9 ms·

Report of alleged wrongdoing in poker hand and audit of security live stream

78 points by hbcondo714 4y ago

kevingadd 4y ago
"The playing cards all have RFID antennas in them" feels like intentionally creating a bunch of security vulnerabilities that you simply don't need to have, in order to be high-tech and I guess simplify tracking what's in people's hands? I feel like there would be some sort of computer vision or manual solution for this that wouldn't be so potentially exploitable. I'm sure they considered this but it fascinates me that they're not doing something like 'when a card is dealt it runs past a scanner' to track who gets what card.
- Supermancho 4y ago
  > feels like intentionally creating a bunch of security vulnerabilities that you simply don't need to have, in order to be high-tech Making unique ids for tracking is not being "high tech". IDs provide traceability, which is protection against unauthorized modification/deletion, which is part of information security, etc.
  - intrasight 4y ago
    Casinos live on their reputations of running an honest game. I guess "smart cards" can further that cause. But there's a risk that the opposite can occur.
  - kevingadd 4y ago
    Couldn't you just have serial numbers on the cards and check them at the end of the hand? Why an antenna that can be read at a distance through obstructions?
    - wikfwikf 4y ago
      The RFID chips are there so that they can show exactly what everyone has during the hand. Televised poker is much more interesting when you know what cards everyone has.
  - dandelany 4y ago
    All true, but when A) your entire business model relies on keeping those IDs hidden and B) you’re storing them on intentionally “promiscuous” media (RFID), it definitely increases the attack surface in a big way. I’m sure this is a calculated risk, they probably feel confident in their ability to detect unauthorized attempts to read the tags.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- kfrzcode 4y ago
  It's likely there are a lot of counter-measures in place, including software-based protocols as well as frequency monitoring. https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/sp/800-98/final https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/sp/800-98/final
- bayindirh 4y ago
  All the cards have randomized UUID numbers as their IDs, so without matching them to their real value, they're just random numbers on the air. And when all you can do is sniff all cards at once, you can't do this pairing and read the game. Sounds, well, sound to me.
- wikfwikf 4y ago
  They used to require players to put their two cards on a transparent spot of the table so that a camera below could id them for the television feed. RFID is much more secure than this, and it also reduces the times when cards can't be read because the player doesn't play them right. Putting the cards past a reader or scanner while dealing would alter the flow of the game, and would also introduce other attack vectors.
bb88 4y ago
New spying technology often uses schemes that may not be fully understood until years later, or is so brilliant that it takes someone of equivalent brilliance to figure it out. https://www.spymuseum.org/exhibition-experiences/about-the-collection/collection-highlights/the-great-seal/ https://www.spymuseum.org/exhibition-experiences/about-the-c...
- intrasight 4y ago
  I envision butt plugs that use undetectable subspace communications
  - bb88 4y ago
    If you can't detect it, it sure makes receiving it hard.
    - intrasight 4y ago
      Lots of things made no sense in Star Trek
monero-xmr 4y ago
I have never been in a hand with a $100k+ pot, but in higher-stakes tournament and cash play ($1000's per hand) you will still see the dumbest bluffs and calls. There are a lot of rich people playing poker, and with alcohol involved people care even less. It drives the grinders crazy but that's the flip side of trying to take money from tourists. It's quite possible the player accused of cheating (who apparently didn't even buy in with her own money) just made a stupid call.
jaxomlotus 4y ago
This is super interesting, but honestly it was clear from the video immediately that it was sour grapes. Part of being a pro poker player is having an intuitive sense when someone is bluffing. The guy bluffed and was called on it. That he then came up with an elaborate accusation and even cornered her for the money is pretty crappy behavior. Even if she just got lucky with a jack high, it's not unheard of for people to shove in poker with absolutely nothing. Now that this report came out, I'd say she has a clear avenue for a libel suit against him.
- tptacek 4y ago
  Why does she have a clear avenue for a libel suit?
- intrasight 4y ago
  Yup - she'll call his bluff - again.
- tomr75 4y ago
