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 faster but doesn’t increase the amount the fish are willing to lose to have a good time.
“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 the fact they were often targeting pros - this was reported on and known by LA area pros for at least two years now. why the FBI decided to act now is weird to me. I can’t stress enough that in the pro scene this was common knowledge. years old podcast clips are coming up talking about it.
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 well play with your cards face up.
The FBI is going to take time building up the case, flipping people, getting recordings, and trying to get as many people involved to not just stop the games but hopefully take down the entire crime families involved. LA Poker pros will start talking as soon as they suspect something fishy.
I understand the "need" for cheating but it does seem like overkill the way they cheated, at least as described. They've already got colluders, and then the auto shuffler reads the cards, and then they've ALSO got the contact lenses? Just some marked cards would have been sufficient. And then the rare time the fish catches up after being behind is your "let them win a hand and get traction". It just seems like they really went too far to control every part of the hand
>“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 big leap, it's what sharks and hustlers have been aiming at for hundreds of years.
People making most money _playing_ poker are really really good players that get invited to games with the wealthy people. This takes both poker skills, social skills (being entertaining) and potentially doing some occasional "fun" (incorrect) plays.
They are not the best poker players in the world. Best poker players have the misfortune of not being invited to "fun" millionaire games
If you have enough of an edge, the variance is really not that big. The only reason to have high-tech cheating when you already have a table full of fish - is if the people running the scheme are not very good at poker
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.
You don't want to extract more money per hand, you want to build up the fish (check the text message screenshots in the article) and then strike at the right point. The x rays remove the luck from those big hands.
> 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.
You would be surprised at how good some very wealthy people are at poker. There is a lot of variance in the game and they don't want that. In fact what they want is _exactly_ wealthy people who are quite good at poker because they make big bets and you can reliably bust them out on _one hand_ if you set it up properly after playing a fair game all night. And the great thing about that is that they feel like the night overall was fair and fun, because it was. You just cheat them on one or two hands at the most.
People who are bad at poker can also be quite difficult to reliably take money from fairly because they play randomly and sometimes win huge pots out of complete luck. For one thing, they are near impossible to bluff out of hands, so you end up having to fold a lot more than normal because you can only play with strong hands against them. If you are interested in making a lot of money, you certainly want those strong hands more often than normal.
The trick isn't winning when the celebrity is at the table, it is in getting the celebrity to the table, then keepong the victim there.
It's not about winning mote on each hand. It's about keeping the target happy as money drains away. And that was their aim.
By controlling the whole game, they were able to psychologically manipulate the situation. The target was at tbe table with someone they respected. Saw others win and lose large amounts of money. Sometimes won themselves.
Ooooh you use all these tools in order to _control_ the game, so that is is as fun as possible. So the victim still loses, as they would without the tools, but now they're happy as it happens.
Exactly, to a pro poker player a celebrity or athlete looks like an easy target. Someone with a lot of money, likes to play for fun, and doesn't have the same skills as a pro. They are at the table to bait the pros. But now the problem is you need those same players to win in order to extract any money from the game, hence the high-tech cheating.
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.
> Once you’ve convinced a wealthy person to play at your underground poker table, you’ve already won - just play better poker than them,
This is why in the book Molly's Game [0], the author mentions explicitly that she didn't want professionals in her game.
This b/c her game was seen as a game between "regular/amateur" players who just happened to be famous and/or have a lot of money. This was also DESPITE poker professionals both asking her to play AND offering to give her a stake of their winnings.
Granted, certain players (e.g. Tobey Maguire) were MUCH better than the other players but it seems that didn't matter as long as poker wasn't their primary source of income.
You really don't understand the mind of fraudsters and criminals. The reason they do what they do is because they don't want to "just be better at X than Y" and spend the effort for that, they want to take the shortcut and they think they've found the best shortcut considering their situation.
Once you start to look at what people are doing with that perspective, things will start to make more sense.
