blonde poker forum

That's the title of Barry Carter (aka Dave Shoelace) latest article on Poker Strategy.

It's been a running story for a week or more now, it's on 2 + 2, & Twitter has been buzzing with it.

Way too much to explain quickly, but a fella on a streamed live cash game in the USA has been getting abnormally good results over a decent period.

Barry's excellent article is as good a brief summary as there is (the Joey Ingram video expose is almost 5 HOURS long), so here it is;


 https://www.pokerstrategy.com/news/world-of-poker/When-does-perfect-play-become-cheating-_109554/


Fascinating stuff.

The theory seems to be that the RFID (card reader) system is being compromised or exploited. Or the geezer is very good, Or very lucky. Take your pick.

Here's a summary from Joey Ingram;


Mike's 2018 results found so far on stream
+$93.2k
21 sessions
2 losing

$1/3
+$36.12k
52 hrs
13 sessions
0 losing

$5/5
+$56.8k
64 hours
16 sessions
1 losing

$5/5/10
8 hrs
+$300
2 sessions
1 losing

100% the guy is cheating

What's unusual about making $700 per hour in a $1/$3 game over 52 hours?

Something similar happened in Glasgow last year for more money and no one cared.

https://clips.twitch.tv/JoyousPeppyRadicchioPupper

Could have been better if he’d cheated even more...

Cheers Teeks, I must say this one has been fascinating and very very addictive to follow.

If you check out 2+2 it seems there is now growing evidence for an accomplice behind the scenes, turns out a key member of staff was away for six weeks which coincided with the only six weeks Postle did not play the stream.

https://m.twitch.tv/videos/348363451?t=04h10m40s

LOL at the hand @ 4:10 hahaha, maybe he’s just better than everyone else...

Hi Barry,

Very nice article.

And yes, one guy went AWOL.....

"Postle quits playing on stream when Justin is in Vegas during the WSOP, but as soon as Justin returns, Postle is back in the game winning more than ever.

Justin said Stones internal investigation showed no cheating and everything is perfectly normal.

Justin, you are busted. But there are others involved. Just wait."


Here's the 2 + 2 thread for anyone with an hour or two to spare. Warning, it's 44 pages & growing by the minute.

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/29/news-views-gossip/mike-postle-cheating-allegations-1753388/

ha, read that thread when it was 3 pages and had seen a couple of Joey's tweets.   He seems to have more than his fair share of those hands which you pull off once in a lifetime, and very few of those "oh you have quads" hands.

The casino guy seems so suspicious though, you'd think if there was one punter you'd throw under the bus it would be the got the lot guy.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist in an 'online poker is rigged' sort of way, but I can't believe that the games are fair considering what's at stake.

If you watch enough of the hands, you can't help but notice that Postle keeps looking down at his lap, where, I assume, he may or could have a 'phone resting. Amazing how often he does it.

before) - the players in the game are all allowed to have their phones out and many are watching the stream (on its ~20 minute delay).

From 2+2

How to play 9-6;



YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vaF0kwjQhg

.@StonesLivePoker is suspending all broadcast of poker play, including live streaming, while we expand our multifaceted investigation with outside experts.
This investigation will be thorough & detailed. We will report the outcomes when they are available.

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZS47DB94-vk

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kDtE9vrRiA


Joey, Jason & Doug all on it.

Just seems like another 'run like blatch' type scam where he builds up an image and deludes the locals into thinking he is bombproof.  Seems a very basic looking at your phone scam getting info passed to him.    Amazed no one in the game ever questioned him about it and it took so long to be exposed.   If he does have some technology sending info to his phone he would have been much better having a device with a buzzer/vibration in his pocket with one buzz for fold, two for call, three buzzes for jam then the looking down at your phone obvious issue wouldn't have been an issue for the cheat.

That Doug video is just so good.

All that was missing was a few 'solids' by his fan boys after scooping each pot.   At least Blatch threw the odd (mythical) loser in now and again.  This guy didn't seem the smartest in the box never having a loser.

Is very good and worth a watch if you got a spare 30 minutes.   

