Postle is obviously cheating, but surely the fact that the same person sometimes takes huge risks and sometimes declines small risks is all part of creating an unpredictable persona, something that would be beneficial to any non-cheating player. It’s just the pure percentage that shows he’s clearly guilty.
I think I’ve told this story on the board before, but I’ve folded KK in a cash game pre-flop, and I wasn’t cheating. Short version is, situation was something like: UTG raises the pot, I look at kings and raise the pot again, player to my left raises the pot again, UTG player goes all in. At this point I folded since I was pretty sure one of them had AA. Lo and behold, the player to my left called and won with AA over UTG’s JJ. I got some flack for folding (possibly, in light of this thread, because they thought I might be cheating?) but I don’t care - it was a good read and the right move, which is relatively unusual for me!
ETA: the point of this post is in response to garygnu, to show that you can’t be sure someone is cheating just because they fold KK pre-flop. I’m not saying Postle isn’t cheating - he totally is, based on all the other evidence already posted.
There could be other things that are suggestive of his guilt. Does he ever play at any other poker room or table? If he chooses one particular place to play, and avoids others, that suggests he has some reason to favor that game. Maybe someone could even set up a game with non-RFID cards and see how well he does. Heck, let him keep playing at the same table, but take away his phone and see what happens; make sure there’s no other way he could be receiving information.
He may not have a partner. The chips in the cards are read by a computer. He may have been able to implant some code into that computer that’s feeding the information directly to him.
5-bet shoving Jacks seems ambitious. I couldn’t fold Kings there though absent an ‘Old Man Coffee’ or senior Asian lady vibe that all they were playing were KK+. Just too much over valuing AK—even though it is a hand that prefers to see all 5 cards—and general live player spazz for me to think I was truly beaten. I’d think you fold the better hand too many times for folding to be +EV overall. QQ is getting mucked without a question though.
However it’s true that lots of live players don’t 3 and 4-bet unless they have it. The 5-betting UTG player with Jacks is someone I’d end up paying off later in the session, and preferably avoiding pots s/he’s in.
For God’s sake, I hope you didn’t show.
Phil Gordon’s old adage that “the fourth bet is aces” isn’t always right, but quite often it is. If that bettor is a nit, yeah, I might toss KK.
Anyway. odd behaviour in ONE hand is not evidence of cheating. People can do funny things. Postle acting like this for a year and winning more than God? That’s cheating.
This is something I’m glad to see here, that is absent from so many hand histories or other poker stories: reads on the other players. How many hands have they been playing? Lots of hands pre-Flop (a ‘loose’ player) Or very few voluntarily (a ‘tight’ player) Have they been ‘passive’ (calling the bet, rarely raising)? Or have they been ‘aggressive’ (whenever they bet, it’s usually a raise.)?
Are they a winning/losing player? Do they look like they know what they’re doing? How they manipulate their cards, their chips, how they talk to the dealer. Do they exhibit any of the tells that, e.g., Mike Caro wrote about?
Keep in mind labels can change throughout the stages of a hand. Plenty of players are loose pre-Flop, but tighten up once they see three cards. Does the player ‘thinly value bet’ (press any perceived equity advantage, no matter how small)? Or does the player only get aggressive with a made, strong hand? Are they ‘sticky’, will they constantly call bets, no matter what you are representing? Or do they constantly see ‘monsters under the bed’ when a potential for a big hand shows up, like a pair on the board or three to a flush, and are therefore easily bluffed off their hand?
Do they ‘semi-bluff’? Which is to say, do they aggressively bet a currently non-made hand, but one with many chances to improve, even if they aren’t a current equity favorite vs your range. The classic hand here is overcards (cards of a higher rank than any of the current community cards) combined with a flush draw. 9 cards make the flush, and six cards make a larger pair. One may semi-bluff an open-ended straight draw (8 outs), a naked flush draw (9 outs) and so on.
Then we get to levels of thinking. What do you think their impression of you is? Do you perceive that they think of you as someone likely to bluff them? Do you think they are cognizant of your opening ranges, your calling versus raising ranges, or are they just playing their own cards and maybe thinking about what you think about their hand?
