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A Cheating Scandal Rocking the Poker World

295 points by indigodaddy 7y ago

indigodaddy 7y ago
Accompanying TwoPlusTwo thread: https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/29/news-views-gossip/mike-postle-cheating-allegations-faq-first-post-1753388/ https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/29/news-views-gossip/mike...
hornd 7y ago
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 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.
- elwell 7y ago
  How many hands is that scatterplot over?
- jedberg 7y ago
  Is this the number of Big Blinds that he eventually wins or something else?
  - jandrese 7y ago
    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.
    - MFLoon 7y ago
      No that's not what the graph shows at all. It's just his win rate in terms of how many big blinds he's won per 100 hands played, against the percentage of hands he's choosing to play.
  - superhuzza 7y ago
    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.
    - ProAm 7y ago
      > there's only one plausible explanation Lets not rule out time travel just yet
    - jedberg 7y ago
      > It's so far out of the norm there's only one plausible explanation. The greatest poker player that ever lived? :)
  - aidenn0 7y ago
    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.
- MFLoon 7y ago
  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.
  - soVeryTired 7y ago
    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.
    - MFLoon 7y ago
      Yea that's fair. But the point is it's possible/normal for some amount of the player pool to put up those numbers over some time span, whereas 10x that is an outrageously far outlier. Who knows, some of the in-band high winners might be cheating too, but just doing a much better job at hiding it. Also FWIW I think some live cash crushers can land in the 20-40bb/100 range with some consistency. The online cash player pool is known to be much tougher per capita.
      - soVeryTired 7y ago
        > Also FWIW I think some live cash crushers can land in the 20-40bb/100 range with some consistency. The online cash player pool is known to be much tougher per capita. Yeah, that's true. Especially in live games where there's a steady supply of players who are happy to show up just to gamble.
- indigodaddy 7y ago
  This screenshot of a spreadsheet of his 2019 winnings summary also sheds light: https://twitter.com/Joeingram1/status/1179441674683994112 https://twitter.com/Joeingram1/status/1179441674683994112
socialist_coder 7y ago
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???
- aidenn0 7y ago
  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.
- tempsy 7y ago
  So why would anyone play with this guy at this point even if the casino won't ban him for lack of definitive evidence?
  - MFLoon 7y ago
    Oh they won't. This guy is never playing poker again in his life, except maybe in a jail cell. That's already guaranteed. 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.
- MFLoon 7y ago
  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.
  - elwell 7y ago
    > without prior incident without being overly exploited such as to be recognized as an incident
RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
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.
- socialist_coder 7y ago
  Occam's Razor. They need to rip the RFID tags out and watch his performance completely suffer.
  - Crosseye_Jack 7y ago
    I fired up the last live stream and it seems they put in a "electronic devices need to be away from the table" rule. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/489058455?t=13m51s https://www.twitch.tv/videos/489058455?t=13m51s 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.
tempsy 7y ago
So what is the consensus? He has an accomplice who is watching the stream and texting info? Does the stream show the players' cards (never seen it)?
- socialist_coder 7y ago
  Read the article dude, it explains it
  - tempsy 7y ago
    I did read it. It doesn't actually confirm anything.
    - dugditches 7y ago
      >He has an accomplice who is watching the stream and texting info? Does the stream show the players' cards (never seen it)? From the 4th sentence of the article: >and the game was broadcast on a half-hour delay so that viewers couldn’t relay information from the broadcast to the players during the hands
      - bloody-crow 7y ago
        It's entirely possible that as a former employee he has access to the system that is responsible for introducing the streaming delay and gets a real-time feed on his phone or some other wearable device.
  - aidenn0 7y ago
    I read it twice and there was only speculation on various ways that he might have cheated; no definitive answer to how he did.
  - jandrese 7y ago
    The article doesn't explain it at all. There's a lot of hand analysis proving that it is a statistical impossibility that he's not cheating, and a lot of speculation on possible methods, but nothing that explains how he actually did it. The most likely method seems to be a RFID reader either in his keys or hat transmitting data to his phone, but from what I can tell nobody has nailed down his technique exactly.
captncraig 7y ago
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?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- umvi 7y ago
  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.
  - wallace_f 7y ago
