Years ago at the start of the poker boom, I had an idea and outlined a yet\u00a0unfinished novel about a huge-prize-money televised poker tournament where the hole-card feed was compromised and a player won through cheating. My message was that it wasn\u2019t inconceivable that this could occur and tournament organizers and TV producers needed to be extremely vigilant in making sure this couldn\u2019t happen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
From its beginnings in America, poker suffered from a reputation as a game populated with cheaters. In fact, in his book\u00a0Cowboys Full,<\/em>\u00a0Jim McManus describes how, in the early days of poker in America, it was widely known as the \u201ccheating game.\u201d (I wrote a blog post<\/strong><\/a> about this a few years ago.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n When poker exploded on the Internet, the majority of players were high-school and college kids, many of whom were unwise to the realities of the world, especially where money is involved. Exposed hole-card scandals at online sites Absolute Poker and UltimateBet, as well as many other types of Internet cheating, wised them up quickly and greatly damaged confidence in the integrity of online poker.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the popular aspects of the poker boom was a plethora of TV poker shows, such as \u201cHigh-Stakes Poker\u201d and \u201cPoker After Dark,\u201d as well as expanding coverage of the World Series of Poker, the World Poker Tour, and other major events. These shows used technology to enable the viewing audience to be part of the action by being shown the players\u2019 hole cards. They also depended on players and viewers trusting that the hole-card information was secure from other players at a table. In my book outline, the cheating was done through someone in the TV control room, who knew the hole cards and electronically signaled his cohort at the table.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After poker\u2019s Black Friday on April 15, 2011, when the U.S. government shut down the major online sites, brick-and-mortar poker was pretty much the only game in town for American poker fans and these poker shows had an avid following.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fast forward to 2019 when the Mike Postle scandal erupted. It concerned a livestream cash game at Stones Casino in Sacramento, where Postle seemed to make every right decision over a period of time and was seen as acting suspiciously at the table, indicating that he might be getting information about his opponents\u2019 hands (the story is told in Chapter 48 of Huntington Press\u2019 recently published\u00a0The 50 Greatest Stories in Poker History<\/strong><\/a><\/em>). People in the TV control room, as well as the commentators, generally have the hole-card information, as they did in the Postle situation. One of the commentators, Veronica Brill, leveled the charges, posting an 18-minute video presenting her evidence. Poker Internet chatrooms exploded. It was even covered on ESPN\u2019s \u201cSports Center.\u201d While no charges were filed and lawsuits were dismissed, it was a major black eye for live poker.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another major scandal erupted recently, concerning the livestream of the popular Hustler Casino live-poker show. A relative novice player named Robbi Jade Lew made a seemingly absurd call in a huge pot against top-pro Garrett Adelstein that set the poker world on fire once again. There\u2019s an ongoing deep investigation into this incident and I don\u2019t know what the final conclusion will be. But the accusations alone are another black eye for poker\u2019s reputation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here\u2019s a youtube link to the Hustler hand. The hand in question starts around the 2-minute mark:<\/p>\n\n\n\n