For people who are not familiar with poker and dont understand why people are 100% sure this person is cheating, allow me to explain.
This player continously makes decisions playing poker that are theoretically unsound and manages to always win the maximum and lose the minimum amount of money possible.
So not only are his plays theoretically unsound, there is no observable underlying strategy to his play. He plays conservatively when the player he is playing has the best hand and he plays aggressively when the player he is playing has a worse hand.
The only thing consistent about his play is that his decision is the perfect play he could make if he had access to the other players cards.
This kind of play is possible in a very small sample but this person has been playing this way consistently for a year now.
There are some interesting ideas here. It seems extra risky to involve a second person. Does a second person always show up with him? Maybe he built an app that allows him to read that data on his phone without needing a second person.
First, the issue is that he's winning at a rate that is 10+ standard deviations above what the typical winning/profitable player is achieving. These results are accomplished across a significant sample of sessions (39 live streamed ones), and across almost a year.
If you consider some of the players considered the best "live readers" in the history of the game (Ivey, Negreanu, etc.), none have won at the rate that he has.
Secondly, he's playing $1/3 and $5/5 poker in a city (Sacramento) that is not exactly a gambling mecca. You would expect someone who is as good as he is to play higher stakes games. $1/3 and $5/5 are stakes offered at nearly any casino.
Third, he's performed well against some elite pros. Matt Berkey (who regularly plays the highest stakes in Vegas) was in a streamed game against Postle, and Postle performed extremely well in heads-up hands. Given that Berkey is playing for hundreds of thousands of dollars on a nightly basis in Vegas, and seems to be a profitable player in those games, are we supposed to believe that Postle somehow has identified body language tells that no one else has discovered?
This is not even considering other facts like:
* Postle used to consult for the production team behind the streaming for the casino
* Postle used to claim to run some kind of app development company, and has since deleted his LinkedIn
* The extreme winning sessions seem to only have taken place during streamed games
Sure, it's possible that there's a benign explanation here, but it's looking far and far more unlikely.
There are hands that make this virtually impossible. In one well-known hand where both his opponents have AKo and Postle goes all in. AKo is a very good hand, but it's a much worse hand if two people hold it. Even if Postle had magic face-reading abilities that allow him to always discern good and bad hands, it's absurd to claim he can read exact rank and suit from faces.
He only plays in the specific circumstances that are set up for this particular streamed event. He could easily prove himself innocent by playing and winning similarly in literally any other poker venue.
> How do you falsify his claim that he can read his opponent's faces and tell what cards they have?
This would be super easy to test. Since the cards are RFID spied-upon by the House, a player simply has to pretend to look at their cards while never actually seeing them. The RFID chips are still active and the likely source of the leak.
So just don't look at your cards, he'll still know what your cards are even though you don't!
Personally, that's not poker to me. Removing my ability to control the information about my cards - specifically letting the House know my cards before I do! - seems to violate the basic tenets of what makes poker poker. Shouldn't a player be allowed to fold and drop that information into a black hole? It's not poker if you can't do that! Key player strategies have always included selecting which information to reveal to other players. Removing this ability from the players changes the game, dramatically, as seen here.
The control of information has been wrestled from the player and forced into the hands of the House. Any amount of cheating should be expected in such a weird system of convoluted rules and specific data leaks planted into the system on purpose.
It's not high level or high stakes. It's a $1/$3 game--the games Vegas weekend warriors and tourists play. If he really has this superpower, why isn't he playing 100-1000x those stakes in Macau?
No, it's not. It's just something that happens in the movies. Real people at high stakes poker tables don't exhibit tells, especially not ones that allow you to be 100% accurate.
Imagine if you had a video of every player (a huge dataset across players and events), along with just the information that you're supposed to have. Now you code up a neural net or whatever fancy algorithm you can think of. How much do you think that extra data is actually going to help?
If your answer is very little, you agree he's cheating. Like me.
