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Can this even remotely be a surprise? I have to believe there’s a whole lot more that hasn’t yet come to light.
My general feeling: “A fool and his money are soon parted.”
The best quick insight is provided by the graph that Gray Ghost linked. If accurate, this more or less conclusively proves that Postle is cheating.
The vertical axis shows the percentage of hands a player elects to bet with. At more than 60%, Postle is way above average, which necessarily means he’s often playing with mediocre cards. This should produce lots of losses and a high variance in his results. But the horizontal axis (which shows the rate at which he wins money per 100 hands played) indicates that he enjoys spectacular success, with scarcely a setback. To score 150 on this scale would rank you as possibly the greatest poker player ever (or perhaps someone who plays only with really bad players); Postle is at 1000, which is simply not possible in fair games over any longish time.
For context, check out the dot labeled “potripper”. This shows the result achieved online in 2007 by a cheater in what is known as the Absolute Poker scandal. It was shown that potripper had real-time access to his opponents’ cards - but note that his (absurdly high) win rate is only about half of Postle’s.
He’s also been remarkably consistent in folding very good hands when other players happen to hold something just a little bit better.
Postle’s win rate is impossible without cheating, so let’s accept that (I am assuming the charts presented are accurate, because the stats are really the only evidence presented; a few oddly played hands don’t mean much.) He probably cheats with his phone and an insider. What blows me away is how fucking stupid he is. He’s now known as a cheater.
Having said that, let me tell you something; cheating in casino poker is very, very common. Mike Postle went much further in his efforts to cheat, and was unnervingly idiotic in not trying to hide it, but guys at tables sharing information with cell phones is common as hell now and I see bizarre laydowns and calls all the time by people who look at their phones and only then decide what to do.
What’s the source of the information?
It’s easy to have a phone you can look at; much harder to arrange for useful info to appear there.
Yep, this. For example, maybe you move all in on the river when a third heart falls with only Ace high or some other weak hand, trying to represent that you have a flush. It doesn’t need to work all the time to be a profitable play. You can sometimes get a better hand to fold (less frequently you’ll get called by worse; I made that play recently with AK and got looked up by AQ, but there was a specific dynamic going on in that hand).
If your opponent has the ace-high flush - the nut flush (assuming no straight flushes are possible), however - they ain’t folding.
When Postle lost big pots, it was almost always because someone made a hero call that one could argue was probably a losing call against any other player!
Having played all over the world for many years - I highly doubt that players are using their phones to openly cheat in real time during hands. No card room I’ve been in the last 10+ years let you be on your phone during the hand, for starters, and there simply isn’t enough time while in a hand to sit there typing out the situation (stack sizes, position, action, board, hole cards etc) to provide (or get) any remotely useful information. Sorry, that just ain’t a thing.
Do some regs softplay each other? Yep. Do some regs share info about players? You bet. Are there some habitual angle-shooters out there? Damn sure. But I think out-right cheating in live play is pretty rare. Would probably require the dealer being in on the action.
Ha! there you go, shows what I know about cards.
Thing is though, he hasn’t actually been “caught” has he? Again, it is possible I’ve missed something obvious here but I can’t see an explanation of *how *he was cheating, just an assertion that he must be.
Sure the stats seem to place his performance way above chance but unless anyone can produce a smoking gun he gets to keep the money. Seems like a winner and a heck of a story to me! I like tricks I can’t solve. I look forward to Netflix mini-series that surely must follow.
It would be great if this were always true. Certainly around here, it’s not; while the local casinos all have rules that technically prohibit this, it is rarely enforced. You can, in any practical sense, be on your phone during hands. It is commonplace behaviour.
What does that gain people though, Rick? Collusion in the hand? Agreement to softplay? Accessing something like ‘Snowie’ (https://www.pokersnowie.com/) or other solver during the hand?
I’ve seen people on phones in hands, doing things like ICM calcs in tourney play—to figure out payout splits for a deal, not for making a push/fold decision----or making entries in a gambler’s diary, but is that cheating?
I’m just trying to figure out what the phone is supposed to help them do.
In Postle’s case, he’s learning other players’ hole cards. Outside of that, the only thing I could think of is getting computer-aided odds and optimal betting strategy. Just how clunky vs useful that would be I rather doubt.
It seems to me that the phone isn’t the real issue, here: It’s how the opponents’ cards are being known (probably a confederate working for the casino). If he had the confederate but not the phone, there are plenty of other ways the confederate could be feeding him information.