Wealthy people aren't dumb - they don't join games where the odds are tilted against them. In these high-stake private games they can usually demand and set the rules like shallow stacks (100BB), enforced straddles, raising stakes after a loss, button games etc. that remove the GTO / poker element and make the game more gambly.
Boring pros who play these games straight up and don't "give action" don't get invited back.
This is how you can have some of the best poker players like Tom Dwan get absolutely wiped out while playing against whales in Macau
If you want to see a more recent example of this - the amateur whale Monarch recently took on one of the best cash game heads up players Bjorn Lee. I won't spoil the result because it's highly entertaining and demonstrates how the game works at these stakes:
You don't need to play better poker. You can just have multiple people on the same team at the same table and communicating, vastly increasing your odds of your team having the best hand.
My understanding is that collusion is rampant in poker.
If you get introduced to a 'friendly' game of 5 players there's a good chance that these guys are signalling to each other and basically folding to whoever's got the best hand. You can't win against that. Even if you have 2 new players showing up at a table existing players could worry about collusion.
If you don't have the fancy trappings those guys did it is almost impossible to catch people colluding in poker.
Diminished? More like, matured into white collar crime. There's no need to murder people on the street any more, that kind of dirty work is left to some random Southern American cartels, and the white collar crime brings in more than enough profit while also being way less risky should the feds catch up on it.
Sometimes the wealthy person is the shark, and you're the fish...
In Molly's Game, Tobey Maguire was the celebrity shark. (In the movie he was played by Michael Cera). He could easily have been a professional poker player, but he makes way more from acting and he prefers the easy play in private games.
No need to learn; just hire players who are better than the fish and split the profits???
Once it is your shuffler, I could cobble together a Raspberry Pi to light a slightly different wavelength LED when it dealt them two pictures and would need to concentrate to lose enough to get all their money.
> In what sounds like an Ocean's Eleven film plot, prosecutors say these "unwitting" victims were cheated out of at least $7m (£5.25m) in poker games - with one person losing at least $1.8m.
Definitely a lot of work but that seems like a half decent payday to me.
The profit from a scheme like this would likely be in the high tens of millions of dollars.
The poker game itself in high-roller situations could be a million plus per night depending on the stakes.
Then there's the whole "you owe the Mafia" angle with NBA players and coaches. It's a pretty clear line to the Mafia making tens of millions of dollars on rigged NBA games.
Seems pretty clear to me the risk and excitement of the scheme was probably a big part of the appeal for these people, as much as the total cash amount they took home.
Most criminals have a specific type of cleverness, but not intelligence.
If they were smart people, they wouldn't do the crimes in the first place.
I dealt with a low-tech breach at one of the hospitals I worked for.
The criminal worked in HIM, and used paper and pencil to note specific info about specific types of patients. Since they worked in HIM, it was expected for them to view many medical records in a day and no app detects paper/pencil, so quite clever so far.
Ultimately, they used this info to file false tax returns to steal the refunds.
The problem? They filed 881 false tax returns annnnnnd used the same address for all of them. DOH.
They were busted/arrested and off to jail they went.
Clever, right until the end, then abysmally stupid.
HIM = Health Information Management for anyone else wondering.
If they were smart people, they wouldn't do the crimes in the first place.
There are tons of smart people committing crimes. The levels of Intelligence, success, luck, greed, and morals can co-exist in every possible combination within one human.
Organized crime groups are rarely interested in "the long game". They work on the assumption that the party will end sooner than anticipated. Each game must be total victory.
“An X-ray poker machine was employed to read facedown cards and a rigged card-shuffling machine was also used in the plot, prosecutors say.”
Would love to know more about such a machine, if anyone has any insight. Are these developed underground? How expensive could they be?
If it can efficiently take in a deck of cards and deterministically return a rigged deck in a reasonable amount of time, I would be fascinated at how they solved that problem.
Many shuffle machines read all the cards, do the shuffle in software, then sort the cards accordingly. Here's a guy on Wired showing how to rig a poker game:
As someone who knows a bunch of card tricks myself, I have learned to resist the temptation to do an impromptu 'ambitious card' routine just because a deck of cards and an audience is in front of me before a poker game.
