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After chess, cheating rows rock poker and fishing

110 points by mjirv 4y ago

neaden 4y ago
The fishing one is the outlier, since in that case th cheaters were caught red handed in dramatic fashion in front of a crowd. With the chess and poker it's much less clear if anything happened and what to do about it.
- gunshai 4y ago
  I know this is HN, but that guy yelling "WE GOT WEIGHTS!" felt out of a movie. Those dudes were MAD.
  - wyldfire 4y ago
    I couldn't quite understand but it looked like the cheater just stood there and witnessed the revelation unfolding without saying anything in confession or in his defense.
    - neaden 4y ago
      Probably the best move, I mean what can you say? An immediate apology isn't going to be credible and you can't really claim innocence at all.
      - drexlspivey 4y ago
        I would expect him to just leave
        neaden 4y ago
        I would want to stay near the authority figure and on camera if I had that many people that mad at me.
        rasz 4y ago
        Kinda hard with a crowd chanting for police. There are videos from later on where police write cheaters details up. What they did is a felony https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/23/sports/bass-fishing-cheating.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/23/sports/bass-fishing-cheat... This was a $30K tournament and supposedly this cheating team cleaned $500K last year.
  - owlninja 4y ago
    Rightfully so, those tournaments have very large buy-ins and the cash + prize rewards are pretty great. I get the feeling many other contestants thought they were cheating in previous wins, I am surprised they don't have more advanced measures for detecting cheating. I've seen some people comment that the eyeball test on some of those fish's weights was laughable.
alasdair_ 4y ago
I saw the poker event live. I genuinely think she was not cheating. She was only 47% to win the hand after her call of the all-in bet and while the play was marginally +EV, it wasn’t much. Far more likely was she misread J4 as J3, especially as she literally said “threes are good, right?” during her deliberations. Cheating in this spot just makes no sense and there has been zero evidence to indicate it was anything more than what she said - she misread a 4 as a 3.
- melling 4y ago
  “Lew ended up returning Adelstein his chips, saying she had been "threatened" - something Adelstein denied.” That’s a lot of money to give back
  - silisili 4y ago
    That's what makes me feel like something is fishy. The dude immediately was calling her out, saying all but she cheated. If she beat him fair and square, any reasonable person would call him a sore loser and be happy to have taken his money.
    - Waterluvian 4y ago
      This logic gives me a very ugly feeling and reminds me of, “why didn’t you scream? Why didn’t you fight?” A lot of comments in this post are applying the commenter’s context to her situation when judging her actions.
      - WastingMyTime89 4y ago
        All the discussion surrounding cheating allegations these past few weeks gave me a very ugly feeling. I have personally lost all respect for at least two communities. Supposedly intelligent people apparently are all too ready to turn into a mob too.
      - lamontcg 4y ago
        Also "if you were innocent, why would you sign a confession?" Bullying is an effective tactic. If it wasn't effective we wouldn't have so many bullies. Apparently we're still living by playground rules where if you don't stand up for yourself you deserve it.
draw_down 4y ago
The poker one doesn’t make sense to me in any direction. Even if she was cheating and had full knowledge of the other player’s cards, her call still doesn’t make sense. Giving back the money to the other player was a really suspicious move though. It seems like she mostly just didn’t really understand what she was doing.
- jstx1 4y ago
  > her call still doesn’t make sense. It 100% makes sense to call the shove on the turn if you know Garett's hole cards. In fact the problem is that it only makes sense if you know his hole cards.
  - deanCommie 4y ago
    How?? The hole cards aren't enough - there are more cards coming on the table. Even if you know that your nothing beats his nothing you are risking a lot on a small advantage that his nothing won't turn into something.
    - alasdair_ 4y ago
      There is no more betting to go, so it does make sense. You are 47% to win but it’s +EV because there is already money in the pot so the pot odds favor you. That said, there are far better spots to do this and her other plays earlier were less than great.
    - jstx1 4y ago
      > How?? After the shove on the turn the pot is $161k, she needs to call $109k. She needs 109/(109+161) = 40.3% equity to break even. So if she has more than 40.3% equity, she should call. If you plug in their cards on the turn into an equity calculator, you'll see that she has 54.55% equity (not accounting for dead cards like the stream calculation but either way it's the same outcome) so it's +EV for her to call.
    - mod 4y ago
      If Garrett turned his hand face up, she makes about 20k by calling on the turn.
remote_phone 4y ago
The cheating claims for the poker example are absolutely stupid. Only people who know very little about poker would claim that. What is obvious is that the lady made a mistake. If someone were helping her cheat, there’s no way they would have told her to call, especially after the flop. She was behind the entire hand after the flop, and even after the turn she still had a disadvantage. She shouldn’t have called it at all and there was no reason to even think about it. If she were cheating her accomplice would have told her under no uncertain terms to fold. Who would advise anyone to make a 6 figure bet on a coin flip???There’s no circumstance under which her actions make sense except in the case of her making a mistake. She made a mistake and got lucky, that’s all there is.