If it's a lot, then you're saying looking at faces is critical to poker. And yet how much do poker players say about reading faces? There would be other people who'd also discovered that reading tells is useful, and they would be somewhere in between the naive people just reading the cards and this guy, who seems to play optimally given all information, even that which isn't normally public.
If that was the case, why isn’t he playing with the big boys? If he was this good, he should be making millions and millions a year. Even if he doesn’t have the money, someone should be willing to sponsor him for millions or even tens of millions.
While no concrete evidence has been provided, there is a lot of statistical evidence (he’s on a practically impossible part of the bell curve), Occam’s Razor implies that he’s cheating. Moreover he only plays when twitch is rolling. The most likely explanation is that he’s giving a percentage of his winnings to some tech guy processing the feed, probably more than 50%.
It seems to me that security at the venue is extremely inconsistent. They care enough about cheating to time-delay the stream (even to the announcers), but players are allowed to have phones and keys and things at the table? Maybe don't allow that?
A 30-minute (minimum) time delay on a live stream is usually a legal requirement in most jurisdictions, enforced by the state gaming commission.
Most poker rooms also allow you to use your phone, as long are you're not a participant in the current hand. The alleged cheater (Mike Postle) is said to have hid his phone under the table, in his crotch area. Obviously, it's going to be pretty hard for other players and the dealer to check for that at that angle.
In the end, the no-phone rule in most poker rooms is going to be largely an honor-system based thing.
Edit:
Jason Somerville, who founded one of the most popular poker streaming companies (Run It Up), has described how stringently the Nevada Gaming Control Board inspects casinos that are hosting streams. E.g. multiple inspections of the streaming equipment, a requirement for a guard at the streaming booth, etc. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZS47DB94-vk). He mentioned that California does not seem to have the same level of on-site scrutiny.
Edit2:
On TwoPlusTwo (the popular poker forum), long time players at Stones Gambling Hall (where the alleged cheating took place) mentioned that their poker room did not institute a no-phone policy until sometime into the alleged cheater's crazy run of success.
The Nevada Gaming Control Board doesn't mess around. I remember there was an HN thread about reproducible builds, and someone who worked on slot machine software mentioned that the NGCB would walk up to a slot machine on the floor of a casino, dump the filesystem onto a memory card, hash it, and the hash had better match what they had on file or someone was getting dragged into court.
Almost every poker room allows phones at the table. Turns out poker's a really boring game when you're at a table for hours and hours. Many of them technically don't allow use of them during a hand, but those rules tend to not be strictly enforced. Often players at the table are even playing online games against each other concurrent with the poker game - sometimes gambling on things like open face chinese/pineapple, or just regular games like Words With Friends.
Source: played thousands of hours of high stakes live games, and I'll bet that some of the regulars are among the best Angry Birds players in the world.
I play at Stones a bit, and last time I was there, there was this dude with a laptop open on his drink cart playing a few tables online on the side while playing live. They are very (too) lax about technology there.
Seriously, even a phone without internet seems like a massive opportunity to cheat. Simply create a custom app that allows you to input all available information via accelerometer input or volume button clicks which is fed to a poker engine and the then the app communicates the result of the engine's decision via vibration pulses.
Even IF you allow phones though, it seems insane not to make players play in an RF-shielded room so that radio signals can't enter or leave.
It sounds like your idea is just calculating odds - this is a slight advantage, but most pro's have learned to do this in their heads already. Poker math isn't very complicated.
If it's an inside job, the phones are not even necessary. Body language could communicate the state of competitor's hands against his.
And because the stream is delayed, there is not even a need for hand states to be revealed by RFID. This info can be retroactively added with better techniques.
There's a lot of focus on his phone. If this guy is really cheating it's probably way more sophisticated than that.
There are super tiny hidden in-ear earbuds that would easily go unnoticed unless someone really looks for it. https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/E~0AAOSwqABbH4mT/s-l640.jpg Or vibrating devices hidden anywhere else on the body. This paired with some information from the RFID stream, either through some insider or by hacking the Wifi.