I love the chart where he has a better winrate than the infamous potripper.  Qudos to whoever discovered that.  End is so good too. 

https://twitter.com/Chase_Bianchi/status/1179525506829602816

Oh my, more news.

https://twitter.com/DougPolkPoker/status/1179589305003495424

Was in the office through the night so watched Joey and Dougs two hour analysis

They picked up some interesting points and are totally convinced some form of cheating is in play

https://uk.pokernews.com/news/2019/10/stones-gambling-hall-suspends-all-poker-broadcasts-36347.htm

Funnily enough, he wouldn't have been caught on party poker.

The poker community are sleuths of the highest order when it comes to stuff like this. Within a few days we have crowd sourced all sorts of evidence. From companies he was involved in, interviews with his brother, table chat and someone actually went through hour upon hour of footage to show his vpip and bb/100 make him more of an outlier than potripper.

don't play on sites that don't allow you to view hh's, folks

Watched it and surprised it’s taken this long for someone to call him out.

Cheating scumbag 100%

Too many hands to go over but the 45 off against two AK is ridiculous .

The guy has been playing since 2005 , regular poker player but in these games he
does crazy shit not even Tikay would do.

Hope he gets sent down .

Love this video; Veronica was the person who raised this issue first

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHmuAqJ_sVo

Is that bloke the one who's supposed to be in on it?

Jerry Springer cheering for mateyboy.

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-tn_g2wcRc

Here's Berkey's take on it.

nah, think he is just a random who thought he was a great player

https://twitter.com/Kevmath/status/1180175521143017474

Incred :D

So you have been accused of a major crime, scamming hundreds of thousands in broad daylight, the wisdom of thousands of poker players crowd sourced to provide evidence of the alleged cheating and ESPN do a feature on it all.

Do you lawyer up?

Do you forensically go through the arguments against you and refute them?

Do you ask for a right of reply with Joe Ingram who has made the most detailed arguments against you?

Or do you wait for Mike Matusow to, in his words, get really fucking stoned and let him interview you?

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W25kCO_doto

Thanks Barry.

I'm WAY too fascinated by this whole saga. There have been many bigger & worse scams for sure, but this one is a purler, like a Dick Francis novel. I can't stop reading & watching everything about it. The 2+2 thread reached 150 pages, 3,700 replies & 400,000 views this morning. Awesome.

Having said all that, I can't, even in this case, bring myself to listen to Mr Matusow giving large. That's a step too far even for someone as tolerant as me.  He is poker's answer to Liz Truss, which I feel bad for thinking & saying. I mean, that's real bad. Bad bad.

I think this video sums up why this is such a compelling story

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FHv1CcBJ_k

I've just seen this review of the Matusow interview on Twitter.

"It was the most dreadful thing I've ever listened to and my kids are learning violin"

^^^^^

Ha, A++

Go to Mouthpiece interview, fast forward to 28 minutes and listen to Mike Postle full interview, worth listening tooooooooo

I think 20 minutes listening to that will be above average.  The whole thing was pretty painful, but I am not an unbiassed listener. Can't say I look forward to Matusow sitting at my table in live games (or anywhere in the room I am in).

Think Joey was doing a breakdown of that podcast as I finished work ~4, but I wasn't staying up for that :D

https://www.pocketfives.com/profiles/yngmann4quiki/ (https://www.pocketfives.com/profiles/yngmann4quiki/)

Careful what you put as your job title

This is pretty damning

https://twitter.com/Joeingram1/status/1180651345923018752

https://twitter.com/Joeingram1/status/1180652812255891456

Making my way through it now but by all accounts Postle's defence in part 2 with Matusow is simply the greatest player in the world

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItY3cfAYL68

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXZibOC0gmI

This is just LOL bad.

Barney Boatman tweeted a very valid point about how many less brain dead people who could easily have been using this and not making it so obvious as Postle has and still getting away with it and actually losing a few hands.

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qar90n6teQ

More Berkey breakdowns.

$10m lawsuit brought against Postle, the poker room and a 'Chief Confederate"

https://www.pokerstrategy.com/news/world-of-poker/109702/

Court documents: https://documentcloud.adobe.com/link/track?uri=urn%3Aaaid%3Ascds%3AUS%3A323fafc0-e583-4c19-91be-dc7d1610c53b

Shit got real

Good stuff Barry.

One of the charges is...

"unjust enrichment"


Don't know where to begin with poker, or even life in general, & unjust enrichment.

Amazes me how stupid and greedy some people are.

He could have quietly milked this for years having far more losing sessions.

