191–200 of 288 posts
This scheme doesn’t really make sense. Once you’ve convinced a wealthy person to play at your underground poker table, you’ve already won - just play better poker than them, ultra wealthy fish don’t have time to learn to play perfect poker and you do. Trying to extract slightly more money per hand via x ray tables etc kills the golden goose and doesn’t even necessarily increase total winnings, since it makes you win…
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This plus a lot of the soft greed. The insistence on a foul-centric game that leads to over 50% longer games, the ridiculous lack of investment on its own broadcast infra, the refusal to shorten the season (which is the longest in pro sports, longer than baseball's season, despite being less than half the games), and the consultant-driven management decisions - I have so much contempt for Adam Silver for making me ha…
I stopped watching a couple of years ago but I assume they're still doing this: dealing out every game to a different network. You needed like 4 sports subscriptions just to be able to watch the season, sometimes even to watch the championship. For me that was the bridge too far.
NFL Network, ESPN, Prime, Peacock, YouTube...
All this potential jail time and reputation lost for $7 mil stolen over multiple years total??? And how many criminals split those winnings?? So the take home pay for an NBA HOF was like under $1 mil? Billups just signed an extension as an NBA head coach making well over that amount EVERY YEAR. Just sad imo
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I stopped watching a couple of years ago but I assume they're still doing this: dealing out every game to a different network. You needed like 4 sports subscriptions just to be able to watch the season, sometimes even to watch the championship. For me that was the bridge too far.
NFL isn't far behind NFL Network, ESPN, Prime, Peacock, YouTube...
Of course the NFL isn't gonna turn down $1B per year from Amazon for TNF. They get ~$2B from CBS and Fox each for the combined 10 Sunday games, then another couple billion from NBC for one Sunday night game, and another couple billion from ESPN for Monday night.
I think it's unlikely a single broadcaster would spend $12+B/year for exclusive rights to all games.
This is probably a very HN comment, but I cannot imagine why people actually like gambling and poker: - high likelihood you lose money - the point of the game is to lie to friends and strangers - you're stuck sitting at a table and following rules for hours - the only victory condition is that you take money from other people
This can be done with no tech at legit casinos. Just have a group of people with a predetermined “tell” system so that only the best hand in the group competes against the fish. In a 4 player game, with 3 teamplayers and 1 fish, thats 75% of games you’ll win. With zero tech.
Wouldn't this be discovered and get you banned by the casino?
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I read a theory that the poker winnings were not the scam. The scam was that the criminal element would HELP the NBA players cheat at poker, and then blackmail them with that info to change the outcomes of NBA games, which they were betting on, from which they could derive greater scale of winnings.
imo that doesn't make sense. All the online betting platforms will cut off the sharps. If you are net profitable and you make too much money from them, you will get banned.
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imo that doesn't make sense. All the online betting platforms will cut off the sharps. If you are net profitable and you make too much money from them, you will get banned.
with that level of sophistication I’m sure they’re not using the inside info to place bets on retail platforms.
This scheme doesn’t really make sense. Once you’ve convinced a wealthy person to play at your underground poker table, you’ve already won - just play better poker than them, ultra wealthy fish don’t have time to learn to play perfect poker and you do. Trying to extract slightly more money per hand via x ray tables etc kills the golden goose and doesn’t even necessarily increase total winnings, since it makes you win…
I think it's revealing of how diminished the la costa nostra is. This is such trivial work and, yet, this was a multi-family operation.
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Exactly. Structures, men behind, organizations involved, networks and other crimes indicated or discovered for example money laundering, betting. It takes time to build a case. Some laws need people working together and a one time event testing a new table and accidentally having lots of cash in the bags as well as so-called famous people showing up can simply happen by chance. It is complicated.
I'm not sure I believe this. It seems you can just walk into one of these places and roll the whole place, confiscate electronics, and make all the necessary connections fairly quickly. These games aren't a secret and never have been. I don't like the private (illegal) scene because it's killed action in casinos and games I used to love playing in. The risk to me of breaking the law, being robbed/scammed, or worse is…
The presence of petty scams does not indicate they have stopped their large scale operations. The Mafia has always done scams like this; it's basically the bush leagues to train for the really big stuff.