As you say there are also lots of other items brought in and worn by the players, looking at the video i see people wearing hats, shades, bags and bulky clothes where you could easily hide all kinds of equipment.
Poker is a very slow and boring game and with people's attention spans these days it's going to be hard to ban phones outright. Maybe only at the highest stakes tables.
But apparently people watch streams of other people playing poker. How is this not considered an unsporting behaviour as it clearly disrespects the audience?
Is it just me, or do others find it disturbing that very serious accusations are being made and promoted with nothing but very circumstantial evidence.
I read the article expecting to find some solid evidence of cheating, but instead is just a bunch of speculation and innuendo.
I agree that this article focuses primarily on the "how" he cheated and the circumstantial pieces, but I've followed the story... It's a lot more than just that. I'm struggling to find the source right now (know it was via Haralabos Voulgaris's Twitter account [0]), but his win rate is something like 31 standard deviations above the mean. He also never plays high stakes anywhere else, and only plays high-stakes when his alleged co-conspirator is working. There's a ton of data-backed evidence that he's cheating. Seriously, scroll back through Haralabob's timeline and you'll find it all.
I don't know the guy who is doing the commentary in the vid but he is already very convinced of mikes guilty. Is there a list of scenes without commentary? I'd like to see few of the with context of the whole game to get a clue.
He's not always in super-user/cheat mode. In 2019, he mostly is though. When he is, his phone is nowhere to be seen during action/hands (vs phone in plain sight during hands when not in super-user mode, eg, not making incredibly suspicious plays based on hand context, and not always making the perfect play according to what opponents have, almost never actually gets into those types of hand situations when not in God mode), he is very clearly looking down at his crotch when pretending to look at his cards before decisions, etc. It's plain as day when you start looking at the videos when he is "winning like god." And also when he is "normal," you see all the things that are not happening anymore that I described.
Take a look at this hand you which I find about as damning as any that you will see:
According to one conservative estimate, he’s 6.1 standard deviations above his expected winrate (of the best players in the game). This is about a 1 in 200 billion chance.
What he’s doing is basically mathematically impossible. Combined with all the other evidence, he is 100% cheating. When he doesn’t have an advantage, he plays dramatically different and does things he never does in the other 90%+ of sessions.
As I read it he got too greedy and started playing in a way that was statistically impossible. Like 10x better than the best non-cheating players in the world.
It would be kind of like if someone bought a single lotto ticket every week and every week they won the grand prize. You may not have physical evidence that they are cheating, but you also know that they're outside of what should be possible in the lifetime of the universe.
> You may not have physical evidence that they are cheating, but you also know that they're outside of what should be possible in the lifetime of the universe.
Right, it is a very good clue that something is going on so an investigation should be opened and some of the anti-cheating mechanisms changed / improved.
However, I don't think that you can say you have definitive evidence that there is cheating (as this article does) until you can say how it is being done.
Sure, each individual instance of suspicious behavior is circumstantial evidence by the formal legal standard. But this isn't a court of law, and as a fellow poker player, I want to know about this asap and not wait until it's been "proven" - I'm completely comfortable with the minuscule chance this is a false positive, as it's not a matter of life and death, but it is a matter of integrity of any game this guy would sit at. And the statistical evidence it's quite compelling - the guy is simply winning at a rate that no other players, even world class ones, achieve.
Even in a criminal court the standard is beyond _reasonable_ doubt. If the defence present a doubt that the jury judges not to be reasonable, they can dismiss it without seeing any evidence that isn't true. "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury I tell you that Martians using mind-control rays executed this bank robbery, framing my client". No, I don't think so, I think your client is a bank robber. Guilty.
For example I was in court last week for among other things the sentence of a man done for VAT fraud. He'd presented laughably bad forgeries to the inspectors when they put it to him that his claim for a refund was fraudulent, and he continued to say, even at sentence (so after being found guilty) that the documents were genuine. The judge had to more or less tell him to shut up because he was representing himself so he didn't have a lawyer to tell him.
