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Poker fraud used X-ray tables, high-tech glasses and NBA players

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Re: Poker fraud used X-ray tables, high-tech glasses and NBA players

#201

Post by skeeter2020 »

jimbokun wrote: post #154
prodigycorp wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if I buy that. If we were to put this in white collar terms, we'd all be questioning Tim Cook if he decided that selling ice cream was a great resource allocation decision.

What business would you take your organized crime organization into for maximal returns? Just stick everything in the S&P 500?

I'd get dirt on the sitting president, then leverage him to make decisions with obvious market implication. Examples: give me a day's notice that the federal government is going to invest in a dinky mining company, or tariffs are coming on foreign electronics... except next week are exempt. You gotta believe people on the inside are making fortunes as the markets continue to make big swings up & down.

Re: Poker fraud used X-ray tables, high-tech glasses and NBA players

#202

Post by [deleted] »

CGMthrowaway wrote: post #133
mattmaroon wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a former poker pro: I hated gambling, I just was willing to do it when I had an edge and at poker I had an edge. I almost never gambled at anything else unless I was getting an edge from promotions. Still don’t. There’s a approximately a 45% chance of losing money on any given day, even for the best players, but it decreases over a big sample. It’s definitely a marathon, not a sprint. That’s true of most things wo…

This tracks. Not a pro here, but if you have a 5% edge at a $20 8-seat home game your EV is BEST CASE maybe $20/hour. Which is good for entertainment but not much else

[deleted]

Re: Poker fraud used X-ray tables, high-tech glasses and NBA players

#203

Post by theturtletalks »

jimbokun wrote: post #144
otherme123 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some professional poker player told me this anecdote: he was playing at a table with a celebrity. He quickly noticed he has a tell (he did something with his chips when he had a powerful hand or was bluffing, don't remember), and half the table also noticed the same or similar tells. They proceeded to clean his stash. At the table statistics matter between pros, but if you are not aware of your flaws, you might as we…

This sounds similar to an article I read about major league pitchers, who must learn to avoid "tells" for the pitch they are about to throw, while opposing teams pour over video of their previous outings looking for those tells. Some pitchers even said they would deliberately perform a "tell" that opponents had identified then throw a different pitch.

Same thing happens in football with audibles. I wonder how many teams are feeding videos like these to AI and asking it to find patterns that might be tough for humans to see. If an AI thinks there's a pattern, verifying shouldn't be too hard either.

Re: Poker fraud used X-ray tables, high-tech glasses and NBA players

#204

Post by HelloMcFly »

serf wrote: post #161
JohnMakin wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“just play better poker” like that’s an easy thing to do in a game of chance and incomplete information, with variance having years or decades long tails. not to mention it’s an unsolved game, so “better” poker doesn’t even really have a set definition and depends on tons of variables. and they literally knew what hole cards were coming - that’s vastly more of an edge than playing “better poker” than someone. Besides…

>“just play better poker” like that’s an easy thing to do in a game of chance and incomplete information you just need to beat the table, you don't need to become an over-average pro. that decades long tail you mentioned is for pros chasing profitability in tournaments -- it's a much shorter tail when you're playing fish in setups. being better at poker than the guy at the table who is good at making money isn't a bi…

> it's a much shorter tail when you're playing fish in setups

A lot of rich people know more about poker than middle-income scrubs. You don't want to find out the fish you're chasing was a shark all along. The point here is to turn a game a chance into a profit center, suggesting they just do it legitimately missed the point and assumes the scammers themselves have the time or talent to become good enough to reliably fleece people legitimately. It also means you have to vet the people you invite, rather than confidently turning out the pockets of scrubs and capable players alike.

Re: Poker fraud used X-ray tables, high-tech glasses and NBA players

#205

Post by Aurornis »

prodigycorp wrote: post #99
CGMthrowaway wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Organized crime operations have no problem getting a lot of people involved in their schemes. They wouldn't use one account. They'd spread the bets over a large number of people and accounts and also possibly sell the information.

Re: Poker fraud used X-ray tables, high-tech glasses and NBA players

#206

Post by mattmaroon »

CGMthrowaway wrote: post #133
mattmaroon wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a former poker pro: I hated gambling, I just was willing to do it when I had an edge and at poker I had an edge. I almost never gambled at anything else unless I was getting an edge from promotions. Still don’t. There’s a approximately a 45% chance of losing money on any given day, even for the best players, but it decreases over a big sample. It’s definitely a marathon, not a sprint. That’s true of most things wo…

This tracks. Not a pro here, but if you have a 5% edge at a $20 8-seat home game your EV is BEST CASE maybe $20/hour. Which is good for entertainment but not much else

Well, if you’re paying NL against people who don’t know what they’re doing, your win rate should be much higher. But yeah you can only take however much money is on the table so nobody makes a living playing the really low stakes.

Back in my day most cash games were limit hold’em (it’s been awhile) and you could pretty easily get to making $50 an hour beating up an amateurs. That was equivalent to about $90/hr today which is pretty great if you’re a young kid playing a game you enjoy.

Re: Poker fraud used X-ray tables, high-tech glasses and NBA players

#207

Post by daveevad »

mckirk wrote: post #21
y-curious wrote: post #6

I can’t help but think this recent Wired video[1] has some accidental overlap with how they cheated. 1: https://youtu.be/JQ20ilE5DtA?si=_MHmhjKGMKk4sobB

Sorry to be completely off-topic, but: I'm really reluctant to click on anything with these 'share IDs' and usually remove them from any link I share with anyone. I don't want to make it even easier for the platforms to build networks of associated accounts.

Sorry to be pedantic but if you're clicking the link, YT gets the referer header even without the share id url parameter.

Re: Poker fraud used X-ray tables, high-tech glasses and NBA players

#208

Post by Aurornis »

QuadmasterXLII wrote: post #25

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…

> just play better poker than them

That's a big "just".

They were using sports celebrities as the draw to the table, not expert poker players.

Cheating at poker also looks less threatening than playing against an expert, counterintuitively. Someone who cheats can pull out some big wins on some bets that look statistically bad. The target can see this and think the other party is playing poorly (betting on non-obvious hands) but simply getting lucky.

Contrast this with a shrewd expert poker player who will be easier to spot.

They want the target to think the celebrity sports figure is just getting lucky on bad bets, not that they're an expert poker shark who's going to take all of their money.

EDIT: Here's a 2 year old YouTube video from before all of this confirming this https://youtu.be/G-TKR5ca5jI?t=1790 (Skip to 29:50)

Having the cheating poker players look bad is a key part of the scam. It tricks the other players into coming back and betting big.

Re: Poker fraud used X-ray tables, high-tech glasses and NBA players

#209

Post by Aurornis »

cattown wrote: post #37

Doesn’t sound that profitable to me. $7m is a lot of money. But not that much after building all of that custom tech, setting up a dedicated space, training and paying a whole bunch of people to run these games. Then whatever’s left over gets split between multiple crime families? Seems like a lot of work.

This is likely one part of a larger operation including blackmail opportunities, as others have mentioned.

However, don't overlook the value of $7 million in cash and cryptocurrency. For an organized crime operation that's a lot more valuable than $7 million in revenue from an actual business subject to taxes, business records, and bank tracking. This was an easy way to get millions of hard to trace dollars into accounts they could use.

Re: Poker fraud used X-ray tables, high-tech glasses and NBA players

#210

Post by dragonwriter »

parineum wrote: post #136
duped wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The FBI is also struggling for legitimacy at this point in history

Name a decade without a major FBI scandal

The difference it that what used to be a decade-defining major FBI scandal is more like monthly in the current administration.
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