  it didn't make sense because even most bluffs beat her hand even if she thought he was bluffing, Q K A high beat her.. why return the money? why let the dealer steal 15k? 100% cheating
  - Yeahsureok 4y ago
    > most bluffs beat her hand That has absolutely nothing to do with the concept of bluffing. The hand is irrelevant.
    - RyanCavanaugh 4y ago
      The hand is relevant on the calling side. Poker doesn't work on the principle of "I called your bluff and so I win!". If you call a bluff with a worse hand, you still lose the pot.
    - kikokikokiko 4y ago
      If you call an "all in", you will have to beat the hand of your opponent. So the fact that she had a TERRIBLE hand is definitely relevant here. No sane person, let alone a PRO player, would call an all in with such an horrible hand as she had, since even if he was bluffing, a simple 22 pair would beat her nothing hand. She was cheating 100%, the fact that she returned the money and didn't call the theft of another 15k, from the guy that probably was her accomplice, is just the icing on the cake, it's the "ok whatever you guys want, just leave me alone and let's not talk about it anymore".
RC_ITR 4y ago
Honestly, returning half the winnings on the spot is the thing that makes me believe no cheating took place. If you did actually have a strategy that you put months of effort into, you’d deny deny deny. If they’re asking, they’ll already check for cheating (like they did above) and you planned for that. You knew you had to cover your tracks and you know the train had left the station. I honestly think this was just bulls*er luck and no-one to cry cheat like a pro male poker player who just got a bad beat against an amateur female player.
- nigamanth 4y ago
  Returning half could also have been a way of subliminally saying "Shut up, right now, you got your money and don't mess up my strategy."
  - googlryas 4y ago
    Except that returning money is so rare in professional poker that the act itself raises red flags.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - gouggoug 4y ago
    It could have been Lew recognizing she had been incredibly lucky and feeling bad about it.
  - freyr 4y ago
    This sums up the problem with the pro-cheating side – the argument boils down to: “This person didn’t behave how I think I would behave in this situation, so she’s probably guilty.” But many people get extremely defensive and indignant when caught cheating or lying. Do returning half the money when cornered by Adelstein is evidence of nothing, either way.
  - RC_ITR 4y ago
    Casino poker is zero sum. The house makes money on a take rate, but the alleged cheaters winnings came directly from other players. There’s no “be chill, I’m trying to get money from the house” aspect here.
darig 4y ago
stevebmark 4y ago
For anyone who hasn't been following this, it has been hilarious. It's the dumbest witch hunt of all time. The YouTube videos analyzing the "cheating" are dumb as shit. I didn't think this could get funnier, until I read: > HSPP has spent more than $100,000 and significant hours of its time to conduct a thorough investigation. Beautiful. Bravo.
- breakpointalpha 4y ago
  HSPP spending this kind of money and time to improve security is just a reputation protective measure. I'd expect any casino, card room, or bank to do this regularly before I'd trust six figures with them.
zxcvbn4038 4y ago
Very interesting read - but ultimately it is gambling, maybe she just felt lucky? Invariably that way these things seem to work is if someone wins it’s because of their mad gambling skills, and if they lose it’s because the casino cheated and/or other players poor strategy took “their” cards. Must be maddening for casino employees to have to put up with that day in and out. Imagine how much money was spent in this audit.
squokko 4y ago
Plenty of dumbfucks make stupid hero calls, and this could clearly be that because only a dumbfuck would agree to return money that she won in poker (cheating or not). This whole thing was overblown and I agree that it would not have happened to a male player making a stupid hero call with daddy's money.
CamperBob2 4y ago
"HCL is currently using the Clear-Com FreeSpeak II system, which runs on the 1.8Ghz and 2.4GHz frequency bands. The current system is vulnerable to eavesdropping with specialized equipment such as a Software Defined Radio (SDR) or specialized parts that are not easily found anymore or needs to be built from scratch. A potential attacker would have to have advanced knowledge of radio and engineering to craft or program a device capable of eavesdropping." Face, meet palm
aaron695 4y ago
ZiiS 4y ago
Adelstein had both an outside strait and flush draw; ie went all in knowing they needed the flop to win. It seems highly plausable that this could have been "read"; at which point Lew did know exactly which two cards they were playing. Is it 25 to Adelstein vs 19 to Law; not ideal but concevable you might call (against a stronger player who would eventually bleed you; a near evens chance if winning can sound quite attractive)