> There are _so many_ ways to cheat at poker that you should basically never play a private game outside of close friends.
Playing in an actual regulated casino or poker hall eliminates most of the technical risk of a fraudulent shuffle. The risk to the enterprise of losing their gaming license keeps things honest. Imagine the net effect of Bellagio’s shuffling machines or dealers being rigged.
But nothing can eliminate collusion of players. You’re best bet for that is your own self awareness. If your spidey sense is tripping, listen to it.
Thanks for the link. So basically, you are at a private game and if everyone has their phones out (and you are also an unsuspecting idiot), you are screwed.
Crazy that there is a USB port exposed outside the machine.
The card-shuffling machine is an obvious vulnerability.
But I'm provisionally calling BS on the "X-ray table." Based on (admittedly limited) experience with X-ray imaging, I don't believe that X-rays can read ink on playing cards. It would have to be a backscatter machine, which is even less discriminatory than a transmissive machine. Would need to see some evidence that this is possible.
If nothing else, the sheer size and bulk of such a machine renders the concept incredible. If I could build something like that, I wouldn't use it to cheat at cards, I'd sell it to the TSA!
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.
Whenever some
group is said to have made/fined 1M out of their likely billions in revenue, someone will chime and say “that’s nothing”. But From a “department P&L perspective” yes, it is a lot of money!
Think about the crime families as making e.g. 50% money from construction corruption, 40% from drug sales, 5% from extortion… someone has to run the other smaller departments and that is a lot of money for that “Dept Head”. Also from the FBIs perspective they want to unravel conspiracies, often by yanking on one piece of yarn like this one.
That was my first thought, especially because they could get similar results with a marked deck. To me, this leads more credibility to it being part of a bigger operation.
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
I think what happens is that many of these professional athletes grow up in communities and circumstances where it's just normal and expected to be "hustling," getting away with things, and avoiding the law. Wrong, but maybe understandable under those circumstances (poverty primarily).
But then you take that person out of the "hood," and give him a $1M/yr sports contract, and the mentality doesn't necessarily go away. It's still about the hustle. They might not stop to consider that they don't NEED to hustle anymore. And they're probably also surrounded now by grifters/"friends"/family who do still need/want to hustle, and essentially using these guys.
I can tell you right now that the kinds of dudes who play high level college ball and then go on to play professional ball were not hustling as kids. Many did grow up in unfortunate circumstances (this is less true as the years go on) however their talents generally were identified early and the track they were on was pretty clear.
I think the simpler answer is that some people are especially poor at risk vs reward analysis. Others enjoy the thrill of getting away with something. It's been 30+ years since Chauncey Billups has had to worry about money. I think your point about friends around them is very fair though. Lots of these guys have hangers on with their hands out and despite making lots of money in their careers they cant just give cash to everyone. So I can imagine them thinking "hey place a bet on my under for the next game because I'm going to go out early" seems like a low risk, not so evil way to put a few dollars in a friend's pocket.
Semi related: A couple of years ago a waste facility in Berlin measured increased levels of radio activity and traced it back to a restaurant where 13 cards laced with radioactive Iodine-125 were found:
Looks like near-IR of some sort but media calls everything x-ray since it's what people know. X-Rays would go through cards anyway. But you'd get nice pictures of peoples hands though, and cataracts after a night of play.
edit: now I think of it: if the cloth is thin enough you don't even need near-IR. Old fashioned IR camera's (those without any fancy filter) from the '00 showed though some relatively thin opaque synthetic material with a tiny IR source so ...
I looked up the term "X-ray table" but couldn't find anything relevant except very recent results about this specific news.
Sounds like FBI invented this very stupid/confusing name for the story when they could have used much something much better and clearer. X-ray really has nothing to do with this.