    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.
  - manav 7y ago
    A poker engine wouldn't really help you since it can't read players and intentions, also most decent players can calculate odds in their heads.
  - ar_lan 7y ago
    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.
    - leetcrew 7y ago
shkkmo 7y ago
> Soon the thread on TwoPlusTwo resembled a detective’s corkboard with red string wound around pushpins, connecting the various dots that revealed the definitive answer to the mystery What definitive answer? All I ever see in the article is speculation, circumstantial evidence and statistical analysis this indicates something is probably going on. This article is very underwhelming and short on actual details.
- sschueller 7y ago
  To me it appears he has access to the system that scans the rfids of the cards. Article mentions that he was involved with a company that consulted with the casino. Someone should run some tcpdumps on their wifi.
  - shkkmo 7y ago
    That seems like a quite likely explanation. It doesn't seem like actual definitive evidence would be that hard to find (if the relevant people were actually interested in finding it). Does it really matter if you have exposed one cheater who over-used the system when the system still has unknown and unfixed flaws that could be enabling other, more circumspect cheaters?
Mikeb85 7y ago
Live higher-stakes but non-professional players have major tells. They're good enough to play good hands and know the odds, but not good enough to bluff, make hero calls or folds. I used to play 10/20 and 25/50 PLO, and while the game is different, the pattern described is pretty typical. Big multiway pots and speculative hands are the rule, so if a draw completes and there's 4 players in the hand, someone has it. This doesn't sound like cheating, just a typical higher stakes game but on TV.
- hornd 7y ago
  900BB/100 is absolutely not typical for any high stakes game I've ever seen. It's unrealistic.
  - Mikeb85 7y ago
    And I've run up $1k to $5k in an hour... I've seen players turn $5k into $100k at an even higher stakes game over a few hours. I'd rather see some evidence of wrongdoing, you can't prove he's cheating simply because he's on a heater...
    - MFLoon 7y ago
      lol it's not just a sick 1 session heater running up 10 or 20 buyins... he's running +900bb/100 over 70 or so sessions.
      - Mikeb85 7y ago
        Against non-pros at a cash game broadcast on the internet. Odds are half the people he's playing against are out of their comfort zone, playing higher stakes than they should just to be on a stream. Not to mention there's no buy-in limit on these stakes, BB/100 means nothing if they're playing above the expected stakes (happens often if the biggest stakes are relatively low). Again, none of what you're saying is actually proof.
        7y ago
bloody-crow 7y ago
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.
ivanb 7y ago
So what's the problem here? Just check his magic hat and sue him to hell.
miles_matthias 7y ago
TLDR: a poker player has an unusually high win rate, says he’s not cheating, online sleuths are trying to find cheating evidence. No concrete conclusion.
- knowaveragejoe 7y ago
  Take a look at other comments in this thread - I don't see how it could not be cheating.
  - miles_matthias 7y ago
    I didn’t say he is or isn’t. Just that no concrete conclusion has happened - the casino hasn’t agreed that he was cheating and kicked him out. He still seems to be participating and claiming innocence.
arctangent 7y ago
While I recognise the valid points made elsewhere in this discussion about this guy’s luck and/or cheating, I can’t help wonder about how we would react differently to an AI “oracle” that gave useful solutions to problems we can’t /couldn’t solve. Where is the boundary between experiential evidence and statistical “proof”?
- beart 7y ago
  I'm not sure I fully understand your comment but I certainly wouldn't wager my money playing poker against the system you describe.
- logical42 7y ago
  Both would suck to play against but the AI oracle would play optimally and not perfectly.
dwighttk 7y ago
I don't understand why they need RFID if the stream is delayed 30 minutes... Just look at the cards afterwards and backfill the information onto the stream...
- GoRudy 7y ago
  That wouldn’t be practical. It would slow the game down to a point of being almost unplayable and the way cards are discarded currently would prevent that.
  - anonymfus 7y ago
    Can you be more specific in how exactly it would slow down the game and how cards are discarded? So people like me who never watched such poker streams in our lives could understand.
    - BigJono 7y ago
      When you fold your cards in poker they're 'mucked' by the dealer i.e muddled in with the rest of the dead cards so you can't tell which cards came from where. This is to prevent cheating and confusion in ambiguous situations. With experienced dealers and players, poker games move quite fast. It's quite normal for 5+ hands to be folded in quick succession pre-flop. Manually recording who had what cards would be really impractical. The best place to record the information without disrupting the game at all is in each of the player's hands themselves. Traditionally this is done with either under table cameras and see-through spots on the table, or RFID.
  - dwighttk 7y ago
    RFID seems like it wouldn't be practical... how do you keep players from reading the signals?