For a jury this will have been easy, the defendant's claim is that these forgeries are genuine, but the jury can see for themselves (no need for an expert on document forgery) that these are childishly bad, incompetent. Is it in some sense technically "possible" that real documents look exactly like a toddler with learning difficulties tried to make them? Sure. But it's not "reasonable" to think that's the truth and so the jury were right to convict.
But it doesn't seem to be a rule they enforce all the time (as one player said "that would be a good rule to have all the time") but the other players said they liked the rule simply cause people actually pay attention to the game instead of their phones now.
If it is how others have suggested in this thread, he has a tap into the system reading the cards and they if they only have that card reading system enabled during the live streamed games (Postle only seems to play during the live games and would be constantly looking at his phone) then that would be "enough".
If he is using a large reader in a bag or something then surely something powerful enough to read his opponents cards would also be picking up the cards in the dealers hands (the rest of the deck) esp if his opponent is on the other side of the table with the dealer in-between them.
That's just my speculation on the matter.
EDIT: Though he does seem to have his phone in his breast pocket. And if he really does have a tap into the system it wouldn't take much to create some easy to conceal device to feed him data via another mean other than a phone screen.
Some of the other games seem to happily have some of the players wearing headphones and the like so unless there was an outright ban on electronics near the table their would still be "issues".
If he does indeed have an "in" to the system then even ripping out the RFID system and replacing it with cameras (like in other televised poker games could be a data leak unless they ripped out the WHOLE thing and started a fresh with another company supplying the tech.
I was pretty astonished, reading the original article, that a poker game would allow having RFID chips in the cards in the first place. It makes sense from the POV of wanting to stream the games without needing a set of cameras for the table, but dang if it doesn't sound like an incredibly bad idea to begin with.
And yes, you're 100% right, just make the guy play under any other circumstances and see if he's still as good. A few people in this thread are pointing out that there's no conclusive proof, and while that might technically be correct, there are way too many independent red flags here to let this guy continue to play without checking it out somehow. I could believe that a random guy in Sacramento was truly the best poker player in the world without the part where the cards have transmitting technology embedded in them, but with all the facts here you have to admit something smells a bit fishy.
Really interesting story though, I'm convinced he's cheating and I'm really curious to see how (if) they ultimately figure out he's doing it. Seems obvious the RFID cards are responsible, but I'd like to see exactly what information he's getting (his opponents' full hands, or just "CALL" or "FOLD") and how he's getting it (hat? phone? microscopic in-ear audio transmitter? x-ray glasses?).
his results are preposterously good for a poker player of his style. he's far and away the greatest of all time if he's not cheating and should be in macau 24/7, never leaving the table.
This is so obvious it is not even ridiculous. Like: hey this pupil keeps his phone under the table while the other ones put it on it during an exam. And he aces it!!
Taking a look at his BB/100 (big blinds per 100 hands) versus "normal" players (and against potripper, a known cheater) shows just how out of the ordinary Postle is playing: https://i.imgur.com/66i3Tii.jpg. Admittedly, the sample size is small (live poker is much slower than online), but his win rate is outrageous.
For context: against good players (e.g. perhaps NL1000 in the bay area, and maybe NL50 online), a winrate over 10BB/100 over a long period of time is considered very good.
For additional context, at most stakes being a 5-10bb/100 winner is considered being a very good player. The thin cluster of people winning around 100bb/100 are the actual top tier players representing the top ~1% of the player pool. And then there's Postle off to the side doing 10x better than them.
I don't think anyone wins 100BB/100 long-term. I'd say those are players who have won large pots and haven't had time for the law of large numbers to catch up. Back in the 2000s when I played online, four or five BB/100 was considered crushing it at anything above a penny table.
It's your total winnings divided by the amount of the big-blind (to normalize the stakes) divided by 100. So Postle averages a net positive of almost 10x the big blind per hand which is absurd.