I don't think it's literally "X-Rays". A couple years ago I saw an infrared transparent table being demonstrated as a product prototype by a distributor of magic props at a conference for professional magicians. I played with it a while because I thought it was quite remarkable and had never seen anything like it. The top surface was a half-inch thick hard black plastic which appeared completely opaque. It was perfectly convincing as it even had faux wood grain texturing on the surface. It looked for all the world like a table you'd see at IKEA or Target. I put my phone's flashlight on full brightness under it pointing up and couldn't see any light coming through, even shading the spot with my hand.
The table had a bunch of IR emitters pointed up built into the supports holding the table surface but they were at least two feet away and well-obscured into the table leg design by more normal-seeming smooth plastic I associate with being IR-transparent. Of course, if you suspect the use of IR, it's quite easy to detect with your camera phone. There was a camera hidden into the middle of the table supports looking up which transmitted the image wirelessly to a monitor nearby. My own face-down playing cards were visible on the camera plain as day, so it doesn't require special cards.
Interestingly, the magic distributor showing it wasn't giving out any info on who made it, what it cost or when it might be available. They just said they were "showing it to gauge interest" and might carry it at some point in the future. They're a large, long-time, reputable distributor of other people's products so I don't think they were involved in creating it. It hasn't made an appearance at subsequent conventions, so they must have decided it wouldn't be popular with magicians - which makes perfect sense. It would have been expensive and pretty technically involved for a limited-use magic prop. Good magicians have a many easier and cheaper ways to learn the identity of hidden cards :-). But the fact such a thick, textured, optically opaque surface could be IR transparent was pretty nifty.
As a former magician I was surprised to read the gang was using 'reader' cards (backs marked with ink visible to special glasses). No one uses those anymore as there are so many better ways to do the same thing. Seems like this gang was just into various tech toys and kind of lazy. In reality, once you control the environment, cards and have confederates in the game - cheating to win is trivial without any tech if you know what you're doing.
i wonder if we're not conflating xray with terahertz radiation perhaps? the former being used by a company called corrections one that produces a horrifying whole-body X-Ray of a prisoner to detect contraband (certainly not healthy.)
Terahertz radiation is used in airports with (arguable) safety and efficacy. the resolution is sufficient to read protest statements written under a passengers shirt in metallic ink. I wonder if it could read cards should they be specially crafted similarly.
This appears to be the / a source for the devices in question. It's worth reading over the technical details of how it all works. It's both terrifying and impressive. Cards can be identified using a barcode encoded on their thin edge from meters away.
Readit News
Besides the fact they were often targeting pros - this was reported on and known by LA area pros for at least two years now. why the FBI decided to act now is weird to me. I can’t stress enough that in the pro scene this was common knowledge. years old podcast clips are coming up talking about it.
source: https://sports.yahoo.com/nba/breaking-news/article/professio...
At the table statistics matter between pros, but if you are not aware of your flaws, you might as well play with your cards face up.
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 big leap, it's what sharks and hustlers have been aiming at for hundreds of years.
They are not the best poker players in the world. Best poker players have the misfortune of not being invited to "fun" millionaire games
If you have enough of an edge, the variance is really not that big. The only reason to have high-tech cheating when you already have a table full of fish - is if the people running the scheme are not very good at poker
Someone didn't pay a bribe on time?
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.
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You would be surprised at how good some very wealthy people are at poker. There is a lot of variance in the game and they don't want that. In fact what they want is _exactly_ wealthy people who are quite good at poker because they make big bets and you can reliably bust them out on _one hand_ if you set it up properly after playing a fair game all night. And the great thing about that is that they feel like the night overall was fair and fun, because it was. You just cheat them on one or two hands at the most.
People who are bad at poker can also be quite difficult to reliably take money from fairly because they play randomly and sometimes win huge pots out of complete luck. For one thing, they are near impossible to bluff out of hands, so you end up having to fold a lot more than normal because you can only play with strong hands against them. If you are interested in making a lot of money, you certainly want those strong hands more often than normal.
It's not about winning mote on each hand. It's about keeping the target happy as money drains away. And that was their aim.
By controlling the whole game, they were able to psychologically manipulate the situation. The target was at tbe table with someone they respected. Saw others win and lose large amounts of money. Sometimes won themselves.