I remember playing 3 card brag at Stapleford Cue Club back in the late 80's and a guy
kept consistently winning , far too much in the space of 15-20 weeks that I sussed out how
he was cheating as statistically it was almost impossible to go on a run like he did.

He got greedy.

He would have got his comeuppance as I had a cold deck ready to swop when he went to the toilet
but a brother of one of the players alerted him when he was in the toilet that we had sussed him out.

He never came back , although he did visit me at my shop the next day to offer some "cashback"

I refused as we had as a group all lost around 15-20k and he needed to recompense all of us..

Never saw him again although he did make headlines of Nottingham Evening Post for cheating
a football pools customer out of thousands because his newsagents shop was scamming customers
by keeping their pools money.

Lovely bloke.

 

Blimey, I used to frequent Stapleford Cue Club, though maybe more like early 90's than late eighties. Just for snooker though, not cards. The place was run by a couple, both of whom were decent snooker players,  & they were big mates with Mike Hallett who often made an appearance.

I remember you mentioning the cue club in your diary a while back.

Our paths must have very nearly crossed before those heady smoke filled casino
days in the early 2000's.

Steve was the owner of the club , tall young chap , he had a pub in the middle of Nottingham
as well. Not sure of timelines but I believe their was a fella named Dave who took it over from him
and he was a good snooker player and that would have been early 1990's.

One or two of our card group thought Oscar ( the cheater's name ) wasn't cheating but merely
card counting. Tried to explain to them that when he was blind and putting in half of what you
were putting in "seen" and he knew what cards he had that amounted to cheating.
Especially when you could not see a blind man in 3 card so he kept going blind till he had all
your money.

I was staggered by their attitude of " fair play to him "

The money sloshing around in the late eighties is like nothing I have ever seen since.

Brag had some distinctly dodgy rules one of which iirc was that if you ran out of cash you lost the pot.

We didn’t have that one but plenty of other dodgy rules.

The main one for our cheater Oscar was once dealt , pack of cards were turned
upside down and then players cards were put on top face up as you folded.

No shuffling either which meant you could suss out what cards were going to come
out at a later stage.

Oscar didn’t need your dodgy rule 😉

I’m nearly over it 30 years later 😄

I saw him , real name Steve Austin , a couple of weeks ago at a
Charity golf day at Chilwell .

He acknowledged everyone at our table after we had played , except me .

Complete low life , hasn’t aged well at least .

He must look older than Tikay .

Ahhh so someone gets the bookies pants down, are we supposed to feel sorry for the bookie, hmmmmmmmm now let me think

You get more like Woodsey every day 😄

Now get back to the other thread but please pick on someone other than Tighty.

He tries his best to be balanced , puts lots of interesting stuff out there for us to
digest and all you can do is nitpick 😳

I am all for leaving the EU , without a deal , but respect his views , unlike you ,
you miserable old codger .

yep, never shuffle in 3 card.

.....Unless someone wins with a prial

was he a "stone cold" cheat? :)

Had to google that just in case I was missing something , very good !

Afraid I am not into WWE , thank god  ;D. Saw that clip of Fury hamming it up ,
cannot believe adults love watching them mock fighting.

So what's everyone's thoughts on the outcome for Postle ?

Heard he has took a vacation abroad.

Think Stones are more in trouble , financially , by facilitating the whole thing.

Postle  , guess is he will declare himself bankrupt .

Be interesting if it gets to a criminal trial instead of a civil one and he does a plea
bargain and spills the beans on his accomplice.

It's going to be awful for Stones, for sure.

Postle? No idea. When he is being - rightly, it must be said - battered on all sides across social-media & even TV, I worry a little for him. It's bullying & it's not nice to observe, & it must be pretty terrible for him to endure. Does he deserve it? Of course he does. If he self-harmed in some way though, well, I hope nobody wants to see that.

If he cheated, he deserves to have the book thrown at him, but he must be going through hell right now, & it's not a pretty sight.

Send him to prison for a few years, I'm cool with that, make him bankrupt, yeah, that too. But what he is going through right now is a bit too much imo, even if he is a dirty rotten cheat.

Can't believe I wrote that.

Think I might have to go dark for a few days. 

How much money do we think he's had and over what period.

I assume it isn't sitting in an online account somewhere so what could he have done with it?

I have no sympathy whatsoever for whatever happens to him.