- draw_down 4y ago
- gregw134 4y ago
  > The cheating claims for the poker example are absolutely stupid. Only people who know very little about poker would claim that. Doug Polk is suspicious of cheating here, and Tom Dwan called this one of the most suspicious plays he's ever seen.
- csa 4y ago
  > The cheating claims for the poker example are absolutely stupid. Only people who know very little about poker would claim that. A not small number of well-known pros don’t think it’s so simple: https://preview.redd.it/e4x1y513wer91.png?width=1409&format=png&auto=webp&s=dc359c6d71546ac7c4d10933387f2a377cab32fd https://preview.redd.it/e4x1y513wer91.png?width=1409&format=... Most of the pros think it was just a new player who did something stupid that she didn’t understand, having seen that at the table many times before. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable take. That said, she has several other issues that need to be addressed beyond making that specific hero call.
  - mod 4y ago
    > Most of the pros think [she didn't cheat] I don't have that impression. I follow about 100 pros on SM.
dylan604 4y ago
"Lew ended up returning Adelstein his chips, saying she had been "threatened" - something Adelstein denied." This seems like a very suspect thing to do in my opinion. The threats must have been very specific and meaningful for me to even consider returning chips that I was claiming to have fairly won. Returning them just seems like a guilty move.
- indigodaddy 4y ago
  I disagree. A cheater would desperately attempt to latch on to anything they can to show they are not a cheater. So they would generally refuse even more to give back any money and just repeat the “not cheating” mantra ever more and more— and would definitely never give back the money that they cheated so hard to get… just my opinion. The fact that she gives back the money (and I see no reason to disbelieve that she was likely cornered and intimidated in the hallway) shows that she’s not really that concerned about it and doesn’t really even care that much. A cheater would be grasping on to those chips at all costs/odds.
  - jstx1 4y ago
    Unless you're bad at cheating and get caught and then panic. Not everyone has the personality to double down.
    - late2part 4y ago
      I've probably played around 10k hours of poker. On the one hand, crazy shit happens all the time, and folks win by sucking out or by insane bluffs. On the other hand, it's not considered honorable to win by mistake. Winning by catching a 3% is luck - but just screwing up isn't cool. So, even though $130k (or whatever it was) seems like a lot of money - there is honor among (some/most) poker players, so it seems totally honorable to me that she gave him the money, as she doesn't feel she deserves it. I don't know how she would have cheated. Maybe she did but it doesn't seem to me like she did.
      - jstx1 4y ago
SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
> Local media report that the [fishing] pair were disqualified as winners at an event last year, because one of them failed a polygraph test. wtf? That is definitely not how to use a polygraph. First off, why would you ever submit to that? Second, they are notoriously questionable, and something tells me the fishing championship didn’t get the world’s leading expert to run it.
- a1369209993 4y ago
  > the fishing championship didn’t get the world's leading expert to run it. That would actually make the results less reliable, not more. Polygraphs are good at two things: interrogation, which is basically hitting the subject's knowledge-tree with a stick and seeing what falls out, with the polygraph giving a crude estimate of where to aim for more information. And legitimization, pretending that the interrogation 'produced' some specific result (interrogation does not work that way) to trick people into thinking that result is true. Interrogation is mostly useless (you might get information about how they (may have) cheated, but that's worth less than nothing unless you can verify it against real evidence), and legitimization makes your beliefs wronger than they were to begin with, because you no longer know that you don't know things.
mensetmanusman 4y ago
The future is full body x-rays or large magnetic fields that will kill your if you have metal in you.
furyofantares 4y ago
I think the only reason this drama is going around is because of the chess drama. It's in the zeitgeist and it's good clickbait right now. It's made clear by articles like this that are using the chess drama to make their article interesting, including an even more tenuous link to some fishing drama. Go back an hour in the footage, and she's calling with Jack high on a KQK board against the same player, and she calls for extra time before eventually folding a bet on the river when she still has Jack high. It's apparently not unlike her to be trying to catch bluffs with hands that lose to the bluff. She's new to poker and playing against sharks on TV. She's nervous and embarrassed and doing and saying things that don't make sense.
- neaden 4y ago
  I think the fish one, with the dramatic reveal of the first weight followed by the absurdity of pulling more weights and fish fillets out all while an angry crowd gathers around would have been a sensation no matter what. I agree with you on the poker though.
- throwawaysleep 4y ago
  The fish one went viral on its own. It’s been on the front page of Reddit in one sub or another for a couple days.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Playing jacks is exactly what you’d expect from a player who hasn’t memorized all the odds. Especially since it works sometimes, it can become a huge trap.