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.
This is why in the book Molly's Game [0], the author mentions explicitly that she didn't want professionals in her game.
This b/c her game was seen as a game between "regular/amateur" players who just happened to be famous and/or have a lot of money. This was also DESPITE poker professionals both asking her to play AND offering to give her a stake of their winnings.
Granted, certain players (e.g. Tobey Maguire) were MUCH better than the other players but it seems that didn't matter as long as poker wasn't their primary source of income.
0 - https://amzn.to/4o05BFi
You really don't understand the mind of fraudsters and criminals. The reason they do what they do is because they don't want to "just be better at X than Y" and spend the effort for that, they want to take the shortcut and they think they've found the best shortcut considering their situation.
Once you start to look at what people are doing with that perspective, things will start to make more sense.
Boring pros who play these games straight up and don't "give action" don't get invited back.
This is how you can have some of the best poker players like Tom Dwan get absolutely wiped out while playing against whales in Macau
If you want to see a more recent example of this - the amateur whale Monarch recently took on one of the best cash game heads up players Bjorn Lee. I won't spoil the result because it's highly entertaining and demonstrates how the game works at these stakes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCd7giB9s5U
I doubt the same is true of these Cosa Nostra and NBA guys.
If you get introduced to a 'friendly' game of 5 players there's a good chance that these guys are signalling to each other and basically folding to whoever's got the best hand. You can't win against that. Even if you have 2 new players showing up at a table existing players could worry about collusion.
If you don't have the fancy trappings those guys did it is almost impossible to catch people colluding in poker.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/rtnSe0eKmdI
In Molly's Game, Tobey Maguire was the celebrity shark. (In the movie he was played by Michael Cera). He could easily have been a professional poker player, but he makes way more from acting and he prefers the easy play in private games.
Definitely a lot of work but that seems like a half decent payday to me.
The poker game itself in high-roller situations could be a million plus per night depending on the stakes.
Then there's the whole "you owe the Mafia" angle with NBA players and coaches. It's a pretty clear line to the Mafia making tens of millions of dollars on rigged NBA games.
I dealt with a low-tech breach at one of the hospitals I worked for. The criminal worked in HIM, and used paper and pencil to note specific info about specific types of patients. Since they worked in HIM, it was expected for them to view many medical records in a day and no app detects paper/pencil, so quite clever so far.
Ultimately, they used this info to file false tax returns to steal the refunds.
The problem? They filed 881 false tax returns annnnnnd used the same address for all of them. DOH.
They were busted/arrested and off to jail they went.
Clever, right until the end, then abysmally stupid.
If they were smart people, they wouldn't do the crimes in the first place.
There are tons of smart people committing crimes. The levels of Intelligence, success, luck, greed, and morals can co-exist in every possible combination within one human.
Probably don't have time to play so many hands with you that the better player is statistically guaranteed to win, either.
Would love to know more about such a machine, if anyone has any insight. Are these developed underground? How expensive could they be?
If it can efficiently take in a deck of cards and deterministically return a rigged deck in a reasonable amount of time, I would be fascinated at how they solved that problem.
https://youtu.be/JQ20ilE5DtA
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For the shuffling machine there is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQ20ilE5DtA
There are _so many_ ways to cheat at poker that you should basically never play a private game outside of close friends.
If you wanted to spend a year or so practicing, you can learn how to do false shuffles and cuts, bottom deals, cold stack a deck etc...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3Mu7jocdew This guy was a professional card cheat for decades before going honest.
As someone who knows a bunch of card tricks myself, I have learned to resist the temptation to do an impromptu 'ambitious card' routine just because a deck of cards and an audience is in front of me before a poker game.
Playing in an actual regulated casino or poker hall eliminates most of the technical risk of a fraudulent shuffle. The risk to the enterprise of losing their gaming license keeps things honest. Imagine the net effect of Bellagio’s shuffling machines or dealers being rigged.
