Report of alleged wrongdoing in poker hand and audit of security live stream
hustlercasinolive.com
hustlercasinolive.com
Mostly I just want to comment to say that any analysis involving her hand equity against a random hand is flawed. For one, bluffs generally don't come out of a random range. Probably more importantly, someone deciding to have undue confidence in their read and acting on it is more common than some people here seem to think. It's pretty clearly a bad call under almost any reasonable analysis, but I wouldn't have been making a living if people made good decisions all the time. In this particular hand, if you convince yourself that the opponent has exactly 8c7c (not hard to do), it's also going to be pretty easy to convince yourself that a hand with the Jc in it is a good enough candidate to snap off that bluff.
Meta-considerations about offering to return money or the likelihood of choosing to burn an exploit for a very marginal situation don't seem particularly convincing one way or another unless you know the principals well. However, if I had to choose one word to describe a high stakes poker player, "erratic" would be a pretty good one. Basically I think anyone uninvolved who's sure of what happened is probably being overconfident.
The first explanation I hear her give is “I thought you were on Ace high,” which when asked “So why call with Jack high then?” she immediately changes the subject. Eventually she states that she was playing him as opposed to playing poker, which is a much more plausible thing to say.
Given that her initial justification didn’t make any sense, I genuinely just think she won by making a bad decision. It’s a perfectly valid thing to do in poker, but I can understand the argument for why she could have been cheating.
One example: I've played hundreds of thousands if not millions of hands, and at least once I've accidentally folded half the pot at showdown because I misread the board. If for some reason that had happened in a tournament and my hole cards were known, it would be pretty easy to make the argument that I was cheating to pass chips to my opponent, instead of the actual reason of me being an idiot and not knowing how to read a hand with thousands of dollars in front of me.
Now that this report came out, I'd say she has a clear avenue for a libel suit against him.
Also, note that shoving != calling, so it was definitely an unusual hand. And poker players are very wary of cheating - there was a famous case of Mike Postle in livestreamed games.
If they were that unbelievably reckless, this wouldn’t be the only hand they cheated in. Yet there weren’t other examples of notable calls or folds that indicated cheating.
The simplest explanation in my mind is that this rather inexperienced player made a very loose call and got lucky. I can’t rule out the possibility of cheating, but there’s not enough evidence to make it more than a conspiracy theory.
1. Lew made a statistically awful call and got lucky
2. (yawning chasm of implausibility)
3. A rough tie between
3a. Lew made an extremely shrewd read and figured out the exact one hand Adelstein could have that she was ahead of and called on that basis
and
3b. Lew could cheat, and chose to do so in the one spot that gave her very little additional equity and immediately exposed the cheat at the same time
I believe this observation doesn't make cheating less likely.
If you're bad enough to play like that without cheating, you're bad enough to cheat like that.
https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/29/news-views-gossip/garr...
Additionally to me it makes much more sense as a cheat than as a legitimate play.
Notice that people allegedly involved in the cheating aren't good poker players. And that as shown by some comments in this hn thread there are people who think that reasoning "I think he bluffs so I call" makes sense.
The whole evening she was setting it up taking how she is gonna read him and call his bluffs, etc. She was fishing for the spot like that. It can come once or twice during the evening or not at all. Of course it makes sense that she goes for it rather than waiting for a better spot that might never happen.
She could have got e.g. a binary signal that her hand is good and didn't bother to rethink if it makes poker sense or maybe she thought it did.
Of course, if the only cheating they were doing was signaling between each other (i.e. no fancy electronic gadgets), then they would not have had an advantage on the J4 hand. So it is possible that that hand was just plain luck. But because the session was being recorded, and because they were signaling, they decided to give the money back on that hand to try and ward off any accusations.
Similarly, nothing we’ve said is any more than speculation. That’s fine, but that’s all this is.
BRAAAP BRAAAP BRAAAAP
"I fold"
BRAAAP BRAAAP
"I'm all in"
BRAAAP BRAAAP BRAAAAP
"I fold"
even if she thought he was bluffing, Q K A high beat her..
why return the money? why let the dealer steal 15k?
100% cheating
There’s also motivation to give someone money if you were honest, like trying to make them happy or go away, but it’s an expensive way to accomplish that and probably less common.
Maybe because she was bullied into doing so.
That has absolutely nothing to do with the concept of bluffing. The hand is irrelevant.
If you did actually have a strategy that you put months of effort into, you’d deny deny deny. If they’re asking, they’ll already check for cheating (like they did above) and you planned for that. You knew you had to cover your tracks and you know the train had left the station.
I honestly think this was just bulls*er luck and no-one to cry cheat like a pro male poker player who just got a bad beat against an amateur female player.
“This person didn’t behave how I think I would behave in this situation, so she’s probably guilty.”
But many people get extremely defensive and indignant when caught cheating or lying. Do returning half the money when cornered by Adelstein is evidence of nothing, either way.
The house makes money on a take rate, but the alleged cheaters winnings came directly from other players.
There’s no “be chill, I’m trying to get money from the house” aspect here.
https://www.spymuseum.org/exhibition-experiences/about-the-c...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33058889
tbf I don't know poker but it looked like an unpleasant, bullying response from a bad loser from the outside with very poor visuals considering the power dynamics.
I'm sure they considered this but it fascinates me that they're not doing something like 'when a card is dealt it runs past a scanner' to track who gets what card.
Making unique ids for tracking is not being "high tech". IDs provide traceability, which is protection against unauthorized modification/deletion, which is part of information security, etc.
I’m sure this is a calculated risk, they probably feel confident in their ability to detect unauthorized attempts to read the tags.
And when all you can do is sniff all cards at once, you can't do this pairing and read the game.
Sounds, well, sound to me.
Putting the cards past a reader or scanner while dealing would alter the flow of the game, and would also introduce other attack vectors.
Face, meet palm
> HSPP has spent more than $100,000 and significant hours of its time to conduct a thorough investigation.
Beautiful. Bravo.
I'd expect any casino, card room, or bank to do this regularly before I'd trust six figures with them.
So there's a significant chance that the theory was wrong, but will become true at another event.
Just a bad beat.
This audit seems pointless to be honest, but when there's an accusation of cheating not much else to do.
Invariably that way these things seem to work is if someone wins it’s because of their mad gambling skills, and if they lose it’s because the casino cheated and/or other players poor strategy took “their” cards. Must be maddening for casino employees to have to put up with that day in and out. Imagine how much money was spent in this audit.
Figure 4: Faraday bag example
somewhat queer?