    - BigJono 7y ago
      Close range sensors and secure transmissions. As long as the reader has to be within a couple of centimetres of the cards there's really nothing other players at the table can do to get the data that isn't obvious. It's not like you can lean over the table and scan your opponent's cards with your phone without raising a few eyebrows. I'd guess the transmission of the card data from the table to the servers for the broadcast wasn't secure. Either because someone involved set it up that way on purpose to cheat, or because they had a 'password123' sort of password on it without thinking.
newfangle 7y ago
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.
- paggle 7y ago
  How do you falsify his claim that he can read his opponent's faces and tell what cards they have? Isn't that a common skill in high level poker?
  - cryptoz 7y ago
    > 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.
abstract7 7y ago
The only thing this circumstanial evidence justifies is an investigation. The author is stating he's a cheater like a matter of fact.
- rednerrus 7y ago
  His numbers are better than god mode pros on poker sites.
- jessaustin 7y ago
  If he weren't cheating, he would be happy to play poker in literally any other venue besides this one particular streaming program for which he personally set up the RFID. He would win in those other venues in similar dominant fashion, and we'd all hail him as a great poker player and not at all a cheater. He hasn't done that.
- nabla9 7y ago
  There is extremely strong statistical evidence against him. His cheating can be taken as matter of fact.
Animats 7y ago
While his neighbors keep their phones on the table, he always keeps his phone on his chair between his legs, with his left hand holding it in place beneath the table. That casino allows phones at a high-stakes poker table? Duh.
- cududa 7y ago
  I mean last time I was in Vegas was 2013 and couldn’t use my phone playing black jack
TheRealPomax 7y ago
Can someone give the tl;dr on whether it was actually proven? I tried to read the article but it's paragraph after paragraph of "As I enjoyed my chocolate cake on a patio at a Parision bistro, the sun pleasantly warming the table and people going about their business unaware of the wrongs of the world, my thoughts turned to the prime numbers and how they related to music" and almost none of it has any real information.
- jimmyvalmer 7y ago
  Aye, verbosity is an existential threat.
- bonestamp2 7y ago
  No, it has not been proven. All of the evidence (like his impossible winning statistics) lean toward cheating, but there's no smoking gun at this time.
m4tthumphrey 7y ago
Looks like it's been figured out [0]. [0] https://mobile.twitter.com/vdthemyk/status/1179892447142449153?s=09 https://mobile.twitter.com/vdthemyk/status/11798924471424491...
anxman 7y ago
I think his "hack" is something far simpler than having a co-conspirator. As he helped setup the live streaming system, he also installed a piece of software that nicely calculates what to do at every step and simply sends him his own percentage calculation. This is far more difficult to detect and would require reverse engineering the entire system end to end to find the culprit. It could be anything from a backdoor in the RFID system to an AI that reads the video stream when it gets sent into OBS. There are tons of vectors that could easily be setup. I very much hope that the resolution here isn't just a Civil penalty but that the FBI gets involved and he goes to jail.
- jessaustin 7y ago
  The FBI does sometimes take an interest in massive ongoing fraud...
monkeydreams 7y ago
=w2hhjjjg34tg
bonestamp2 7y ago
I assume all this heat will bring on an actual law enforcement investigation? I mean, that has to be some serious fraud if he's actually cheating?
vast 7y ago
Sorry I've just watched a random show with Mike Apostle on yt and I have to say - by this small sample - bullshit. Assuming he cheats, I don't see how. He played dominating hands with very classic conservative playstyle, not unnecessarily asking for value. He made risky pre flop all ins. He bluffed loosing hands. All sort of stuff that happens in an average poker game. Not sure why I even watched him playing considering the awful article.
- jessaustin 7y ago
  Focusing on the wrong things is a great way to lose lots of money in poker, and in life.
  - vast 7y ago
    Thanks for the help mate. I will now focus on the right things.
- indigodaddy 7y ago
  Exactly correct, but this is when he wasn't God-moding. 2017 believe no evidence of cheating. 2018 just one episode (Aug 22) where it was likely. Much of 2019 sessions he was super using/god-moding though. All the streams that he is a normalish player is actually some of the most damning evidence. He doesn't even resemble the same sort of player. Everything is different. All of the physical tells (touching the hat and gazing down at crotch while pretending to look at cards) and cheating indications are no longer present, and he never gets into the type of hand situations and/or crazy moves and perfect-for-all-the-hands decisions he was making in God mode.
bartread 7y ago
He keeps his phone on the chair between his legs. He glances down at his phone before making a decision. 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.
- pfortuny 7y ago
  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!!
rbrbr 7y ago