But nothing can eliminate collusion of players. You’re best bet for that is your own self awareness. If your spidey sense is tripping, listen to it.
Crazy that there is a USB port exposed outside the machine.
But I'm provisionally calling BS on the "X-ray table." Based on (admittedly limited) experience with X-ray imaging, I don't believe that X-rays can read ink on playing cards. It would have to be a backscatter machine, which is even less discriminatory than a transmissive machine. Would need to see some evidence that this is possible.
If nothing else, the sheer size and bulk of such a machine renders the concept incredible. If I could build something like that, I wouldn't use it to cheat at cards, I'd sell it to the TSA!
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.
Think about the crime families as making e.g. 50% money from construction corruption, 40% from drug sales, 5% from extortion… someone has to run the other smaller departments and that is a lot of money for that “Dept Head”. Also from the FBIs perspective they want to unravel conspiracies, often by yanking on one piece of yarn like this one.
But yeah they surely make much more selling fentanyl.
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But then you take that person out of the "hood," and give him a $1M/yr sports contract, and the mentality doesn't necessarily go away. It's still about the hustle. They might not stop to consider that they don't NEED to hustle anymore. And they're probably also surrounded now by grifters/"friends"/family who do still need/want to hustle, and essentially using these guys.
It is sad.
I think the simpler answer is that some people are especially poor at risk vs reward analysis. Others enjoy the thrill of getting away with something. It's been 30+ years since Chauncey Billups has had to worry about money. I think your point about friends around them is very fair though. Lots of these guys have hangers on with their hands out and despite making lots of money in their careers they cant just give cash to everyone. So I can imagine them thinking "hey place a bet on my under for the next game because I'm going to go out early" seems like a low risk, not so evil way to put a few dollars in a friend's pocket.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-42157129
I couldn't find anything about how the cheat actually worked, though. In Mongolia they found radioactive dice at an airport: https://conferences.iaea.org/event/16/contributions/7187/att...
edit: now I think of it: if the cloth is thin enough you don't even need near-IR. Old fashioned IR camera's (those without any fancy filter) from the '00 showed though some relatively thin opaque synthetic material with a tiny IR source so ...
Sounds like FBI invented this very stupid/confusing name for the story when they could have used much something much better and clearer. X-ray really has nothing to do with this.
The table had a bunch of IR emitters pointed up built into the supports holding the table surface but they were at least two feet away and well-obscured into the table leg design by more normal-seeming smooth plastic I associate with being IR-transparent. Of course, if you suspect the use of IR, it's quite easy to detect with your camera phone. There was a camera hidden into the middle of the table supports looking up which transmitted the image wirelessly to a monitor nearby. My own face-down playing cards were visible on the camera plain as day, so it doesn't require special cards.
Interestingly, the magic distributor showing it wasn't giving out any info on who made it, what it cost or when it might be available. They just said they were "showing it to gauge interest" and might carry it at some point in the future. They're a large, long-time, reputable distributor of other people's products so I don't think they were involved in creating it. It hasn't made an appearance at subsequent conventions, so they must have decided it wouldn't be popular with magicians - which makes perfect sense. It would have been expensive and pretty technically involved for a limited-use magic prop. Good magicians have a many easier and cheaper ways to learn the identity of hidden cards :-). But the fact such a thick, textured, optically opaque surface could be IR transparent was pretty nifty.
As a former magician I was surprised to read the gang was using 'reader' cards (backs marked with ink visible to special glasses). No one uses those anymore as there are so many better ways to do the same thing. Seems like this gang was just into various tech toys and kind of lazy. In reality, once you control the environment, cards and have confederates in the game - cheating to win is trivial without any tech if you know what you're doing.
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Terahertz radiation is used in airports with (arguable) safety and efficacy. the resolution is sufficient to read protest statements written under a passengers shirt in metallic ink. I wonder if it could read cards should they be specially crafted similarly.
This appears to be the / a source for the devices in question. It's worth reading over the technical details of how it all works. It's both terrifying and impressive. Cards can be identified using a barcode encoded on their thin edge from meters away.