The VPIP (Y axis) is on what percentages of hands he voluntarily put money in the pot (i.e. called without a blind or raised with a blind). He is on the high-end for VPIP which means he plays looser, and has higher winnings per hand. This is already looking bad, but playing so loosely should at least mean he has some big losses to go with some big gains, but looking at individual results he really doesn't.
VPIP - Voluntarily put in pot - So % of preflop hands where the player bet money. How 'active' a player is in terms of betting.
BB/100 is a calculation of how many 'big blinds' the player has won per 100, where big blinds is a specific $ amount. Effectively it's how profitable the player is.
As you can see, he's high on VPIP, which means he bets on a high percentage of hands. At the same time, his play remains highly profitable. It's so far out of the norm there's only one plausible explanation.
It's basically how many times he's willing to make what should be an extremely risky bet. Normally that kind of play would be reckless and exploited by the other players, but for some reason it almost always works out for this guy.
For those who say there is no conclusive evidence.
CERN considers 5 sigma as the level where they are confident of announcing a discovery of new scientific result. 7 sigma for Higgs Boson. Statistical evidence against Mike Postle's game is stronger than that. It also only happens during streamed games with RFID chips in a single casino.
Either world's best player is playing for peanuts (relatively speaking) in single venue using high variance style without variance or he is cheating.
That's the same kind of reasoning that sent a mom of whose babies died to prison for decades. (I can't remember her name so can't link, sorry - it's a well known story of a mother getting convicted for double child murder because a doctor did some shitty statistics in court).
Sure, the chance is high. But if there is no conclusive evidence, then there's no conclusive evidence.
That might be enough for angry Twitter mobs, but I sure hope that it's not enough for court.
> Clark's first son died in December 1996 within a few weeks of his birth. Her second son died in similar circumstances in January 1998. A month later, Clark was arrested and tried for both deaths. The defence argued that the children had died of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). The prosecution case relied on flawed statistical evidence presented by paediatrician Professor Sir Roy Meadow, who testified that the chance of two children from an affluent family suffering SIDS was 1 in 73 million. He had arrived at this figure erroneously by squaring 1 in 8500, as being the likelihood of SIDS in similar circumstances. The Royal Statistical Society later issued a statement arguing that there was no statistical basis for Meadow's claim, and expressed concern at the "misuse of statistics in the courts".
So, there cameras live-shooting the whole thing and another system that overlays rfid readings over it. The resulting footage than gets stored on some system and being broadcasted with a 30 minutes delay to twitch.
There's enough opportunity to leak this information in near-realtime via some previously planted backdoor (Postle is a former employee), or a current accomplice from within the company.
Wow, putting RFID chips in every card... gee what could go wrong?
How does that idea even get past the whiteboarding stage? Seems so stupid for any poker house to do that. I mean come on, there is real money at stake and you are putting RFID TAGS IN EVERY CARD???
It's a necessary evil to make the game more marketable. Watching poker without knowing the hole cards is pretty damn dull. They used to use cameras but RFID is cheaper and lower friction for players. FWIW major tournaments and other casinos with streaming shows have been using them for years without prior incident. It should be a fairly securable system in principle, just ban devices at the table, and don't let players have access to the equipment, but Stones was clearly way too lax.
Unlike e.g. blackjack, the house usually has no stake in who wins. For this reason it's always been easier to cheat at a poker table than at other gambling places.
Couldn't each RFID tag have a UUID that maps to some in-house database to decode them to their actual card value? Each card/deck would essentially be "unique" and if you read the tags all you'd know is that your opponent is holding cards B8BB148A-1BA4-493D-A9C4-884A2AAA4491 and 1534DE97-B227-4292-817E-01112B9BC1E5.
Usually only two decks are used at a table, one for the current hand, and one in the shuffle machine. That's only 104 unique tags. Decks tend to be changed out only every few hours at most, because it delays the game (new decks are visually verified by spreading them on the table to see that they contain every card).
The vulnerability probably wasn't in the cards. That is, the cheater could not read the card RFIDs directly. It is more likely that he has been able to access, in real-time, the system reading the cards and storing the card values.