All of these things go into developing a mental picture of what cards an opposing player is likely to have, and what they are likely to do next. Yet are rarely mentioned in typical poker stories.
FWIW, here’s an old GQ thread I started asking a similar question - if someone cheated using ESP, could they be convicted? Sure, ESP doesn’t exist, but the underlying question really was - do you have to demonstrate the cheating mechanism, or could you convict solely on the probabilities? The consensus there was that you couldn’t convict solely based on the math.
While true, the thing is that tell reading is generally not the first place you should go.
Folding KK in the face of three or four bets absolutely is a move where the villain’s apparent table image really, really matters. Most of the time, however, the amateur should worry about the math. I love Mike Caro, but I honestly think a lot of folks are too quick to get into a Kremlinology-like internal monologue on how the guy in Seat 4 shuffles his chips and start to lose sight of fundamental poker math.
Poker fundamentals are like fundamentals in any game. The amateur golfer should concern herself with proper technique in driving, iron game, and putting. Flaws in their swing should be detected and eliminated. The amateur should not spend much time at all worrying about whether to use a 7 or 8 iron for an approach shot to the 12th hole at Butthump City Municipal Golf Course during their company’s annual scramble tournament. It’s not a decision that really matters in the grand scheme of becoming a better golfer, especially if you are not thinking about the fundamentals.
This is especially true of the kinds of poker games we’re all playing which, unless someone here is way richer than I’d expect, are not exactly the VIP room at the Bellagio. If I’m playing 1/3 at Casino Niagara, mathematically sound poker is 99% of the battle. At least. Once in a blue moon a “do I fold KK here based on the fact this lady is obviously ultra tight” decision will come up.
Part of the fundamentals is studying opponents, and getting an idea of what their ranges and tendencies are. Not some Teddy KGB Oreo-type tell, but an attempt to quantify through observation, all of that information we’d normally have on a HUD, if we were still playing online.
Otherwise, we have to default to a ‘typical’ LLSNL player model for our opponents, and try to exploit those players’ average errors through our tight aggressive play. Which, as you point out, usually works well.
If we are playing in a game where we can’t identify those average errors, we need to change tables. Given the rake, the only realistic winner at LLSNL if everyone is sound is the house. Which is an answer to the question posed upthread, “Why cheat, if you’re a good player?” Because everyone else is often good too, and we’re all trying to cull out the one or two bad players from the herd, and feast on their bones.
I was only trying to explain that one of the most important parts of live play is playing next to living, breathing human beings. Observing their traits is a gigantic pool of information, and yet is rarely conveyed in stories/requests for assistance like, “Halp, I have AT, flopped top and bottom, and got checkraised on the Flop. What do I do?” And so on.
I may be giving myself too much credit here, but my (hazy - it was a few years ago) memory of the situation was that it was the kind of game with all sorts of crazy bets and banter going on, really good fun to play and potentially quite profitable for those skilled at taking advantage of such (which does not include me - I normally turn up drunk and just play for fun in a rather LAGgy way, which means I usually wind up donating my chips to others at the table). The player who had JJ was a relatively small stack and had been playing pretty tight compared with the rest of the table. But my real read was of the player to my left (who turned up with AA) - hitherto he had been quite talkative and bossing the table, but on this hand he went quiet, and the difference in his demeanour and body language suggested to me he wanted a call. So while I agree that generally folding KK here is a bad move, I maintain that in this particular situation it was a rational move and a good read. Which as I said, is unusual for me, so perhaps more good luck than good judgement.
I didn’t show my cards as such because when I folded there were still players to act behind, but I openly admitted I had KK and it was obvious I wasn’t lying. Since I generally like to over-represent and bluff/semi-bluff when I can, I think it helped my table image to show that I was potentially really tight, it should have put doubt in people’s minds next time I came in light. Generally I’m all about ‘pay to see’, unless (exceptionally) I think showing one or two cards might be helpful in the long run.