Don’t read the article, it lacks any factual evidence. It’s like a book without an end, where the murder hasn’t been found yet (if there was any).
- pfortuny 7y ago
  No but it does point out clues: word hay AND phone under the table or not showing. Left hand not visible. I would not let any student of mine do any of those things in an exam.
grizzles 7y ago
Doug Polk did a funnny YT takedown of this story a few days ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kDtE9vrRiA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kDtE9vrRiA He shows a clip with Mike's brother talking about how Mike will do anything he can to angle shoot (eg. cheat). Funny stuff.
Nokinside 7y ago
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.
- skrebbel 7y ago
  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.
  - kurtisc 7y ago
    It is enough for civil court.
    - jacquesm 7y ago
      Different standards than a criminal case.
  - Mtinie 7y ago
    You are thinking of Sally Clark: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally_Clark 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".
anonu 7y ago
What is a plausible technical explanation for how he is cheating? A phone in between your legs, though suspicious, is not enough evidence. And who thought it was a good idea to put RFID in playing cards?
- sbarre 7y ago
  Simplest explanation would be an inside job. The article says he worked for the casino as a consultant at some point in the past. So he has a connection that works on the livestream production that has access to the RFID-provided hole card information in real-time (perhaps through a software backdoor?) Then he has some kind of device attached somewhere on his body that receives some signal that tells him what other players have, sent to him by the insider setup. This could be a BLE device connected to his phone that vibrates morse code or some other signal, etc..
- Sebb767 7y ago
  As per another comment, the visualization software can be configured to send the card data via wifi. Anyone on the same network knowing the password (assuming one is set) can receive them. He also worked with the casino beforehand, so there is a good chance he knows the infrastructure. Some way of transferring the info to him is rather easy, then, either by his phone or hat.
sireat 7y ago
There are way too many red flags here(only playing superhumanly at the RFID games, in fact not playing elsewhere,etc). There are some similarities to chess cheating here. There were defenders to the infamous Borislav Ivanov too (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borislav_Ivanov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borislav_Ivanov) even though all decent chess players could tell he was cheating. In the Borislav's case the cheating method was not found although many suspect it was a vibrating smartphone in his shoes. Of course there are differences between poker and chess cheating as well. Pure poker computer without the extra information would not be that much of a help to a good player. What is similar is that both of these players make superhuman moves consistently. Less greedier cheaters would not be caught so easily. Like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igors_Rausis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igors_Rausis it was very suspicious (mostly because of his age) but until the smoking gun in the toilet it was still somewhat plausible that he was not cheating.
haolez 7y ago
Should be easy to disrupt his numbers: play against him with your cards always turned down. Do no look at them :)
abductee_hg 7y ago
well, I think this whole thing is going a bit out of proportion. what do we have so far? - a guy is doing something highly unlikely(not impossible, just unlikely) - lots of speculation - the whole internet seems to be out to get him. In 2009 German speed skater Claudia Pechstein was banned for 2 years from the sport based on irregular levels of reticulocytes in her blood. Nobody could prove that she was doping, however this was the first case of a ban based on circumstantial evidence alone; no forbidden substances were ever found during her repeated tests. Later it turend out that she had a rare genetic disorder called Hereditary spherocytosis. While the court-stuff is still ongoing, science papers have been written, and the IOC has refined the test. still she lost 2 years at the top of her game. I must admit that figuring out this riddle is rather tantalizing, I have been nerd-sniped by good riddles in the past, however my Cpt. Picard-sense is tingeling. let's keep the pitchforks at bay, shall we?
todd8 7y ago
I don't believe in ESP, but I know others that do. I have pointed out to some friends that Las Vegas wouldn't exist as it does if there were people that really had ESP. They could use telekinesis to control the outcome of games or they could use clairvoyance and precognition to predict what was going to happen or they could use telepathy to read others cards. If ESP existed in a group of people I believe that many would reside in Vegas living off their abilities and not performing tricks for gulible researchers. The fact that Postle doesn't cash in on this remarkable ability by playing in higher stake games makes his performance suspicious to me just as people that claim ESP that don't bother to take the casinos for millions makes he skeptical of their claims.
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295 points by indigodaddy 7y ago

