I’m six two and was heavy into martial arts at the time.)
"The fact that she gave him the money back isn’t an admission of guilt, but likely the contrary.
A money hungry scumbag cheat isn’t likely to give money back in that spot.
Felt like she didn’t want to deal with conflict and can afford it."
[0] https://twitter.com/RealKidPoker/status/1575726681117011968?...
From fighting games to Donkey Kong to fishing to whatever else you can think of, people that chronically cheat often have the mentality to double down and/or muddy the fields to try and disprove that they're cheating. Because the best counter to any sort of cheating accusation is to never fold. This is even when they're explicitly countered with hard evidence of the cheat.
Much like with plea bargains in the criminal justice system, the fact that she returned the chips is (weak) evidence against the claim that she was cheating (since it suggests she had no plan or preparations for being accused), not for it.
Doug Polk is suspicious of cheating here, and Tom Dwan called this one of the most suspicious plays he's ever seen.
At least half of the best professionals in the world believe she cheated.
This is why poker is a great game. People like you that presume to understand poker very well and are so confident in what they believe. Please keep playing.
And btw, I'm 50/50 on her cheating or not. It would be extremely simple to cheat in this environment.
Agree that these levels of bold, decisive claims are signals about what makes poker a great game.
Nobody has near enough evidence to be sure. I think the play is incredibly suspect, and I think I've met many players at the tables stupid enough to make it. It's not common, but they exist and keep playing.
What is exceptionally stupid are the guys saying "it would be a mistake to call here if you were cheating" while still believing "she called with J4 because she's really bad." Their logic requires her to make a (massive) mistake with J4, but assumes she wouldn't make a much more nuanced mistake doing an EV calculation.
I personally think if there was cheating involved, it was a binary signal ("you have the best hand") and she's too dumb to understand the implications of calling with J4 in the spot.
What bears repeating here is that this would not have helped in her situation. She at no point prior to making a seemingly outrageous call had the best hand. That's what makes it so unconvincing that she would be cheating to me. The odds were completely against her and cheating would have required knowing what card/cards were going to come up on the river.
The odds were not against her, they were in her favor.
In amateur games I see this type of behavior all the time. To me all it says is that she's a noob in the world of pro poker. Playing against irrational opponents is hard, hence "beginner's luck".
When you bet or raise in poker you need to do this action with some combinations of hands that are good (we refer to these as value hands) and some combinations of hands that are bad (we refer to these as bluffs).
If you ever have too many value hands the opponent can exploit your strategy by folding all hands that are worse than your value hands. If you ever have too many bluffs the opponent can exploit your strategy by calling with all hands that beat your bluffs.
The problem with this J hi call is that it does not beat the majority of Garrett's bluffs. In this situation Garrett has at most 2 combinations of hands that are worse than J hi, those hands also have 50% chance of winning due to half the deck improving them on the river vs J hi. In this situation Garrett could have three of a kind, a single pair, a full house, or maybe just Ace hi (which beats J hi).
So this call is terrible, even if "you have a read".
So the only explanation is that she's extremely stupid or cheating. Both explain the shifting story for why she called because nobody wants to admit they are dumb and they definitely don't want to admit to cheating.
edit: She could also just have poor emotional regulation under pressure which compelled her to call despite knowing it's bad.
Option 1: She didn't cheat and made an incredibly bad play because she's very stupid.
Option 2: She did cheat and she made an incredibly bad play because she's basically showing off that she's cheating, which makes her very stupid.
So option 1 requires that she's really stupid, and option 2 requires that she's really stupid AND she cheated, making option 1 more likely.
That being said, it ignores a lot of the poker nuance. That's going to be lost on the discussion here, unfortunately, in spite of your comment.
I've long found you can't have any serious poker discussion here.
Unless you catch someone red handed go through channels. Unless of course the object is to create a bunch of hype and engagement… then I suppose accuse more people of cheating without evidence in the noisiest way possible.
Poker players, in the almost 20 years I've been playing, have a pretty standard policy of outing guys who cheat, steal, angle, and owe. Particularly in the high stakes world.
The cheating accusations did not originate with the players in the game, anyway. Garrett maybe told a story with his eyeballs--he's maybe uniquely qualified to do that. But his first mention of "cheating" was after it had already blown up, trust me.
It was on a livestream, it wasn't a subtle event, and people love controversy.
The current poker drama doesn’t offer enough evidence to prove or disprove anything. I think largely the poker world is addicted to drama, unsure if the objective is to remain in the media or just because drama sells.
If you play poker, that call was either the greatest hero call of all or extremely suspect.
There is absolutely no reason to call in that spot considering the fact that many bluffs could be ahead of her hand such as AcXc for a flush draw.
Furthermore, she was backed in that game meaning that she doesn’t have the money to play in it. Who is backing you if you are calling over $100K pots with Jack high.
wtf? That is definitely not how to use a polygraph. First off, why would you ever submit to that? Second, they are notoriously questionable, and something tells me the fishing championship didn’t get the world’s leading expert to run it.
That would actually make the results less reliable, not more.