I'm curious how pervasive RFID tags in cards are in casinos, anyone know? I'm sure they're aware of how big of a vulnerability that could potentially be.
Readit News
This player continously makes decisions playing poker that are theoretically unsound and manages to always win the maximum and lose the minimum amount of money possible.
So not only are his plays theoretically unsound, there is no observable underlying strategy to his play. He plays conservatively when the player he is playing has the best hand and he plays aggressively when the player he is playing has a worse hand.
The only thing consistent about his play is that his decision is the perfect play he could make if he had access to the other players cards.
This kind of play is possible in a very small sample but this person has been playing this way consistently for a year now.
[0] https://mobile.twitter.com/vdthemyk/status/11798924471424491...
First, the issue is that he's winning at a rate that is 10+ standard deviations above what the typical winning/profitable player is achieving. These results are accomplished across a significant sample of sessions (39 live streamed ones), and across almost a year.
If you consider some of the players considered the best "live readers" in the history of the game (Ivey, Negreanu, etc.), none have won at the rate that he has.
Secondly, he's playing $1/3 and $5/5 poker in a city (Sacramento) that is not exactly a gambling mecca. You would expect someone who is as good as he is to play higher stakes games. $1/3 and $5/5 are stakes offered at nearly any casino.
Third, he's performed well against some elite pros. Matt Berkey (who regularly plays the highest stakes in Vegas) was in a streamed game against Postle, and Postle performed extremely well in heads-up hands. Given that Berkey is playing for hundreds of thousands of dollars on a nightly basis in Vegas, and seems to be a profitable player in those games, are we supposed to believe that Postle somehow has identified body language tells that no one else has discovered?
This is not even considering other facts like:
* Postle used to consult for the production team behind the streaming for the casino
* Postle used to claim to run some kind of app development company, and has since deleted his LinkedIn
* The extreme winning sessions seem to only have taken place during streamed games
Sure, it's possible that there's a benign explanation here, but it's looking far and far more unlikely.
This would be super easy to test. Since the cards are RFID spied-upon by the House, a player simply has to pretend to look at their cards while never actually seeing them. The RFID chips are still active and the likely source of the leak.
So just don't look at your cards, he'll still know what your cards are even though you don't!
Personally, that's not poker to me. Removing my ability to control the information about my cards - specifically letting the House know my cards before I do! - seems to violate the basic tenets of what makes poker poker. Shouldn't a player be allowed to fold and drop that information into a black hole? It's not poker if you can't do that! Key player strategies have always included selecting which information to reveal to other players. Removing this ability from the players changes the game, dramatically, as seen here.
The control of information has been wrestled from the player and forced into the hands of the House. Any amount of cheating should be expected in such a weird system of convoluted rules and specific data leaks planted into the system on purpose.
Deleted Comment
If your answer is very little, you agree he's cheating. Like me.
If it's a lot, then you're saying looking at faces is critical to poker. And yet how much do poker players say about reading faces? There would be other people who'd also discovered that reading tells is useful, and they would be somewhere in between the naive people just reading the cards and this guy, who seems to play optimally given all information, even that which isn't normally public.
Deleted Comment
While no concrete evidence has been provided, there is a lot of statistical evidence (he’s on a practically impossible part of the bell curve), Occam’s Razor implies that he’s cheating. Moreover he only plays when twitch is rolling. The most likely explanation is that he’s giving a percentage of his winnings to some tech guy processing the feed, probably more than 50%.
Most poker rooms also allow you to use your phone, as long are you're not a participant in the current hand. The alleged cheater (Mike Postle) is said to have hid his phone under the table, in his crotch area. Obviously, it's going to be pretty hard for other players and the dealer to check for that at that angle.
In the end, the no-phone rule in most poker rooms is going to be largely an honor-system based thing.
Edit:
Jason Somerville, who founded one of the most popular poker streaming companies (Run It Up), has described how stringently the Nevada Gaming Control Board inspects casinos that are hosting streams. E.g. multiple inspections of the streaming equipment, a requirement for a guard at the streaming booth, etc. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZS47DB94-vk). He mentioned that California does not seem to have the same level of on-site scrutiny.