splonk 4y ago
Former pro and high stakes player here. I don't know the principals involved and as such have no particular strong opinion on whether any cheating occurred, but this particular situation of a ridiculous hero call based on a very specific read is common enough that it doesn't raise any red flags to me. Mostly I just want to comment to say that any analysis involving her hand equity against a random hand is flawed. For one, bluffs generally don't come out of a random range. Probably more importantly, someone deciding to have undue confidence in their read and acting on it is more common than some people here seem to think. It's pretty clearly a bad call under almost any reasonable analysis, but I wouldn't have been making a living if people made good decisions all the time. In this particular hand, if you convince yourself that the opponent has exactly 8c7c (not hard to do), it's also going to be pretty easy to convince yourself that a hand with the Jc in it is a good enough candidate to snap off that bluff. Meta-considerations about offering to return money or the likelihood of choosing to burn an exploit for a very marginal situation don't seem particularly convincing one way or another unless you know the principals well. However, if I had to choose one word to describe a high stakes poker player, "erratic" would be a pretty good one. Basically I think anyone uninvolved who's sure of what happened is probably being overconfident.
- alexambarch 4y ago
  While I don’t think she cheated, the reasoning she gives at the table for why she calls the hand is really weird. The first explanation I hear her give is “I thought you were on Ace high,” which when asked “So why call with Jack high then?” she immediately changes the subject. Eventually she states that she was playing him as opposed to playing poker, which is a much more plausible thing to say. Given that her initial justification didn’t make any sense, I genuinely just think she won by making a bad decision. It’s a perfectly valid thing to do in poker, but I can understand the argument for why she could have been cheating.
  - splonk 4y ago
    People lie about their hands and reasoning at the table all the time. Amateurs are worse at it, but even pros get caught out saying dumb stuff now and then. Normally we just point and laugh at their obvious attempts to save face. At the end of the day I think I've just seen so many weird hands, even from good players, that one more just doesn't move the needle. One example: I've played hundreds of thousands if not millions of hands, and at least once I've accidentally folded half the pot at showdown because I misread the board. If for some reason that had happened in a tournament and my hole cards were known, it would be pretty easy to make the argument that I was cheating to pass chips to my opponent, instead of the actual reason of me being an idiot and not knowing how to read a hand with thousands of dollars in front of me.
ugh123 4y ago
They didn't really touch upon the fact that any decent electronic hobbyist of late could probably build a usable TENS unit with wifi and battery, and hidden into areas not easily checked. That would give plenty of distance to get to the commentator booth.
- Eisenstein 4y ago
  If it uses wifi it needs an access point to connect to or it does peer to peer, but either way it is broadcasting its presence to everything around it.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
Krisjohn 4y ago
All I got was a broken page and "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. In ullamcorper eget euismod orci. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis."
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mellosouls 4y ago
Previous discussion from the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33058889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33058889 tbf I don't know poker but it looked like an unpleasant, bullying response from a bad loser from the outside with very poor visuals considering the power dynamics.
msie 4y ago
Sour grapes and sexism.
bluelightning2k 4y ago
Here's some irony: while it's unlikely that cheating occurred; the huge amount of attention on the potential to cheat has likely inspired multiple future attempts to cheat in these hypothesized ways. So there's a significant chance that the theory was wrong, but will become true at another event.
jaclaz 4y ago
As a side-side note, isn't the insertion in the article of a photo of a bag: Figure 4: Faraday bag example somewhat queer?
psychphysic 4y ago
More likely than not she just got lucky and made a terrible decision which turned out perfectly. Just a bad beat. This audit seems pointless to be honest, but when there's an accusation of cheating not much else to do.

