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Comment by RyanCavanaugh | Hacker News Reader

It's not enough to know that someone is bluffing; you actually have to have a better hand to win the pot when calling an all-in bet. Even if you were given the information "Adelstein does not have a pair" by an oracle, statistically, J4 is behind a randomly-chosen non-paired hand here.

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This arguably makes cheating less likely. If someone in production knew both players’ hole cards, which was the theory, this would be a nonsensical place to cheat. It was still a coin flip to either lose everything or, best case scenario, win a hand with a remarkable call that was sure to draw scrutiny.

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.

> it would be a nonsensical spot to cheat in

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.

If you’re bad enough to cheat like that, you’re not good enough to avoid a pattern of suspicious behavior.

Maybe, but there IS a whole pattern of suspicious behavior.

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.

You’re linking to the “report” by the accuser that consisted entirely of character attacks and borderline paranoid speculation. It contained none of the evidence he had promised.

Similarly, nothing we’ve said is any more than speculation. That’s fine, but that’s all this is.

Doug Polk thinks the binary signal might have been a vibration device that appears to visibly shake her chair during the hand:

https://youtu.be/xPQUarLEr9A

Yes, he believed the covert cheating device was an industrial-strength vibrator powerful enough to visibly shake the chair she was sitting in. Because that wouldn’t arouse suspicion. Truly a brilliant theory by Doug.

You have to give the "lawnmower engine vibrator" hypothesis some credit for its sheer hilarity. Imagine Lew sitting there getting signals loud enough for the entire table to hear, see, and feel, like the water cup in Jurassic Park

BRAAAP BRAAAP BRAAAAP

"I fold"

BRAAAP BRAAAP

"I'm all in"

BRAAAP BRAAAP BRAAAAP

"I fold"

FWIW, after doing a quick scan through the forum post, I could be convinced that Robbi and RIP where using signals to coordinate hands. There did appear to be a fair bit of subtle communication between the two throughout the game.

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.

Yeah, if I had to rank the scenarios in order of likelihood:

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

Yes, there were enough coincidences to at least make cheating a possibility, but without any credible evidence I don’t think the “100% guilty” people should be taken seriously.

It seems very arbirtrary to claim that she can absolutely be this bad at poker but she can't possibly be this bad at cheating.

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