In fact, if he’s clever, the phone could be a red herring: When suspicion gets high enough, someone seizes the phone and checks all the logs… only to find that it’s been in airplane mode for every tournament and all he’s been doing on it is playing Candy Crush. Thereby “proving” that he wasn’t cheating after all.
This is what I’m wondering as well. I assume that someone walking around looking over people’s shoulders while they are in the middle of a hand would stick out like a sore thumb. The person would have to be walking around rather than just be in one spot. It also doesn’t make sense for the dealer to be in on it. For one, the dealer isn’t busting out their phone in the middle of hand to text anyone. Presumably he isn’t always playing with the same dealer as well.
In this particular case, the cards are marked so that the livestream audience knows who has what. Clearly, getting that information, be it by phone, or as Chronos mentioned, some other method, would be really useful
I was asking what a phone is supposed to accomplish for a card room player in the general case.
The cards have RFID chips in them. That info is broadcast on the delayed feed. He’s getting the info live, but the exact mechanism is unknown at the moment.
This guy ONLY plays these broadcast games that use the RFID cards. He doesn’t play anywhere else, and walks from the table when the broadcast period ends.
According to his now-deleted LinkedIn page, he was connected to the company that ran the Stones Live broadcasts and had worked for them as a consultant in the past. Hmmm…
So, do we have an over/under on his prison sentence?
Collusion is the easiest thing to use phones for, of course.
As to things like Snowie, I would assume that’s against the rules - it is in effect coaching. I’m not sure how useful it’d be in real life, though, I have never used it.
He’s been caught with evidence that is as strong - if not stronger - than DNA evidence. I think it’s unlikely he’ll ever see the inside of a prison cell, and I don’t know how other players would ever get any money back.
But I think it’s quite likely the casino is going to be in for a world of hurt, and Postle and others involved or viewed as likely involved could face civil suits and such. It’s about as certain he cheated as you can ever be certain about anything. There’s arguably more uncertainty about Trump’s ‘no quid pro quo claim’ re: Ukraine than there is about Postle’s cheating. He cheated. We don’t know the mechanism just yet - and maybe never will given that the Casino has basically hired its own lawyer to ‘investigate’. State regulators would need to really get involved for actual info to come to light, so I’m not holding my breath.
But he’s been caught cheating. That much is not in doubt.
No card room or casino I’ve ever been in - literally none - would let you sit at the table while involved in a hand, on your phone entering data. There’s no way you could do that on your phone, entering all the data required to find out your equity in a hand - cards, board, stack sizes, opponents - no way. And even if they did let you sit there with a solver on your phone - it’d be essentially useless since you’d need to enter reasonably accurate hand ranges for your opponent(s) on the fly - and if you’re able to do that on the fly anyway, rough math in your head is going to be sufficiently accurate to guide you in any decision. I’d happily let someone sit there with a phone and a solver, because if that’s how he thinks he’s ‘gaining an advantage’ I know there’s no way he’s remotely accurate with his hand ranges and he’s probably only playing his two cards.
You can be on your phone when you are not involved in a hand - which is when people make notes about hands for review later and such. Could you ‘collude’ by telling another player still in the hand what cards you folded pre-flop etc? I suppose. Would that be a minor edge? Sure - but very very minor.
Knowing *all *the cards - including cards that were folded preflop? That could be / would be very profitable. This hand is amazeballs. Nobody that’s ever played any amount of poker can watch this and not conclude with 100% certainty that he’s cheating.
It’s a 5/5 game but appears to be a $50 straddle in this hand.
Cut-off calls with 96o (lolwut), Button calls with T8s (I might raise here), SB raises to $245 with AK, WSOP champ Moneymaker 3! to $705 also with AK.
UTG folds KQ.
Postle is UTG+1 with 54o. He calls $660. SB ships for $2700, Moneymaker ships for $4100, and Postle - with 54o - calls off.
The only reason he can call pre-flop is because he knows that nobody else behind him can call, and because he knows that 54o is a huge favorite against AK/AK when KQ has folded, his opponents share each others’ outs, so only three cards for his opponents and he has six outs.
There’s simply no way any winning player ever does this. “Oh, he’s just a gambler” - if that was the case, there’s no way Postle would ever fold KK pre-flop…which he did here, when it just so happened that his opponents had Aces.
He’d never fold to a small raise with AA, on a board with a crap-ton of straight and flush draws, when his opponent just happens to have a straight, like he did here.
Either he can have the money and the hammer, or he can walk out of there. He can’t have them both.