- isitmadeofglass 4y ago
  > It's apparently not unlike her to be trying to catch bluffs with hands that lose to the bluff. > calls for extra time So its consistent that she’s acting exactly like she’s waiting on external input in situations where she might have the potential to call a bluff even though she has nothing to call with. And you’re making that out as if that reduces the suspicion?
scombridae 4y ago
The chess world is loving Niemann right now, but even more so Carlsen for his high-profile indignation. P.T. Barnum's chestnut about bad publicity applies most to "sports" desperately seeking spectators.
jwie 4y ago
The cheating accusations need to be a lot less dramatic. Removing cheaters from competitive play isn’t a public activity. Magnus throwing the chess equivalent of a tantrum in public, and a woman being bullied into undoing a lucky win aren’t going to solve anything. Unless you catch someone red handed go through channels. Unless of course the object is to create a bunch of hype and engagement… then I suppose accuse more people of cheating without evidence in the noisiest way possible.
- mod 4y ago
  Knowing about a cheater and not telling other poker players about it is a really good way to destroy your reputation in the poker world. Poker players, in the almost 20 years I've been playing, have a pretty standard policy of outing guys who cheat, steal, angle, and owe. Particularly in the high stakes world. The cheating accusations did not originate with the players in the game, anyway. Garrett maybe told a story with his eyeballs--he's maybe uniquely qualified to do that. But his first mention of "cheating" was after it had already blown up, trust me. It was on a livestream, it wasn't a subtle event, and people love controversy.
joekrill 4y ago
All these accusations of cheating without any concrete proof are really worrying to me. I've read a few of these threads now, and not once have I seen any actual, real, explicit evidence for cheating. It looks very similar to the vote rigging claims we're seeing a lot more of recently in the U.S. Don't like the outcome? Just blame your opponent of cheating! No need to show any _real_ proof - just make up some vague claims of what _could_ have happened! And just keep repeating it. And this all seems to working pretty well - THAT is the scary thing Obviously none of this applies in the case of the fisherman, who seem to have been caught red-handed.
- latortuga 4y ago
  The person Carlsen accused of cheating has a documented and admitted history of it. Officials literally found weights inside the fish. Both of those are in this story.
  - greggsy 4y ago
    The video is damming
  - joekrill 4y ago
    > The person Carlsen accused of cheating has a documented and admitted history of it. So what? Just because someone has cheated in the past does not in any way prove that they've cheated in this particular case. It only proves they've cheated in the past. Is it suspicious? Sure. But any accusations of cheating are still pure speculation. > Officials literally found weights inside the fish. Both of those are in this story. And I specifically mentioned this in my comment.
    - threatofrain 4y ago
      > So what? Getting caught for cheating has an impact on credibility. Credibility is a big deal and a hard problem. The boy who cried wolf is not a story of no wolves. Are you surprised that cheating impacts credibility? In a court of law we might have standards like preponderance of evidence or reasonable doubt. In everyday human relations everyone is free to develop their own theories of credibility and to act upon their freedoms accordingly. You are free to judge whether Microsoft is trustworthy even without proof that they will betray your trust in the future, which nobody really knows.
hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
Check out ‘Mike postle’ in the poker world - he was accused of cheating based on hundreds of hours worth of evidence but no actual proof, the evidence was substantial enough to basically prove guilt beyond doubt. The current poker drama doesn’t offer enough evidence to prove or disprove anything. I think largely the poker world is addicted to drama, unsure if the objective is to remain in the media or just because drama sells.
toomanyrichies 4y ago
Coming soon to ProductHunt- Faraday underpants.
yumswiss 4y ago
How do you even check if someone has a wireless vibrating device?
- 323 4y ago
  X-Ray person, X-Ray all items on person.
  - mirker 4y ago
    And then place persons in Faraday cage underground.
    - 6stringmerc 4y ago
      Throw them in water and see if they float like a duck! …or look like they’re being zapped.
friedman23 4y ago
Let me give you all a quick crash course in poker exploitation. Exploitation is taking advantage of inaccuracies in the other player's strategy to maximize the amount of money you win. When you bet or raise in poker you need to do this action with some combinations of hands that are good (we refer to these as value hands) and some combinations of hands that are bad (we refer to these as bluffs). If you ever have too many value hands the opponent can exploit your strategy by folding all hands that are worse than your value hands. If you ever have too many bluffs the opponent can exploit your strategy by calling with all hands that beat your bluffs. The problem with this J hi call is that it does not beat the majority of Garrett's bluffs. In this situation Garrett has at most 2 combinations of hands that are worse than J hi, those hands also have 50% chance of winning due to half the deck improving them on the river vs J hi. In this situation Garrett could have three of a kind, a single pair, a full house, or maybe just Ace hi (which beats J hi). So this call is terrible, even if "you have a read". So the only explanation is that she's extremely stupid or cheating. Both explain the shifting story for why she called because nobody wants to admit they are dumb and they definitely don't want to admit to cheating. edit: She could also just have poor emotional regulation under pressure which compelled her to call despite knowing it's bad.
