Poker Fraud Used X-Ray Tables, High-Tech Glasses and Nba Players
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A recent case of poker fraud involving high-tech cheating methods and NBA players has sparked discussion on the intersection of sports, crime, and technology, with many commenters expressing outrage and skepticism.
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Everything Silver did grew revenue fourfold. By every metric, he’s a good commissioner. And yet I don’t know a single person in real life who actually likes the NBA. People I talk to find the NBA anywhere from inaccessible to an outright turnoff, due to load management (and player pay), tanking, a glacial pace of play, and so on. And so the only way I can engage the game is by listening to podcasts about it. Podcasts that now belch gambling ads at me constantly.
Let's go Jays! Looking forward to this World Series.
Also not a fan of the constant inundation with gambling ads even if they have literally no interest to me. Just seems like a net negative for a society that realized cigarette ads are bad, but can't seem to figure that out for alcohol or gambling.
At least the public education campaigns have started earlier, I definitely see ads talking about where to get help if you're having an issue fairly frequently.
But it's also important to remember just how successful the smoking psa campaign has been. Especially given the cost! Rates have fallen dramatically, just by telling people to "watch out!" in public spaces that reach young folks ears.
We could be doing equivalent things for gambling (and we have in the past) so this erosion will have consequences for decades.
NYers are out here smokin' bogeys and joints on our streets all day, and when I went to Florida the tables had ashtrays, even occasionally inside. Certainly was the same in Lisbon and France.
Also, taxes have increased on gambling recently, although prediction markets appear to be a loophole.
And I dunno, I guess people are gambling on the screen a lot but I completely missed it. I'm not sure, do people think gambling is cool? I definitely missed that one. But I can see people getting hooked on the fun part if that high is their thing
I believe, although I'm not going to look it up for you, that the public health campaign against smoking is well documented as exceedingly effective for dollars spent. But hey, in today's day and age, we all gotta do our own research!
NFL Network, ESPN, Prime, Peacock, YouTube...
The number of games you can watch on network TV is decreasing slowly but steadily.
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.
It was crazy
You are clearly referring to calendar time, in which case the NHL season is longer
https://open.spotify.com/episode/3LUPh7waoWtydoiwjEgP16?si=-...
People used to play poker, and cheat, and the whole thing was illegal.
Now, people play poker, and cheat, and they want the government to police their poker games and make sure they're fair.
Complete waste of resources.
I think arresting people for cheating legitimizes backroom / mafia gambling. All the other rings (and those left from this one) can say "Look, those other guys got arrested. The law protects you. We don't want that to happen to us. Our game is definitely fair." Of course, they too are cheating.
The only reason the FBI cares here is probably because one of the victims had pull. If you or I get cheated, the FBI won't care about that.
Operating a business that defrauds people is the domain of government enforcement.
I think you’re trying to reduce this to some sort of small scale friendly poker game between friends. It was not. It was an organized crime business operation that was systematically committing fraud.
Fraud is illegal and within scope of government enforcement.
The state / society needs to enforce a basic level of trust for Business A to buy widgets from Business B, and for Customer C to be employed, etc.
Betting on sports / poker / etc. is not part of that. Nobody is creating anything of value when you spin the roulette wheel. At best, the house wins and most players lose... and that is a harm to society. At worst, the house cheats or some subset of players cheat, and most players lose... and that too is a harm to society. (Edit: At worse worst, it leads to violence, extortion, etc...)
Gambling does not deserve the legitimacy of being policed.
Disagree, this case demonstrates the exact opposite -- you think your underground game is legit because there's celebrities playing? Think again, it's a far more sophisticated scam operation than you could imagine.
> The only reason the FBI cares here is probably because one of the victims had pull.
Again, I doubt it. Likely it's because the mafia is involved, and according to the indictment "the defendants and their co-conspirators used threats of force and violence to secure the repayment of debts from illegal poker games."
If you run a Jimmy John’s, most of your customers will pay with credit cards. Everything runs through banks. You can’t launder that easily. It’s all traceable. It’s all taxable.
Run a poker operation and you can get your marks to give you crypto, cash, or small transfers.
$7 million in pure cash and crypto proceeds from a poker game is a lot more valuable than $7 million in revenue from a sandwich shop for an organized crime operation.
You don't need to launder it, it was acquired legally
Nothing about this story makes sense other other than as yet another headline to try to get people talking about something other than Epstein.
Did illegal gambling take place? I’m sure. Were 4 different crime families investing significant resources to take home barely $1m/year? I’m extremely skeptical and given this is coming from Kash “I always look like I just did a line of coke” Patel, I’d say it’s more likely than not we’re getting incomplete, if not bad information
https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/wells-farg...
No, if you personally run a poker game in your house and cheat your friends the government doesn’t care. The FBI isn’t going to be interested.
If you join the mafia and run an organized crime ring that operates poker games as a business which systematically defrauds people for large amounts of money and funnels the proceeds to organized crime through money laundering operations, the FBI will be interested.
If you look at this story and only see “some people cheated at a poker game” you’re missing the real story. This was a full on organized crime business operation
So, their cheating was organized and systematic? Yeah, you can't really cheat consistently without having a scheme.
Did anyone really think the mafia were running fair backroom poker games?
1: https://youtu.be/JQ20ilE5DtA?si=_MHmhjKGMKk4sobB
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.
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.
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.
Just stick everything in the S&P 500?
Yeah but that's friends of the emperor, not organized crime (although granted, the distinction between these two groups is getting smaller by the day).
Organized crime? That money is literally everywhere. Restaurants, real estate, cars, the stock markets... the only place you'll rarely spot it is, ironically, gambling, way too many chances of getting caught on a paper trail. A lot of it is also invested in art pieces stored in one tax haven/freeport or another, really easy to launder money or evade taxes.