78 points by hbcondo714 4y ago

"The playing cards all have RFID antennas in them" feels like intentionally creating a bunch of security vulnerabilities that you simply don't need to have, in order to be high-tech and I guess simplify tracking what's in people's hands? I feel like there would be some sort of computer vision or manual solution for this that wouldn't be so potentially exploitable. I'm sure they considered this but it fascinates me that they're not doing something like 'when a card is dealt it runs past a scanner' to track who gets what card.

Supermancho 4y ago
> feels like intentionally creating a bunch of security vulnerabilities that you simply don't need to have, in order to be high-tech Making unique ids for tracking is not being "high tech". IDs provide traceability, which is protection against unauthorized modification/deletion, which is part of information security, etc.
- intrasight 4y ago
  Casinos live on their reputations of running an honest game. I guess "smart cards" can further that cause. But there's a risk that the opposite can occur.
- kevingadd 4y ago
  Couldn't you just have serial numbers on the cards and check them at the end of the hand? Why an antenna that can be read at a distance through obstructions?
  - wikfwikf 4y ago
    The RFID chips are there so that they can show exactly what everyone has during the hand. Televised poker is much more interesting when you know what cards everyone has.
- dandelany 4y ago
  All true, but when A) your entire business model relies on keeping those IDs hidden and B) you’re storing them on intentionally “promiscuous” media (RFID), it definitely increases the attack surface in a big way. I’m sure this is a calculated risk, they probably feel confident in their ability to detect unauthorized attempts to read the tags.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
kfrzcode 4y ago
It's likely there are a lot of counter-measures in place, including software-based protocols as well as frequency monitoring. https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/sp/800-98/final https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/sp/800-98/final
bayindirh 4y ago
All the cards have randomized UUID numbers as their IDs, so without matching them to their real value, they're just random numbers on the air. And when all you can do is sniff all cards at once, you can't do this pairing and read the game. Sounds, well, sound to me.
wikfwikf 4y ago
They used to require players to put their two cards on a transparent spot of the table so that a camera below could id them for the television feed. RFID is much more secure than this, and it also reduces the times when cards can't be read because the player doesn't play them right. Putting the cards past a reader or scanner while dealing would alter the flow of the game, and would also introduce other attack vectors.

bb88 4y ago

New spying technology often uses schemes that may not be fully understood until years later, or is so brilliant that it takes someone of equivalent brilliance to figure it out. https://www.spymuseum.org/exhibition-experiences/about-the-collection/collection-highlights/the-great-seal/ https://www.spymuseum.org/exhibition-experiences/about-the-c...

intrasight 4y ago
I envision butt plugs that use undetectable subspace communications
- bb88 4y ago
  If you can't detect it, it sure makes receiving it hard.
  - intrasight 4y ago
    Lots of things made no sense in Star Trek

monero-xmr 4y ago

I have never been in a hand with a $100k+ pot, but in higher-stakes tournament and cash play ($1000's per hand) you will still see the dumbest bluffs and calls. There are a lot of rich people playing poker, and with alcohol involved people care even less. It drives the grinders crazy but that's the flip side of trying to take money from tourists. It's quite possible the player accused of cheating (who apparently didn't even buy in with her own money) just made a stupid call.

jaxomlotus 4y ago

This is super interesting, but honestly it was clear from the video immediately that it was sour grapes. Part of being a pro poker player is having an intuitive sense when someone is bluffing. The guy bluffed and was called on it. That he then came up with an elaborate accusation and even cornered her for the money is pretty crappy behavior. Even if she just got lucky with a jack high, it's not unheard of for people to shove in poker with absolutely nothing. Now that this report came out, I'd say she has a clear avenue for a libel suit against him.