Polygraphs are good at two things: interrogation, which is basically hitting the subject's knowledge-tree with a stick and seeing what falls out, with the polygraph giving a crude estimate of where to aim for more information. And legitimization, pretending that the interrogation 'produced' some specific result (interrogation does not work that way) to trick people into thinking that result is true.
Interrogation is mostly useless (you might get information about how they (may have) cheated, but that's worth less than nothing unless you can verify it against real evidence), and legitimization makes your beliefs wronger than they were to begin with, because you no longer know that you don't know things.
https://sdfish.com/general/dark-secret-americas-big-bass-gur...
But the more likely route was some sort of compromised computer system. The cards in these televised games have RFID to allow the show to know what everyone has. Like any computer system, that could have been compromised in some way. There's a lot of money on these tables, enough to make it worth a lot of effort to cheat.
…or look like they’re being zapped.
It 100% makes sense to call the shove on the turn if you know Garett's hole cards. In fact the problem is that it only makes sense if you know his hole cards.
His response to the call feels a bit like Michael Scott in the episode Casino Night. "I went all in, you should fold, I have good cards". Ok, that's why you play the hand. If all the responses are going to be dictated on rails, then why bother. Deal the cards and let the computers sort it out.
And it's not like it was guaranteed that he wouldn't hit either his straight or flush. I know the cards have RFID in them, I don't know if they're sensitive enough to tell the exact order of a stack of cards. Because that's what she would have had to know, his cards, and the next cards in the deck in order.
She would only have to know that if it was an absolute requirement that she wins the hand.
It's not--she can take a positive expectation, which includes a coin flip, and still be wildly profitable.
The outcome of the last two cards isn't overly important, just the state of the game when she committed $109,000.
> He has more outs
You've made a fundamental error here. He's the only one with outs, as outs refer to cards that will improve your hand to be the winner. She doesn't have outs, because her hand is better than his at every single point.
I think your points are reasonably well thought out, they're just missing some fundamental knowledge required to make any kind of valid determination.
That's the point that hits me every time. It really seems like his claim is that her cards are shit and the hands she can make are marginal at best and he put her all in. So that should tell her his hand is better and she should fold. But she doesn't, she calls. And from here that makes him believe she has a hand already. But she doesn't, she has Jack high. To his 8 high.
So his hand isn't better, he's trying to not go to the river and have to find out if he actually has a hand. He's essentially lambasting her for also having nothing but less nothing than him.
She chooses the wrench because, fuck him, that's why.
You're misunderstanding. His response (and the response from the rest of the poker community) isn't based on any call, it's based on a call with her specific hand. That's the suspicious part (and her behaviour after the hand). Garett has bluffed and been called and lost many times and not accused the other player of cheating.
He only freaked out (okay, his eyes did) when he saw her actual hand.
The hole cards aren't enough - there are more cards coming on the table.
Even if you know that your nothing beats his nothing you are risking a lot on a small advantage that his nothing won't turn into something.
After the shove on the turn the pot is $161k, she needs to call $109k. She needs 109/(109+161) = 40.3% equity to break even. So if she has more than 40.3% equity, she should call. If you plug in their cards on the turn into an equity calculator, you'll see that she has 54.55% equity (not accounting for dead cards like the stream calculation but either way it's the same outcome) so it's +EV for her to call.
That said, there are far better spots to do this and her other plays earlier were less than great.
This seems like a very suspect thing to do in my opinion. The threats must have been very specific and meaningful for me to even consider returning chips that I was claiming to have fairly won. Returning them just seems like a guilty move.
On the one hand, crazy shit happens all the time, and folks win by sucking out or by insane bluffs.
On the other hand, it's not considered honorable to win by mistake. Winning by catching a 3% is luck - but just screwing up isn't cool.
So, even though $130k (or whatever it was) seems like a lot of money - there is honor among (some/most) poker players, so it seems totally honorable to me that she gave him the money, as she doesn't feel she deserves it.
I don't know how she would have cheated. Maybe she did but it doesn't seem to me like she did.
1) she thought he had ace high (still doesn't make sense to call with j high)
2) she thought she had a 3 (that's when she changed her story after the game)
> I don't know how she would have cheated.
It's a streamed game, there's an RFID system that reads everyone's cards. You don't need magic to cheat, you just need an inside person.
The inside person doesn't bear scrutiny either. What would this inside person do to pull this off exactly?
This is based on the equity shown on the stream which takes into account the dead cards, if you only know the board and their hole cards, she has 54.55% equity. Either way she should call because she needs 40.3% equity to break even (109/(109+161)), any equity more than that is a call and she doesn't need to know what cards will come for that call to be profitable.
It's poker there is no honor in poker. Bluffing is part of the game.
Don't underestimate the power of mental self-sabotage of the innocent.
Even more so given the power dynamics here.
Personally, I feel guilty when I'm (wrongly) accused of something merely if it's possible that I could have done it. It makes no sense but that's how my mind works. If it were up to you I'd be convicted every time.
People are jumping to conclusions here.
I would not be surprised if this incident ends up with the guy being charged with theft, or coercion, or whatever the relevant crime is.
How you would react is no where near the standard she would have used.