Accompanying TwoPlusTwo thread: https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/29/news-views-gossip/mike-postle-cheating-allegations-faq-first-post-1753388/ https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/29/news-views-gossip/mike...

hornd 7y ago

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 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.

elwell 7y ago
How many hands is that scatterplot over?
jedberg 7y ago
Is this the number of Big Blinds that he eventually wins or something else?
- jandrese 7y ago
  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.
  - MFLoon 7y ago
    No that's not what the graph shows at all. It's just his win rate in terms of how many big blinds he's won per 100 hands played, against the percentage of hands he's choosing to play.
- superhuzza 7y ago
  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.
  - ProAm 7y ago
    > there's only one plausible explanation Lets not rule out time travel just yet
  - jedberg 7y ago
    > It's so far out of the norm there's only one plausible explanation. The greatest poker player that ever lived? :)
- aidenn0 7y ago
  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.
MFLoon 7y ago
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.
- soVeryTired 7y ago
  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.
  - MFLoon 7y ago
    Yea that's fair. But the point is it's possible/normal for some amount of the player pool to put up those numbers over some time span, whereas 10x that is an outrageously far outlier. Who knows, some of the in-band high winners might be cheating too, but just doing a much better job at hiding it. Also FWIW I think some live cash crushers can land in the 20-40bb/100 range with some consistency. The online cash player pool is known to be much tougher per capita.
    - soVeryTired 7y ago
      > Also FWIW I think some live cash crushers can land in the 20-40bb/100 range with some consistency. The online cash player pool is known to be much tougher per capita. Yeah, that's true. Especially in live games where there's a steady supply of players who are happy to show up just to gamble.
indigodaddy 7y ago
This screenshot of a spreadsheet of his 2019 winnings summary also sheds light: https://twitter.com/Joeingram1/status/1179441674683994112 https://twitter.com/Joeingram1/status/1179441674683994112

socialist_coder 7y ago

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???

aidenn0 7y ago
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.
tempsy 7y ago
So why would anyone play with this guy at this point even if the casino won't ban him for lack of definitive evidence?
- MFLoon 7y ago
  Oh they won't. This guy is never playing poker again in his life, except maybe in a jail cell. That's already guaranteed. 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.
MFLoon 7y ago
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.
- elwell 7y ago
  > without prior incident without being overly exploited such as to be recognized as an incident

RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago

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.

socialist_coder 7y ago
Occam's Razor. They need to rip the RFID tags out and watch his performance completely suffer.
- Crosseye_Jack 7y ago
  I fired up the last live stream and it seems they put in a "electronic devices need to be away from the table" rule. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/489058455?t=13m51s https://www.twitch.tv/videos/489058455?t=13m51s 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.

tempsy 7y ago

So what is the consensus? He has an accomplice who is watching the stream and texting info? Does the stream show the players' cards (never seen it)?

socialist_coder 7y ago
Read the article dude, it explains it
- tempsy 7y ago
  I did read it. It doesn't actually confirm anything.
  - dugditches 7y ago
    >He has an accomplice who is watching the stream and texting info? Does the stream show the players' cards (never seen it)? From the 4th sentence of the article: >and the game was broadcast on a half-hour delay so that viewers couldn’t relay information from the broadcast to the players during the hands
    - bloody-crow 7y ago
      It's entirely possible that as a former employee he has access to the system that is responsible for introducing the streaming delay and gets a real-time feed on his phone or some other wearable device.
- aidenn0 7y ago
  I read it twice and there was only speculation on various ways that he might have cheated; no definitive answer to how he did.
- jandrese 7y ago
  The article doesn't explain it at all. There's a lot of hand analysis proving that it is a statistical impossibility that he's not cheating, and a lot of speculation on possible methods, but nothing that explains how he actually did it. The most likely method seems to be a RFID reader either in his keys or hat transmitting data to his phone, but from what I can tell nobody has nailed down his technique exactly.