- mod 4y ago
  I think one of the best arguments that she didn't cheat is that it requires a lot more. Option 1: She didn't cheat and made an incredibly bad play because she's very stupid. Option 2: She did cheat and she made an incredibly bad play because she's basically showing off that she's cheating, which makes her very stupid. So option 1 requires that she's really stupid, and option 2 requires that she's really stupid AND she cheated, making option 1 more likely. That being said, it ignores a lot of the poker nuance. That's going to be lost on the discussion here, unfortunately, in spite of your comment. I've long found you can't have any serious poker discussion here.
SCAQTony 4y ago
Faith in the athletic sprit of fair play and may the best win probably never existed. "...Anonymous surveys done after elite athletics events in 2011, in which 57% of competitors admitted doping compared to under 4% in WADA test results..." https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/aug/29/sport-doping-study-revealing-wider-usage-published-after-scandalous-delay https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/aug/29/sport-doping-s... "...In addition, of the 81 different riders who finished in the top-10 of the Tour de France during this period, 65% have been caught doping, admitted to blood doping, or have strong associations to doping and are suspected cheaters. ..." https://www.businessinsider.com/lance-armstrong-doping-tour-de-france-2015-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/lance-armstrong-doping-tour-... "...For a nearly year Serena Williams was allowed 'Therapeutic Use Exemptions' (TUEs) which involved LOTS of steroids. Date for use/Date given/Substance Oct 2010 - Mar 2011/23 Dec/Hydromorphone Dec 2010/23 Dec/Oxycodone Nov 27-Dec 1 2010/23 Dec/Methylprednisolone 12-19 Mar 2014/13th Mar/Prednisone 21-30 Mar 2014/2 Apr/Prednisone 7-21 May 2014/8 May/Prednisone 10-17 Nov 2014/3 Dec/Prednisone, Oxycodone 5-10 June 2015/8 Jun/Prednisolone https://www.tennis.com/news/articles/tandon-a-closer-look-at-serena-williams-therapeutic-use-exemptions https://www.tennis.com/news/articles/tandon-a-closer-look-at...
- berberous 4y ago
  Does Prednisone or Oxy really give you a performance boost? I feel like if so it’s marginal and she really was taking them for a medical reason?
  - SCAQTony 4y ago
    WADA has restrictions on Prednisone: "...Prednisolone & prednisone within 10 days of a competition." https://www.usada.org/spirit-of-sport/key-changes-2022-prohibited-list/ https://www.usada.org/spirit-of-sport/key-changes-2022-prohi... "...Oral corticosteroids reduce the pain and inflammation that often occurs with extreme exertion. Athletes have reported that corticosteroids help them push through the pain of extreme exertion and allow them to recover faster for the next event..." https://truesport.org/clean-sport/5-facts-about-corticosteroids-v-anabolic-steroids/ https://truesport.org/clean-sport/5-facts-about-corticostero...
  - 4y ago
aml183 4y ago
Adelstein is one of the best poker cash players in the world. He has a sterling reputation in the community and to my knowledge has never made an accusation like that before. If you play poker, that call was either the greatest hero call of all or extremely suspect. There is absolutely no reason to call in that spot considering the fact that many bluffs could be ahead of her hand such as AcXc for a flush draw. Furthermore, she was backed in that game meaning that she doesn’t have the money to play in it. Who is backing you if you are calling over $100K pots with Jack high.
323 4y ago
Dumb question, but if she was cheating, where is the information sourced from? How could her accomplice see the other player's card to pass to her? I never saw this part explained.
- TigeriusKirk 4y ago
  She's financially backed by someone else who was at the table. He could have seen the other cards. But the more likely route was some sort of compromised computer system. The cards in these televised games have RFID to allow the show to know what everyone has. Like any computer system, that could have been compromised in some way. There's a lot of money on these tables, enough to make it worth a lot of effort to cheat.
- Dma54rhs 4y ago
  This event was televised but I font know uue they use delay or other systems to keep it honest. But from TV they show and tell everyone's cards so it's interesting for the viewers :)
braingenious 4y ago
This reminded me of a fascinating article about cheating in bass fishing that came out a while back. I had no idea how big cheating in fishing is! https://sdfish.com/general/dark-secret-americas-big-bass-guru-mike-long/ https://sdfish.com/general/dark-secret-americas-big-bass-gur...
jurassic 4y ago
All the men commentating on this situation are missing the perceived sexism dynamic at the table. She clearly believed he was full of shit and wanted to call him out on it. Her statements about "bluff catcher" align with this. It was a stupid play that had no rational basis, but she did it based on an emotional read of him not an assessment of the realistic value of her hand. And she got lucky. In amateur games I see this type of behavior all the time. To me all it says is that she's a noob in the world of pro poker. Playing against irrational opponents is hard, hence "beginner's luck".