Edit2:
On TwoPlusTwo (the popular poker forum), long time players at Stones Gambling Hall (where the alleged cheating took place) mentioned that their poker room did not institute a no-phone policy until sometime into the alleged cheater's crazy run of success.
Source: played thousands of hours of high stakes live games, and I'll bet that some of the regulars are among the best Angry Birds players in the world.
Even IF you allow phones though, it seems insane not to make players play in an RF-shielded room so that radio signals can't enter or leave.
And because the stream is delayed, there is not even a need for hand states to be revealed by RFID. This info can be retroactively added with better techniques.
There are super tiny hidden in-ear earbuds that would easily go unnoticed unless someone really looks for it. https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/E~0AAOSwqABbH4mT/s-l640.jpg Or vibrating devices hidden anywhere else on the body. This paired with some information from the RFID stream, either through some insider or by hacking the Wifi.
As you say there are also lots of other items brought in and worn by the players, looking at the video i see people wearing hats, shades, bags and bulky clothes where you could easily hide all kinds of equipment.
Using phones at poker tables, especially ones without RFID systems, isn't really a risk.
Deleted Comment
I read the article expecting to find some solid evidence of cheating, but instead is just a bunch of speculation and innuendo.
[0] https://twitter.com/haralabob/with_replies
Take a look at this hand you which I find about as damning as any that you will see:
https://youtu.be/Gaek0o6eYTo?t=709
What he’s doing is basically mathematically impossible. Combined with all the other evidence, he is 100% cheating. When he doesn’t have an advantage, he plays dramatically different and does things he never does in the other 90%+ of sessions.
It would be kind of like if someone bought a single lotto ticket every week and every week they won the grand prize. You may not have physical evidence that they are cheating, but you also know that they're outside of what should be possible in the lifetime of the universe.
Right, it is a very good clue that something is going on so an investigation should be opened and some of the anti-cheating mechanisms changed / improved.
However, I don't think that you can say you have definitive evidence that there is cheating (as this article does) until you can say how it is being done.
For example I was in court last week for among other things the sentence of a man done for VAT fraud. He'd presented laughably bad forgeries to the inspectors when they put it to him that his claim for a refund was fraudulent, and he continued to say, even at sentence (so after being found guilty) that the documents were genuine. The judge had to more or less tell him to shut up because he was representing himself so he didn't have a lawyer to tell him.
For a jury this will have been easy, the defendant's claim is that these forgeries are genuine, but the jury can see for themselves (no need for an expert on document forgery) that these are childishly bad, incompetent. Is it in some sense technically "possible" that real documents look exactly like a toddler with learning difficulties tried to make them? Sure. But it's not "reasonable" to think that's the truth and so the jury were right to convict.
They need to rip the RFID tags out and watch his performance completely suffer.
But it doesn't seem to be a rule they enforce all the time (as one player said "that would be a good rule to have all the time") but the other players said they liked the rule simply cause people actually pay attention to the game instead of their phones now.
If it is how others have suggested in this thread, he has a tap into the system reading the cards and they if they only have that card reading system enabled during the live streamed games (Postle only seems to play during the live games and would be constantly looking at his phone) then that would be "enough".
If he is using a large reader in a bag or something then surely something powerful enough to read his opponents cards would also be picking up the cards in the dealers hands (the rest of the deck) esp if his opponent is on the other side of the table with the dealer in-between them.
That's just my speculation on the matter.
EDIT: Though he does seem to have his phone in his breast pocket. And if he really does have a tap into the system it wouldn't take much to create some easy to conceal device to feed him data via another mean other than a phone screen.
Some of the other games seem to happily have some of the players wearing headphones and the like so unless there was an outright ban on electronics near the table their would still be "issues".