captncraig 7y ago

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?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
umvi 7y ago
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.
- wallace_f 7y ago
  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.
- manav 7y ago
  A poker engine wouldn't really help you since it can't read players and intentions, also most decent players can calculate odds in their heads.
- ar_lan 7y ago
  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.
  - leetcrew 7y ago

shkkmo 7y ago

> Soon the thread on TwoPlusTwo resembled a detective’s corkboard with red string wound around pushpins, connecting the various dots that revealed the definitive answer to the mystery What definitive answer? All I ever see in the article is speculation, circumstantial evidence and statistical analysis this indicates something is probably going on. This article is very underwhelming and short on actual details.

sschueller 7y ago
To me it appears he has access to the system that scans the rfids of the cards. Article mentions that he was involved with a company that consulted with the casino. Someone should run some tcpdumps on their wifi.
- shkkmo 7y ago
  That seems like a quite likely explanation. It doesn't seem like actual definitive evidence would be that hard to find (if the relevant people were actually interested in finding it). Does it really matter if you have exposed one cheater who over-used the system when the system still has unknown and unfixed flaws that could be enabling other, more circumspect cheaters?

Mikeb85 7y ago

Live higher-stakes but non-professional players have major tells. They're good enough to play good hands and know the odds, but not good enough to bluff, make hero calls or folds. I used to play 10/20 and 25/50 PLO, and while the game is different, the pattern described is pretty typical. Big multiway pots and speculative hands are the rule, so if a draw completes and there's 4 players in the hand, someone has it. This doesn't sound like cheating, just a typical higher stakes game but on TV.

hornd 7y ago
900BB/100 is absolutely not typical for any high stakes game I've ever seen. It's unrealistic.
- Mikeb85 7y ago
  And I've run up $1k to $5k in an hour... I've seen players turn $5k into $100k at an even higher stakes game over a few hours. I'd rather see some evidence of wrongdoing, you can't prove he's cheating simply because he's on a heater...
  - MFLoon 7y ago
    lol it's not just a sick 1 session heater running up 10 or 20 buyins... he's running +900bb/100 over 70 or so sessions.
    - Mikeb85 7y ago
      Against non-pros at a cash game broadcast on the internet. Odds are half the people he's playing against are out of their comfort zone, playing higher stakes than they should just to be on a stream. Not to mention there's no buy-in limit on these stakes, BB/100 means nothing if they're playing above the expected stakes (happens often if the biggest stakes are relatively low). Again, none of what you're saying is actually proof.
      - 7y ago

bloody-crow 7y ago

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.

ivanb 7y ago

So what's the problem here? Just check his magic hat and sue him to hell.

miles_matthias 7y ago

TLDR: a poker player has an unusually high win rate, says he’s not cheating, online sleuths are trying to find cheating evidence. No concrete conclusion.

knowaveragejoe 7y ago
Take a look at other comments in this thread - I don't see how it could not be cheating.
- miles_matthias 7y ago
  I didn’t say he is or isn’t. Just that no concrete conclusion has happened - the casino hasn’t agreed that he was cheating and kicked him out. He still seems to be participating and claiming innocence.

arctangent 7y ago

While I recognise the valid points made elsewhere in this discussion about this guy’s luck and/or cheating, I can’t help wonder about how we would react differently to an AI “oracle” that gave useful solutions to problems we can’t /couldn’t solve. Where is the boundary between experiential evidence and statistical “proof”?

beart 7y ago
I'm not sure I fully understand your comment but I certainly wouldn't wager my money playing poker against the system you describe.
logical42 7y ago
Both would suck to play against but the AI oracle would play optimally and not perfectly.

dwighttk 7y ago

I don't understand why they need RFID if the stream is delayed 30 minutes... Just look at the cards afterwards and backfill the information onto the stream...

GoRudy 7y ago
That wouldn’t be practical. It would slow the game down to a point of being almost unplayable and the way cards are discarded currently would prevent that.
- anonymfus 7y ago
  Can you be more specific in how exactly it would slow down the game and how cards are discarded? So people like me who never watched such poker streams in our lives could understand.
  - BigJono 7y ago
    When you fold your cards in poker they're 'mucked' by the dealer i.e muddled in with the rest of the dead cards so you can't tell which cards came from where. This is to prevent cheating and confusion in ambiguous situations. With experienced dealers and players, poker games move quite fast. It's quite normal for 5+ hands to be folded in quick succession pre-flop. Manually recording who had what cards would be really impractical. The best place to record the information without disrupting the game at all is in each of the player's hands themselves. Traditionally this is done with either under table cameras and see-through spots on the table, or RFID.
- dwighttk 7y ago
  RFID seems like it wouldn't be practical... how do you keep players from reading the signals?
  - BigJono 7y ago
    Close range sensors and secure transmissions. As long as the reader has to be within a couple of centimetres of the cards there's really nothing other players at the table can do to get the data that isn't obvious. It's not like you can lean over the table and scan your opponent's cards with your phone without raising a few eyebrows. I'd guess the transmission of the card data from the table to the servers for the broadcast wasn't secure. Either because someone involved set it up that way on purpose to cheat, or because they had a 'password123' sort of password on it without thinking.