tptacek 4y ago
Why does she have a clear avenue for a libel suit?
intrasight 4y ago
Yup - she'll call his bluff - again.
tomr75 4y ago
it didn't make sense because even most bluffs beat her hand even if she thought he was bluffing, Q K A high beat her.. why return the money? why let the dealer steal 15k? 100% cheating
- Yeahsureok 4y ago
  > most bluffs beat her hand That has absolutely nothing to do with the concept of bluffing. The hand is irrelevant.
  - RyanCavanaugh 4y ago
    The hand is relevant on the calling side. Poker doesn't work on the principle of "I called your bluff and so I win!". If you call a bluff with a worse hand, you still lose the pot.
  - kikokikokiko 4y ago
    If you call an "all in", you will have to beat the hand of your opponent. So the fact that she had a TERRIBLE hand is definitely relevant here. No sane person, let alone a PRO player, would call an all in with such an horrible hand as she had, since even if he was bluffing, a simple 22 pair would beat her nothing hand. She was cheating 100%, the fact that she returned the money and didn't call the theft of another 15k, from the guy that probably was her accomplice, is just the icing on the cake, it's the "ok whatever you guys want, just leave me alone and let's not talk about it anymore".

RC_ITR 4y ago

Honestly, returning half the winnings on the spot is the thing that makes me believe no cheating took place. If you did actually have a strategy that you put months of effort into, you’d deny deny deny. If they’re asking, they’ll already check for cheating (like they did above) and you planned for that. You knew you had to cover your tracks and you know the train had left the station. I honestly think this was just bulls*er luck and no-one to cry cheat like a pro male poker player who just got a bad beat against an amateur female player.

nigamanth 4y ago
Returning half could also have been a way of subliminally saying "Shut up, right now, you got your money and don't mess up my strategy."
- googlryas 4y ago
  Except that returning money is so rare in professional poker that the act itself raises red flags.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- gouggoug 4y ago
  It could have been Lew recognizing she had been incredibly lucky and feeling bad about it.
- freyr 4y ago
  This sums up the problem with the pro-cheating side – the argument boils down to: “This person didn’t behave how I think I would behave in this situation, so she’s probably guilty.” But many people get extremely defensive and indignant when caught cheating or lying. Do returning half the money when cornered by Adelstein is evidence of nothing, either way.
- RC_ITR 4y ago
  Casino poker is zero sum. The house makes money on a take rate, but the alleged cheaters winnings came directly from other players. There’s no “be chill, I’m trying to get money from the house” aspect here.

darig 4y ago

stevebmark 4y ago

For anyone who hasn't been following this, it has been hilarious. It's the dumbest witch hunt of all time. The YouTube videos analyzing the "cheating" are dumb as shit. I didn't think this could get funnier, until I read: > HSPP has spent more than $100,000 and significant hours of its time to conduct a thorough investigation. Beautiful. Bravo.

breakpointalpha 4y ago
HSPP spending this kind of money and time to improve security is just a reputation protective measure. I'd expect any casino, card room, or bank to do this regularly before I'd trust six figures with them.

zxcvbn4038 4y ago

Very interesting read - but ultimately it is gambling, maybe she just felt lucky? Invariably that way these things seem to work is if someone wins it’s because of their mad gambling skills, and if they lose it’s because the casino cheated and/or other players poor strategy took “their” cards. Must be maddening for casino employees to have to put up with that day in and out. Imagine how much money was spent in this audit.

squokko 4y ago

Plenty of dumbfucks make stupid hero calls, and this could clearly be that because only a dumbfuck would agree to return money that she won in poker (cheating or not). This whole thing was overblown and I agree that it would not have happened to a male player making a stupid hero call with daddy's money.