If he does indeed have an "in" to the system then even ripping out the RFID system and replacing it with cameras (like in other televised poker games could be a data leak unless they ripped out the WHOLE thing and started a fresh with another company supplying the tech.
And yes, you're 100% right, just make the guy play under any other circumstances and see if he's still as good. A few people in this thread are pointing out that there's no conclusive proof, and while that might technically be correct, there are way too many independent red flags here to let this guy continue to play without checking it out somehow. I could believe that a random guy in Sacramento was truly the best poker player in the world without the part where the cards have transmitting technology embedded in them, but with all the facts here you have to admit something smells a bit fishy.
Really interesting story though, I'm convinced he's cheating and I'm really curious to see how (if) they ultimately figure out he's doing it. Seems obvious the RFID cards are responsible, but I'd like to see exactly what information he's getting (his opponents' full hands, or just "CALL" or "FOLD") and how he's getting it (hat? phone? microscopic in-ear audio transmitter? x-ray glasses?).
Why is that even allowed?
Why is he, or anyone else, allowed a phone in the room at all?
I mean, the mere presence of a phone is just such an obvious vector for cheating.
For context: against good players (e.g. perhaps NL1000 in the bay area, and maybe NL50 online), a winrate over 10BB/100 over a long period of time is considered very good.
https://twitter.com/Joeingram1/status/1179441674683994112
The VPIP (Y axis) is on what percentages of hands he voluntarily put money in the pot (i.e. called without a blind or raised with a blind). He is on the high-end for VPIP which means he plays looser, and has higher winnings per hand. This is already looking bad, but playing so loosely should at least mean he has some big losses to go with some big gains, but looking at individual results he really doesn't.
BB/100 is a calculation of how many 'big blinds' the player has won per 100, where big blinds is a specific $ amount. Effectively it's how profitable the player is.
As you can see, he's high on VPIP, which means he bets on a high percentage of hands. At the same time, his play remains highly profitable. It's so far out of the norm there's only one plausible explanation.
CERN considers 5 sigma as the level where they are confident of announcing a discovery of new scientific result. 7 sigma for Higgs Boson. Statistical evidence against Mike Postle's game is stronger than that. It also only happens during streamed games with RFID chips in a single casino.
Either world's best player is playing for peanuts (relatively speaking) in single venue using high variance style without variance or he is cheating.
From your other comments, it is clear that you will not allow yourself to be wrong here no matter what anyone says to explain it to you.
that's how DNA evidence works, after all.
Sure, the chance is high. But if there is no conclusive evidence, then there's no conclusive evidence.
That might be enough for angry Twitter mobs, but I sure hope that it's not enough for court.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally_Clark
> Clark's first son died in December 1996 within a few weeks of his birth. Her second son died in similar circumstances in January 1998. A month later, Clark was arrested and tried for both deaths. The defence argued that the children had died of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). The prosecution case relied on flawed statistical evidence presented by paediatrician Professor Sir Roy Meadow, who testified that the chance of two children from an affluent family suffering SIDS was 1 in 73 million. He had arrived at this figure erroneously by squaring 1 in 8500, as being the likelihood of SIDS in similar circumstances. The Royal Statistical Society later issued a statement arguing that there was no statistical basis for Meadow's claim, and expressed concern at the "misuse of statistics in the courts".
There has been bad statistics in some completely different case. This argument uses statistics. We can conclude that this argument is also bad.
If yes would you say that the chance of your being mistaken is higher or lower than one in 10^100s.
The widely shared preference for certain kinds of evidence over others has nothing to do with certainty and everything to do stubborn human biases.
There's enough opportunity to leak this information in near-realtime via some previously planted backdoor (Postle is a former employee), or a current accomplice from within the company.
How does that idea even get past the whiteboarding stage? Seems so stupid for any poker house to do that. I mean come on, there is real money at stake and you are putting RFID TAGS IN EVERY CARD???
without being overly exploited such as to be recognized as an incident
Edit: Just pointing out the obvious that no self respecting (or just self protecting) poker player would willingly sit at a table with this guy.
What am I missing?