newfangle 7y ago

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.

paggle 7y ago
How do you falsify his claim that he can read his opponent's faces and tell what cards they have? Isn't that a common skill in high level poker?
- cryptoz 7y ago
  > 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.

abstract7 7y ago

The only thing this circumstanial evidence justifies is an investigation. The author is stating he's a cheater like a matter of fact.

rednerrus 7y ago
His numbers are better than god mode pros on poker sites.
jessaustin 7y ago
If he weren't cheating, he would be happy to play poker in literally any other venue besides this one particular streaming program for which he personally set up the RFID. He would win in those other venues in similar dominant fashion, and we'd all hail him as a great poker player and not at all a cheater. He hasn't done that.
nabla9 7y ago
There is extremely strong statistical evidence against him. His cheating can be taken as matter of fact.

Animats 7y ago

While his neighbors keep their phones on the table, he always keeps his phone on his chair between his legs, with his left hand holding it in place beneath the table. That casino allows phones at a high-stakes poker table? Duh.

cududa 7y ago
I mean last time I was in Vegas was 2013 and couldn’t use my phone playing black jack

TheRealPomax 7y ago

Can someone give the tl;dr on whether it was actually proven? I tried to read the article but it's paragraph after paragraph of "As I enjoyed my chocolate cake on a patio at a Parision bistro, the sun pleasantly warming the table and people going about their business unaware of the wrongs of the world, my thoughts turned to the prime numbers and how they related to music" and almost none of it has any real information.

jimmyvalmer 7y ago
Aye, verbosity is an existential threat.
bonestamp2 7y ago
No, it has not been proven. All of the evidence (like his impossible winning statistics) lean toward cheating, but there's no smoking gun at this time.

m4tthumphrey 7y ago

Looks like it's been figured out [0]. [0] https://mobile.twitter.com/vdthemyk/status/1179892447142449153?s=09 https://mobile.twitter.com/vdthemyk/status/11798924471424491...

anxman 7y ago

I think his "hack" is something far simpler than having a co-conspirator. As he helped setup the live streaming system, he also installed a piece of software that nicely calculates what to do at every step and simply sends him his own percentage calculation. This is far more difficult to detect and would require reverse engineering the entire system end to end to find the culprit. It could be anything from a backdoor in the RFID system to an AI that reads the video stream when it gets sent into OBS. There are tons of vectors that could easily be setup. I very much hope that the resolution here isn't just a Civil penalty but that the FBI gets involved and he goes to jail.

jessaustin 7y ago
The FBI does sometimes take an interest in massive ongoing fraud...

monkeydreams 7y ago

=w2hhjjjg34tg

bonestamp2 7y ago

I assume all this heat will bring on an actual law enforcement investigation? I mean, that has to be some serious fraud if he's actually cheating?

vast 7y ago

Sorry I've just watched a random show with Mike Apostle on yt and I have to say - by this small sample - bullshit. Assuming he cheats, I don't see how. He played dominating hands with very classic conservative playstyle, not unnecessarily asking for value. He made risky pre flop all ins. He bluffed loosing hands. All sort of stuff that happens in an average poker game. Not sure why I even watched him playing considering the awful article.

jessaustin 7y ago
Focusing on the wrong things is a great way to lose lots of money in poker, and in life.
- vast 7y ago
  Thanks for the help mate. I will now focus on the right things.
indigodaddy 7y ago
Exactly correct, but this is when he wasn't God-moding. 2017 believe no evidence of cheating. 2018 just one episode (Aug 22) where it was likely. Much of 2019 sessions he was super using/god-moding though. All the streams that he is a normalish player is actually some of the most damning evidence. He doesn't even resemble the same sort of player. Everything is different. All of the physical tells (touching the hat and gazing down at crotch while pretending to look at cards) and cheating indications are no longer present, and he never gets into the type of hand situations and/or crazy moves and perfect-for-all-the-hands decisions he was making in God mode.