Honestly this is the first “advanced” mafia scheme I’ve heard of in a while.
Last time I heard about a mafia crime it was a very sloppy hit that sounded more like what you hear from teenagers in Chicago shooting at each other.
Though tbf it could easily have always been like that and I’m just blinded my media bias about a group of people I’ve never known form a time I’ve never known.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/rtnSe0eKmdI
Definitely a lot of work but that seems like a half decent payday to me.
Just extorting Chauncey Billips seems like a better ROI than the whole caper if you’ve got some hold on him.
The article says "A cut OF THE PROFITS went to those who helped in the plot," implying that the $7m wasn't truly profit but actually revenue? The writing is unclear to me. I'm not sure if this is before paying out to 30+ people over several years, or after, but article implies before, that it's how much was taken from victims. That I think makes the difference on whether or not it was a decent payday. The profit would be how much supposedly went to fund their other operations, which the article does allege some went to.
Same reason there are people out there who shoplift even though they don’t need what they’re grabbing. The thrill of the act.
And that they just didn't want to operate it at a loss.
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.
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...
The political prosecution vendettas are dumb but here in LA they are disrupting “Armenian” crime rings
Normally I'd agree, but this administration is known for pushing to release public distractions whenever they can.
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 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 not worth it to play in these games and I wish they'd go away.
Even the mafia angle - the NY families must have fallen a long way if they're resorting to high profile but ultimately petty scams like this. This seems like PR for the FBI and nothing more, like I said up thread this has been common knowledge for years.
Things like: "Hey I'm organizing a trip to Vegas. $1000 / head. Great hotel, meals paid, etc. etc."
Then the organizer has the great misfortune of being "robbed" of all the money he collected by a masked assailant.
Maybe the higher level guys were were brighter, but I kind of doubt it.
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.
I spent a fun few hours a couple years back deep diving into what has become of the old-school "Goodfellas"-style mob these days. Looking into both media reports as well as posts by 'mob fans' - niche forums of those who obsessively follow mob and mob adjacent activities via open-source intel methods - I got the sense the traditional Italian mob families have indeed shrunk to a smaller, sadder version of what they once were due to being eclipsed by new, different kinds of organized crime.
Guys who are known "made men" getting out of prison after doing 10-15 and then ending up doing relatively nickel and dime crimes like daylight armed robbery of a jewelry store themselves for lack of enough income. 25 years ago guys like that wouldn't normally do that stuff themselves. Others have even sunk to basically LARPing being old-school mobsters on social media.
It seems there are two key drivers behind the decline: the real money in organized crime has shifted to new kinds of activities which scale better and can grow much larger. That's attracted new competitors. Some are smarter, some more brutal and some which are both. There's also an aspect that these new, bigger opportunities are far more complex, long-term and can also require successfully operating legitimate businesses as one necessary component. I guess it's not surprising. Even illicit industries undergo accelerating change over time. The old crime families still exist and can certainly still be dangerous - they're just no longer the top of the criminal food chain in terms of earnings.
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.
Some pitchers even said they would deliberately perform a "tell" that opponents had identified then throw a different pitch.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=g4SEPufzG7s
So really crafty legspinners sometimes try to develop two versions of the googly: one with a deliberate tell and one without a tell.
Here’s an example of probably the greatest legspin bowler of all time doing exactly this, although with a different ball (a “flipper” or topspin ball) not a googly https://youtu.be/DlyG5wnW7I0?si=O463NAdV6NAAB3cG
Once you're cheating and colluding you are in danger of going to jail, and it's not clear that more cheating makes it more likely to be caught.
Car analogy--I never had to take my 1976 Olds Cutlass in because the key fob got out of sync or because the touchscreen got fried or the electronic power steering module shorted or... or .. or
More points of failure = more failure.
Someone didn't pay a bribe on time?
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.
Or like, say you're against a "fish" that goes all in preflop with exactly J7 offsuit and nothing else, no matter how big his stack is, because that's their lucky hand or something. You're not playing as profitably as possible if you lack that knowledge, and if you somehow have that knowledge, there are tons of hands you play there that you normally never would and would appear to others without that information as playing "bad."
It's a deeply complex game people try to trivialize. I've been studying for about 20 years and every year that goes by I think I know less than I did the year before. And I'm just talking no limit hold'em right now - there are tons of variants that all have their own areas of study, and that's not even to get into weird live game areas of theory like tells and stuff (which is not as important as people tend to think).
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.
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
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.
However, if you assume they were feeding the information to the platforms...
Second, the FBI is targeting real world Mafia members, who will typically be the bookies taking action from others. If they know in advance, through blackmail or collusion that an NBA player or coach will throw a game, they can exploit this versus their entire betting pool for massive wins against the suckers placing bets with them.
There is also the very strong possibility that they are colluding with the online betting platforms in some way. Coupled with the fact that any difference-maker athlete is getting a huge salary, and blackmail/extortion becomes your best option to getting one on your side.
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.
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.
I remember as a kid, I'd play battleship with my siblings. I was really good at it, they were not. They hated when it was obvious that I let them win but also hated when I beat them badly so I found a way to make the game go longer. Often we'd play on a glass table and I'd "drop" a piece so I could peek under the table and see where their pieces were. I could get a hit and then miss many follow up shots to slowly destroy their ship and give them more time to find and destroy mine. They'd gloat over their hard-fought win but I'd just smile and beat them for real next round. I could have done this without peeking but I wanted to make sure I didn't accidentally play too well.
Probably don't have time to play so many hands with you that the better player is statistically guaranteed to win, either.
I doubt the same is true of these Cosa Nostra and NBA guys.
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.
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.
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.
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