110 points by mjirv 4y ago

The fishing one is the outlier, since in that case th cheaters were caught red handed in dramatic fashion in front of a crowd. With the chess and poker it's much less clear if anything happened and what to do about it.

gunshai 4y ago
I know this is HN, but that guy yelling "WE GOT WEIGHTS!" felt out of a movie. Those dudes were MAD.
- wyldfire 4y ago
  I couldn't quite understand but it looked like the cheater just stood there and witnessed the revelation unfolding without saying anything in confession or in his defense.
  - neaden 4y ago
    Probably the best move, I mean what can you say? An immediate apology isn't going to be credible and you can't really claim innocence at all.
    - drexlspivey 4y ago
      I would expect him to just leave
      - neaden 4y ago
        I would want to stay near the authority figure and on camera if I had that many people that mad at me.
      - rasz 4y ago
        Kinda hard with a crowd chanting for police. There are videos from later on where police write cheaters details up. What they did is a felony https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/23/sports/bass-fishing-cheating.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/23/sports/bass-fishing-cheat... This was a $30K tournament and supposedly this cheating team cleaned $500K last year.
- owlninja 4y ago
  Rightfully so, those tournaments have very large buy-ins and the cash + prize rewards are pretty great. I get the feeling many other contestants thought they were cheating in previous wins, I am surprised they don't have more advanced measures for detecting cheating. I've seen some people comment that the eyeball test on some of those fish's weights was laughable.

alasdair_ 4y ago

I saw the poker event live. I genuinely think she was not cheating. She was only 47% to win the hand after her call of the all-in bet and while the play was marginally +EV, it wasn’t much. Far more likely was she misread J4 as J3, especially as she literally said “threes are good, right?” during her deliberations. Cheating in this spot just makes no sense and there has been zero evidence to indicate it was anything more than what she said - she misread a 4 as a 3.

melling 4y ago
“Lew ended up returning Adelstein his chips, saying she had been "threatened" - something Adelstein denied.” That’s a lot of money to give back
- silisili 4y ago
  That's what makes me feel like something is fishy. The dude immediately was calling her out, saying all but she cheated. If she beat him fair and square, any reasonable person would call him a sore loser and be happy to have taken his money.
  - Waterluvian 4y ago
    This logic gives me a very ugly feeling and reminds me of, “why didn’t you scream? Why didn’t you fight?” A lot of comments in this post are applying the commenter’s context to her situation when judging her actions.
    - WastingMyTime89 4y ago
      All the discussion surrounding cheating allegations these past few weeks gave me a very ugly feeling. I have personally lost all respect for at least two communities. Supposedly intelligent people apparently are all too ready to turn into a mob too.
    - lamontcg 4y ago
      Also "if you were innocent, why would you sign a confession?" Bullying is an effective tactic. If it wasn't effective we wouldn't have so many bullies. Apparently we're still living by playground rules where if you don't stand up for yourself you deserve it.

draw_down 4y ago

The poker one doesn’t make sense to me in any direction. Even if she was cheating and had full knowledge of the other player’s cards, her call still doesn’t make sense. Giving back the money to the other player was a really suspicious move though. It seems like she mostly just didn’t really understand what she was doing.

jstx1 4y ago
> her call still doesn’t make sense. It 100% makes sense to call the shove on the turn if you know Garett's hole cards. In fact the problem is that it only makes sense if you know his hole cards.
- deanCommie 4y ago
  How?? The hole cards aren't enough - there are more cards coming on the table. Even if you know that your nothing beats his nothing you are risking a lot on a small advantage that his nothing won't turn into something.
  - alasdair_ 4y ago
    There is no more betting to go, so it does make sense. You are 47% to win but it’s +EV because there is already money in the pot so the pot odds favor you. That said, there are far better spots to do this and her other plays earlier were less than great.
  - jstx1 4y ago
    > How?? After the shove on the turn the pot is $161k, she needs to call $109k. She needs 109/(109+161) = 40.3% equity to break even. So if she has more than 40.3% equity, she should call. If you plug in their cards on the turn into an equity calculator, you'll see that she has 54.55% equity (not accounting for dead cards like the stream calculation but either way it's the same outcome) so it's +EV for her to call.
  - mod 4y ago
    If Garrett turned his hand face up, she makes about 20k by calling on the turn.

remote_phone 4y ago

The cheating claims for the poker example are absolutely stupid. Only people who know very little about poker would claim that. What is obvious is that the lady made a mistake. If someone were helping her cheat, there’s no way they would have told her to call, especially after the flop. She was behind the entire hand after the flop, and even after the turn she still had a disadvantage. She shouldn’t have called it at all and there was no reason to even think about it. If she were cheating her accomplice would have told her under no uncertain terms to fold. Who would advise anyone to make a 6 figure bet on a coin flip???There’s no circumstance under which her actions make sense except in the case of her making a mistake. She made a mistake and got lucky, that’s all there is.