He was so smug in those videos , laughing and being cocky while
stealing and cheating people out of a lot of money.

Total scum , deserves everything he gets.

I saw over $300,000 was quoted on one of Doug Polk's video's on You Tube

Meh! I thought it was a lot.

I don't disagree Jim, but I really don't like to see online lynch mobs.

He's a cheat, a poker cheat. Hardly the first to do that though, is he? Cheating, in various forms, is endemic to poker. What he allegedly did was very unusual indeed, that's why there's all the hoohah. Plenty of cheating in poker goes on day to day though, angle-shooting, collusion, ghosting, scamming, multi-accounting & so on, we all know that & we all shrug our shoulders. This is just a novel form of cheating, & whilst most of us - me certainly included - got quite excited by the whole spectacle, I think there should be a limit to the bullying & intimidation we are seeing.   


(http://i.imgur.com/1uj4e3T.jpg) (https://imgur.com/1uj4e3T)

Novel form of cheating ...... give me a break. Sounds like you almost admire his ingenuity.

Not sure how you expect people to react when they have been cheated out of a lot of money.

Not seen the 2 plus 2 thread , only joey ingrahm and polk you tube stuff and thought it was
very good.

Matt Berky comes across excellent in the stuff I have seen him do , very articulate.

I don't admire him one bit, I despise all poker cheats Jim & you know that, but it IS a novel form of cheating, or at the very least, quite unusual.

The 2 + 2 thread has a whopping 7,000+ posts on it, & I've read most of them. I watched & enjoyed most of the earlier Joey Ingram, Douk Polk & Matt Berky stuff, & I found it highly amusing & definitely fascinating at times. Not just because he did what he did, but the fact he somehow got away with it for so long. It's a great, great story about human nature.

But it's gone a bit too far now, Joey & Doug are milking it for subscribers rather than revealing new stuff.

He's a cheat, punish him, banish him, ban him, but don't drive the bloke over the edge.

I often take the side against the lynch mob, but that is usually where someone has made some cock up that is blown out of all proportion (eg the likes of Danny Baker and Justine Sacco).  

I struggle a bit here, as he seems to have deliberately stolen a quarter of a million, and most of the comments reflect that.  I haven't read all 284 pages of two plus two, but can't remember many massively over the top comments there or here.  I feel a bit more sorry for someone like WIll Kassouf, who has probably suffered disproportinately from a drunken indiscretion.  Sure he deservesd criticism, but that incident is going to pop up on internet searches for years to come and he was more than punished enough by losing his sponsorship.  

On the lots of other people cheat, but can't say I have ever shrugged my shoulders at it.  I think they should be all dealt with appropriately, whether it is a slap on the wrist or complete ban.  You can't really stop playing because you suspect some people cheat in the game, but that isn't really condong it or indicating I am happy with it.  

"...he seems to have deliberately stolen a quarter of a million,.."


Yup, but folks steal huge sums of money all the time, be it bank robberies, insider trading, general scams, & they don't get subjected to this level of vitriol. It's too much, imo. 

And just imagine having just ONE prominent poker player taking your side - & it's Mike Matusow. That's surely the ultimate burn?

;)

Is cheating for £250000 a different crime than cheating for £25?

The reason this gets more publicity on a poker forum is because we can all see it, it is intersting, and we are all a bit intrigued,  so all have a view.  Someone mentioned the similar Glasgow scam, but we haven't seen it, and it is all a bit heresay, so nobody has much to say.

On the others it really depends on the publicity. Somebody who has overcharged a pensioner a few thousand and has Dom pop by with BBC camera gets subject to more than his fair share of vitriol, your average insider trader probably not.   I don't think anyone has been round his house, and I assume that plod hasn't felt his collar yet.  I don't even think it has got a lot of mainstream publicity, so it doesn't feel excessive to me yet.

 

Let’s not bully criminals
May upset them

this is a very valid point.

it's mainly a witch hunt. will be interesting to see how this affects the legal case that has been brought.

Wonder how long before players in same room become the next case?

Bump.

Postle sues everybody for saying bad things about him.


https://twitter.com/ToddWitteles/status/1311916113605718022 (https://twitter.com/ToddWitteles/status/1311916113605718022)

Better watch out what we say about cheating scumbags.

Justin and Postles response to all this has been bizarre to say the least!