bartread 7y ago

He keeps his phone on the chair between his legs. He glances down at his phone before making a decision. 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.

pfortuny 7y ago
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!!

rbrbr 7y ago

Don’t read the article, it lacks any factual evidence. It’s like a book without an end, where the murder hasn’t been found yet (if there was any).

pfortuny 7y ago
No but it does point out clues: word hay AND phone under the table or not showing. Left hand not visible. I would not let any student of mine do any of those things in an exam.

grizzles 7y ago

Doug Polk did a funnny YT takedown of this story a few days ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kDtE9vrRiA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kDtE9vrRiA He shows a clip with Mike's brother talking about how Mike will do anything he can to angle shoot (eg. cheat). Funny stuff.

Nokinside 7y ago

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.

skrebbel 7y ago
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.
- kurtisc 7y ago
  It is enough for civil court.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    Different standards than a criminal case.
- Mtinie 7y ago
  You are thinking of Sally Clark: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally_Clark 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".

anonu 7y ago

What is a plausible technical explanation for how he is cheating? A phone in between your legs, though suspicious, is not enough evidence. And who thought it was a good idea to put RFID in playing cards?

sbarre 7y ago
Simplest explanation would be an inside job. The article says he worked for the casino as a consultant at some point in the past. So he has a connection that works on the livestream production that has access to the RFID-provided hole card information in real-time (perhaps through a software backdoor?) Then he has some kind of device attached somewhere on his body that receives some signal that tells him what other players have, sent to him by the insider setup. This could be a BLE device connected to his phone that vibrates morse code or some other signal, etc..
Sebb767 7y ago
As per another comment, the visualization software can be configured to send the card data via wifi. Anyone on the same network knowing the password (assuming one is set) can receive them. He also worked with the casino beforehand, so there is a good chance he knows the infrastructure. Some way of transferring the info to him is rather easy, then, either by his phone or hat.

sireat 7y ago

There are way too many red flags here(only playing superhumanly at the RFID games, in fact not playing elsewhere,etc). There are some similarities to chess cheating here. There were defenders to the infamous Borislav Ivanov too (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borislav_Ivanov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borislav_Ivanov) even though all decent chess players could tell he was cheating. In the Borislav's case the cheating method was not found although many suspect it was a vibrating smartphone in his shoes. Of course there are differences between poker and chess cheating as well. Pure poker computer without the extra information would not be that much of a help to a good player. What is similar is that both of these players make superhuman moves consistently. Less greedier cheaters would not be caught so easily. Like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igors_Rausis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igors_Rausis it was very suspicious (mostly because of his age) but until the smoking gun in the toilet it was still somewhat plausible that he was not cheating.

haolez 7y ago

Should be easy to disrupt his numbers: play against him with your cards always turned down. Do no look at them :)

abductee_hg 7y ago

well, I think this whole thing is going a bit out of proportion. what do we have so far? - a guy is doing something highly unlikely(not impossible, just unlikely) - lots of speculation - the whole internet seems to be out to get him. In 2009 German speed skater Claudia Pechstein was banned for 2 years from the sport based on irregular levels of reticulocytes in her blood. Nobody could prove that she was doping, however this was the first case of a ban based on circumstantial evidence alone; no forbidden substances were ever found during her repeated tests. Later it turend out that she had a rare genetic disorder called Hereditary spherocytosis. While the court-stuff is still ongoing, science papers have been written, and the IOC has refined the test. still she lost 2 years at the top of her game. I must admit that figuring out this riddle is rather tantalizing, I have been nerd-sniped by good riddles in the past, however my Cpt. Picard-sense is tingeling. let's keep the pitchforks at bay, shall we?

todd8 7y ago

I don't believe in ESP, but I know others that do. I have pointed out to some friends that Las Vegas wouldn't exist as it does if there were people that really had ESP. They could use telekinesis to control the outcome of games or they could use clairvoyance and precognition to predict what was going to happen or they could use telepathy to read others cards. If ESP existed in a group of people I believe that many would reside in Vegas living off their abilities and not performing tricks for gulible researchers. The fact that Postle doesn't cash in on this remarkable ability by playing in higher stake games makes his performance suspicious to me just as people that claim ESP that don't bother to take the casinos for millions makes he skeptical of their claims.

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