draw_down 4y ago
gregw134 4y ago
> The cheating claims for the poker example are absolutely stupid. Only people who know very little about poker would claim that. Doug Polk is suspicious of cheating here, and Tom Dwan called this one of the most suspicious plays he's ever seen.
csa 4y ago
> The cheating claims for the poker example are absolutely stupid. Only people who know very little about poker would claim that. A not small number of well-known pros don’t think it’s so simple: https://preview.redd.it/e4x1y513wer91.png?width=1409&format=png&auto=webp&s=dc359c6d71546ac7c4d10933387f2a377cab32fd https://preview.redd.it/e4x1y513wer91.png?width=1409&format=... Most of the pros think it was just a new player who did something stupid that she didn’t understand, having seen that at the table many times before. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable take. That said, she has several other issues that need to be addressed beyond making that specific hero call.
- mod 4y ago
  > Most of the pros think [she didn't cheat] I don't have that impression. I follow about 100 pros on SM.

dylan604 4y ago

"Lew ended up returning Adelstein his chips, saying she had been "threatened" - something Adelstein denied." This seems like a very suspect thing to do in my opinion. The threats must have been very specific and meaningful for me to even consider returning chips that I was claiming to have fairly won. Returning them just seems like a guilty move.

indigodaddy 4y ago
I disagree. A cheater would desperately attempt to latch on to anything they can to show they are not a cheater. So they would generally refuse even more to give back any money and just repeat the “not cheating” mantra ever more and more— and would definitely never give back the money that they cheated so hard to get… just my opinion. The fact that she gives back the money (and I see no reason to disbelieve that she was likely cornered and intimidated in the hallway) shows that she’s not really that concerned about it and doesn’t really even care that much. A cheater would be grasping on to those chips at all costs/odds.
- jstx1 4y ago
  Unless you're bad at cheating and get caught and then panic. Not everyone has the personality to double down.
  - late2part 4y ago
    I've probably played around 10k hours of poker. On the one hand, crazy shit happens all the time, and folks win by sucking out or by insane bluffs. On the other hand, it's not considered honorable to win by mistake. Winning by catching a 3% is luck - but just screwing up isn't cool. So, even though $130k (or whatever it was) seems like a lot of money - there is honor among (some/most) poker players, so it seems totally honorable to me that she gave him the money, as she doesn't feel she deserves it. I don't know how she would have cheated. Maybe she did but it doesn't seem to me like she did.
    - jstx1 4y ago

SV_BubbleTime 4y ago

> Local media report that the [fishing] pair were disqualified as winners at an event last year, because one of them failed a polygraph test. wtf? That is definitely not how to use a polygraph. First off, why would you ever submit to that? Second, they are notoriously questionable, and something tells me the fishing championship didn’t get the world’s leading expert to run it.

a1369209993 4y ago
> the fishing championship didn’t get the world's leading expert to run it. That would actually make the results less reliable, not more. Polygraphs are good at two things: interrogation, which is basically hitting the subject's knowledge-tree with a stick and seeing what falls out, with the polygraph giving a crude estimate of where to aim for more information. And legitimization, pretending that the interrogation 'produced' some specific result (interrogation does not work that way) to trick people into thinking that result is true. Interrogation is mostly useless (you might get information about how they (may have) cheated, but that's worth less than nothing unless you can verify it against real evidence), and legitimization makes your beliefs wronger than they were to begin with, because you no longer know that you don't know things.

mensetmanusman 4y ago

The future is full body x-rays or large magnetic fields that will kill your if you have metal in you.

furyofantares 4y ago

I think the only reason this drama is going around is because of the chess drama. It's in the zeitgeist and it's good clickbait right now. It's made clear by articles like this that are using the chess drama to make their article interesting, including an even more tenuous link to some fishing drama. Go back an hour in the footage, and she's calling with Jack high on a KQK board against the same player, and she calls for extra time before eventually folding a bet on the river when she still has Jack high. It's apparently not unlike her to be trying to catch bluffs with hands that lose to the bluff. She's new to poker and playing against sharks on TV. She's nervous and embarrassed and doing and saying things that don't make sense.

neaden 4y ago
I think the fish one, with the dramatic reveal of the first weight followed by the absurdity of pulling more weights and fish fillets out all while an angry crowd gathers around would have been a sensation no matter what. I agree with you on the poker though.
throwawaysleep 4y ago
The fish one went viral on its own. It’s been on the front page of Reddit in one sub or another for a couple days.
bombcar 4y ago
Playing jacks is exactly what you’d expect from a player who hasn’t memorized all the odds. Especially since it works sometimes, it can become a huge trap.
isitmadeofglass 4y ago
> It's apparently not unlike her to be trying to catch bluffs with hands that lose to the bluff. > calls for extra time So its consistent that she’s acting exactly like she’s waiting on external input in situations where she might have the potential to call a bluff even though she has nothing to call with. And you’re making that out as if that reduces the suspicion?