CamperBob2 4y ago

"HCL is currently using the Clear-Com FreeSpeak II system, which runs on the 1.8Ghz and 2.4GHz frequency bands. The current system is vulnerable to eavesdropping with specialized equipment such as a Software Defined Radio (SDR) or specialized parts that are not easily found anymore or needs to be built from scratch. A potential attacker would have to have advanced knowledge of radio and engineering to craft or program a device capable of eavesdropping." Face, meet palm

aaron695 4y ago

ZiiS 4y ago

Adelstein had both an outside strait and flush draw; ie went all in knowing they needed the flop to win. It seems highly plausable that this could have been "read"; at which point Lew did know exactly which two cards they were playing. Is it 25 to Adelstein vs 19 to Law; not ideal but concevable you might call (against a stronger player who would eventually bleed you; a near evens chance if winning can sound quite attractive)

splonk 4y ago

Former pro and high stakes player here. I don't know the principals involved and as such have no particular strong opinion on whether any cheating occurred, but this particular situation of a ridiculous hero call based on a very specific read is common enough that it doesn't raise any red flags to me. Mostly I just want to comment to say that any analysis involving her hand equity against a random hand is flawed. For one, bluffs generally don't come out of a random range. Probably more importantly, someone deciding to have undue confidence in their read and acting on it is more common than some people here seem to think. It's pretty clearly a bad call under almost any reasonable analysis, but I wouldn't have been making a living if people made good decisions all the time. In this particular hand, if you convince yourself that the opponent has exactly 8c7c (not hard to do), it's also going to be pretty easy to convince yourself that a hand with the Jc in it is a good enough candidate to snap off that bluff. Meta-considerations about offering to return money or the likelihood of choosing to burn an exploit for a very marginal situation don't seem particularly convincing one way or another unless you know the principals well. However, if I had to choose one word to describe a high stakes poker player, "erratic" would be a pretty good one. Basically I think anyone uninvolved who's sure of what happened is probably being overconfident.

alexambarch 4y ago
While I don’t think she cheated, the reasoning she gives at the table for why she calls the hand is really weird. The first explanation I hear her give is “I thought you were on Ace high,” which when asked “So why call with Jack high then?” she immediately changes the subject. Eventually she states that she was playing him as opposed to playing poker, which is a much more plausible thing to say. Given that her initial justification didn’t make any sense, I genuinely just think she won by making a bad decision. It’s a perfectly valid thing to do in poker, but I can understand the argument for why she could have been cheating.
- splonk 4y ago
  People lie about their hands and reasoning at the table all the time. Amateurs are worse at it, but even pros get caught out saying dumb stuff now and then. Normally we just point and laugh at their obvious attempts to save face. At the end of the day I think I've just seen so many weird hands, even from good players, that one more just doesn't move the needle. One example: I've played hundreds of thousands if not millions of hands, and at least once I've accidentally folded half the pot at showdown because I misread the board. If for some reason that had happened in a tournament and my hole cards were known, it would be pretty easy to make the argument that I was cheating to pass chips to my opponent, instead of the actual reason of me being an idiot and not knowing how to read a hand with thousands of dollars in front of me.

ugh123 4y ago

They didn't really touch upon the fact that any decent electronic hobbyist of late could probably build a usable TENS unit with wifi and battery, and hidden into areas not easily checked. That would give plenty of distance to get to the commentator booth.

Eisenstein 4y ago
If it uses wifi it needs an access point to connect to or it does peer to peer, but either way it is broadcasting its presence to everything around it.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

Krisjohn 4y ago

All I got was a broken page and "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. In ullamcorper eget euismod orci. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis."

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

mellosouls 4y ago

Previous discussion from the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33058889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33058889 tbf I don't know poker but it looked like an unpleasant, bullying response from a bad loser from the outside with very poor visuals considering the power dynamics.

msie 4y ago

Sour grapes and sexism.

bluelightning2k 4y ago

Here's some irony: while it's unlikely that cheating occurred; the huge amount of attention on the potential to cheat has likely inspired multiple future attempts to cheat in these hypothesized ways. So there's a significant chance that the theory was wrong, but will become true at another event.

jaclaz 4y ago

As a side-side note, isn't the insertion in the article of a photo of a bag: Figure 4: Faraday bag example somewhat queer?

psychphysic 4y ago

More likely than not she just got lucky and made a terrible decision which turned out perfectly. Just a bad beat. This audit seems pointless to be honest, but when there's an accusation of cheating not much else to do.