Oh, I almost forgot to mention the best part of the hand - the board ended up with an A, K, and J, so we all made a set in the end (don’t remember the order, but do remember that being another reason I was very glad to have folded pre-flop!). Pretty sure I still ended up losing everything by the end of the session.
Y’know, the thought occurs to me… All of the evidence we have amounts to “this guy definitely knew other players’ hands”. What if, in his defense, he just says “Yes, I knew their hands. I’ve gotten really, really good at reading facial expressions and so on, and I’ve studied all of my opponents in depth, and I’m so good at it that I can tell what they’re holding just from their tells”. Yes, of course he’s lying, because nobody’s that good at reading tells… but can you prove that he’s lying? Even if you can prove it, do you want to? A lot of the mystique behind poker, what keeps people coming to the table, is that you can read other players, and the (mistaken, but still appealing) idea that most of the skill in poker comes from such reading. Vegas doesn’t want to dispel that myth.
The only piece of evidence that works against this is the one time that he told an opponent to put their cards in the RFID area. But taken by itself, that one piece of evidence doesn’t amount to much.
That was basically his defense.
And no, it wasn’t convincing. It would take ESP level reads to reproduce the same results. And if he’s got ESP, there are more profitable ways to employ it.
It’s not blackjack. The casino gets its cut no matter how well or poorly individual players do. In poker, they take a small cut off each pot or charge players every hour or half-hour for the seat.
They don’t want to dispel the idea that skill plays a major role (which is true in poker), but it’s in their own best interests that people believe the games are honest.
Yes, Vegas’ cut in poker is a straight percentage of the action, or a table fee, or something else predictable like that. But they still get more profit from more people playing. And the mystique of reading tells gets more people playing.
Wat you;re desccribing is a line. Specifically, it’s the line between “Sir, you are no longer allowed to gamble here. Please don’t come back, or it will be considered tresspassing” and “Sir, you’re under arrest.”
If a casino is pretty sure you’re cheating but cannot prove how, you get the first sentence. If they can prove how, then you get arrested.
As Great Antibob points out, it’‘s the the casinos’ benefit to have the players assume the games are generally on the level. They are not going to make a big fuss over vague accusations of cheating or minor angle shooting; it’s why people can look at their phones while they’re in a hand in many places that nominally ban it. It isn’t worth the players getting into big shit fits with the room manager. But something like this is rather way past that. If a room is this out of control and someone behind the scenes is helping a player cheat, I sure wouldn’t play there.
If Postle has some sort of Super Power like ESP, why is he playing 1-3 No Limit… there are plenty of huge games available if he had a super power.
From what I understand from the Ingram, Polk and the 2+2 thread, he is only playing on the live feeds, not in a regular spread game. disclaimer, I haven’t read all of the threads or listened to the entire library of you tube videos from Polk/Ingram.
And I think one of the benefits of playing on a live stream, the poker game is rake-free. Not sure of the “dealer-tipping”.
It’s obviously not a live stream. If it were, then all he’d need to do to cheat would be to use his phone to watch the live stream. I imagine that they put enough of a delay on it to prevent that.
But belief that a player is relying on a myth of reading tells to excuse cheating isn’t going to have that effect. I seriously doubt anyone now has much interest in playing with Mike Postle at his home casino (near Sacramento, not Las Vegas) - or perhaps anywhere else.
Indeed I think the Stones Gambling Hall is in for some tough times. I note that there is now a lawsuit naming Postle and the casino as defendants.
What’s weird to me, is that if his phone was showing him what cards other people had, you would figure at some point someone would look over and see.
If he’s getting the RFID info, maybe he’s not seeing their cards, but is simply being told to bet or fold by a confederate who’s doing the analysis?
As mentioned earlier in the thread, it’s on a 30 minute stream delay.
But the cards each have an RFID tag that broadcasts the hole cards for each player and the information is broadcast to a control room. One of the scenarios posited in this thread is Postle has a confederate feeding this information during play.
When the stream ends, the RFID information is also no longer sent, which is another suspicious factor - Postle stops playing when the livestream ends and doesn’t play anything else in the Sacramento area but these streaming events.
Wouldn’t be too hard to make it a simple code just in case anybody else is peeking.