scombridae 4y ago

The chess world is loving Niemann right now, but even more so Carlsen for his high-profile indignation. P.T. Barnum's chestnut about bad publicity applies most to "sports" desperately seeking spectators.

jwie 4y ago

The cheating accusations need to be a lot less dramatic. Removing cheaters from competitive play isn’t a public activity. Magnus throwing the chess equivalent of a tantrum in public, and a woman being bullied into undoing a lucky win aren’t going to solve anything. Unless you catch someone red handed go through channels. Unless of course the object is to create a bunch of hype and engagement… then I suppose accuse more people of cheating without evidence in the noisiest way possible.

mod 4y ago
Knowing about a cheater and not telling other poker players about it is a really good way to destroy your reputation in the poker world. Poker players, in the almost 20 years I've been playing, have a pretty standard policy of outing guys who cheat, steal, angle, and owe. Particularly in the high stakes world. The cheating accusations did not originate with the players in the game, anyway. Garrett maybe told a story with his eyeballs--he's maybe uniquely qualified to do that. But his first mention of "cheating" was after it had already blown up, trust me. It was on a livestream, it wasn't a subtle event, and people love controversy.

joekrill 4y ago

All these accusations of cheating without any concrete proof are really worrying to me. I've read a few of these threads now, and not once have I seen any actual, real, explicit evidence for cheating. It looks very similar to the vote rigging claims we're seeing a lot more of recently in the U.S. Don't like the outcome? Just blame your opponent of cheating! No need to show any _real_ proof - just make up some vague claims of what _could_ have happened! And just keep repeating it. And this all seems to working pretty well - THAT is the scary thing Obviously none of this applies in the case of the fisherman, who seem to have been caught red-handed.

latortuga 4y ago
The person Carlsen accused of cheating has a documented and admitted history of it. Officials literally found weights inside the fish. Both of those are in this story.
- greggsy 4y ago
  The video is damming
- joekrill 4y ago
  > The person Carlsen accused of cheating has a documented and admitted history of it. So what? Just because someone has cheated in the past does not in any way prove that they've cheated in this particular case. It only proves they've cheated in the past. Is it suspicious? Sure. But any accusations of cheating are still pure speculation. > Officials literally found weights inside the fish. Both of those are in this story. And I specifically mentioned this in my comment.
  - threatofrain 4y ago
    > So what? Getting caught for cheating has an impact on credibility. Credibility is a big deal and a hard problem. The boy who cried wolf is not a story of no wolves. Are you surprised that cheating impacts credibility? In a court of law we might have standards like preponderance of evidence or reasonable doubt. In everyday human relations everyone is free to develop their own theories of credibility and to act upon their freedoms accordingly. You are free to judge whether Microsoft is trustworthy even without proof that they will betray your trust in the future, which nobody really knows.

hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago

Check out ‘Mike postle’ in the poker world - he was accused of cheating based on hundreds of hours worth of evidence but no actual proof, the evidence was substantial enough to basically prove guilt beyond doubt. The current poker drama doesn’t offer enough evidence to prove or disprove anything. I think largely the poker world is addicted to drama, unsure if the objective is to remain in the media or just because drama sells.

toomanyrichies 4y ago

Coming soon to ProductHunt- Faraday underpants.

yumswiss 4y ago

How do you even check if someone has a wireless vibrating device?

323 4y ago
X-Ray person, X-Ray all items on person.
- mirker 4y ago
  And then place persons in Faraday cage underground.
  - 6stringmerc 4y ago
    Throw them in water and see if they float like a duck! …or look like they’re being zapped.

friedman23 4y ago

Let me give you all a quick crash course in poker exploitation. Exploitation is taking advantage of inaccuracies in the other player's strategy to maximize the amount of money you win. When you bet or raise in poker you need to do this action with some combinations of hands that are good (we refer to these as value hands) and some combinations of hands that are bad (we refer to these as bluffs). If you ever have too many value hands the opponent can exploit your strategy by folding all hands that are worse than your value hands. If you ever have too many bluffs the opponent can exploit your strategy by calling with all hands that beat your bluffs. The problem with this J hi call is that it does not beat the majority of Garrett's bluffs. In this situation Garrett has at most 2 combinations of hands that are worse than J hi, those hands also have 50% chance of winning due to half the deck improving them on the river vs J hi. In this situation Garrett could have three of a kind, a single pair, a full house, or maybe just Ace hi (which beats J hi). So this call is terrible, even if "you have a read". So the only explanation is that she's extremely stupid or cheating. Both explain the shifting story for why she called because nobody wants to admit they are dumb and they definitely don't want to admit to cheating. edit: She could also just have poor emotional regulation under pressure which compelled her to call despite knowing it's bad.

mod 4y ago
I think one of the best arguments that she didn't cheat is that it requires a lot more. Option 1: She didn't cheat and made an incredibly bad play because she's very stupid. Option 2: She did cheat and she made an incredibly bad play because she's basically showing off that she's cheating, which makes her very stupid. So option 1 requires that she's really stupid, and option 2 requires that she's really stupid AND she cheated, making option 1 more likely. That being said, it ignores a lot of the poker nuance. That's going to be lost on the discussion here, unfortunately, in spite of your comment. I've long found you can't have any serious poker discussion here.

SCAQTony 4y ago

Faith in the athletic sprit of fair play and may the best win probably never existed. "...Anonymous surveys done after elite athletics events in 2011, in which 57% of competitors admitted doping compared to under 4% in WADA test results..." https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/aug/29/sport-doping-study-revealing-wider-usage-published-after-scandalous-delay https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/aug/29/sport-doping-s... "...In addition, of the 81 different riders who finished in the top-10 of the Tour de France during this period, 65% have been caught doping, admitted to blood doping, or have strong associations to doping and are suspected cheaters. ..." https://www.businessinsider.com/lance-armstrong-doping-tour-de-france-2015-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/lance-armstrong-doping-tour-... "...For a nearly year Serena Williams was allowed 'Therapeutic Use Exemptions' (TUEs) which involved LOTS of steroids. Date for use/Date given/Substance Oct 2010 - Mar 2011/23 Dec/Hydromorphone Dec 2010/23 Dec/Oxycodone Nov 27-Dec 1 2010/23 Dec/Methylprednisolone 12-19 Mar 2014/13th Mar/Prednisone 21-30 Mar 2014/2 Apr/Prednisone 7-21 May 2014/8 May/Prednisone 10-17 Nov 2014/3 Dec/Prednisone, Oxycodone 5-10 June 2015/8 Jun/Prednisolone https://www.tennis.com/news/articles/tandon-a-closer-look-at-serena-williams-therapeutic-use-exemptions https://www.tennis.com/news/articles/tandon-a-closer-look-at...

berberous 4y ago
Does Prednisone or Oxy really give you a performance boost? I feel like if so it’s marginal and she really was taking them for a medical reason?
- SCAQTony 4y ago
  WADA has restrictions on Prednisone: "...Prednisolone & prednisone within 10 days of a competition." https://www.usada.org/spirit-of-sport/key-changes-2022-prohibited-list/ https://www.usada.org/spirit-of-sport/key-changes-2022-prohi... "...Oral corticosteroids reduce the pain and inflammation that often occurs with extreme exertion. Athletes have reported that corticosteroids help them push through the pain of extreme exertion and allow them to recover faster for the next event..." https://truesport.org/clean-sport/5-facts-about-corticosteroids-v-anabolic-steroids/ https://truesport.org/clean-sport/5-facts-about-corticostero...
- 4y ago

aml183 4y ago

Adelstein is one of the best poker cash players in the world. He has a sterling reputation in the community and to my knowledge has never made an accusation like that before. If you play poker, that call was either the greatest hero call of all or extremely suspect. There is absolutely no reason to call in that spot considering the fact that many bluffs could be ahead of her hand such as AcXc for a flush draw. Furthermore, she was backed in that game meaning that she doesn’t have the money to play in it. Who is backing you if you are calling over $100K pots with Jack high.

323 4y ago

Dumb question, but if she was cheating, where is the information sourced from? How could her accomplice see the other player's card to pass to her? I never saw this part explained.

TigeriusKirk 4y ago
She's financially backed by someone else who was at the table. He could have seen the other cards. But the more likely route was some sort of compromised computer system. The cards in these televised games have RFID to allow the show to know what everyone has. Like any computer system, that could have been compromised in some way. There's a lot of money on these tables, enough to make it worth a lot of effort to cheat.
Dma54rhs 4y ago
This event was televised but I font know uue they use delay or other systems to keep it honest. But from TV they show and tell everyone's cards so it's interesting for the viewers :)

braingenious 4y ago

This reminded me of a fascinating article about cheating in bass fishing that came out a while back. I had no idea how big cheating in fishing is! https://sdfish.com/general/dark-secret-americas-big-bass-guru-mike-long/ https://sdfish.com/general/dark-secret-americas-big-bass-gur...

jurassic 4y ago

All the men commentating on this situation are missing the perceived sexism dynamic at the table. She clearly believed he was full of shit and wanted to call him out on it. Her statements about "bluff catcher" align with this. It was a stupid play that had no rational basis, but she did it based on an emotional read of him not an assessment of the realistic value of her hand. And she got lucky. In amateur games I see this type of behavior all the time. To me all it says is that she's a noob in the world of pro poker. Playing against irrational opponents is hard, hence "beginner's luck".