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Honest question: How do you determine that something like this was an honest mistake? Once, when I was much younger, I had a side gig dealing poker at an under

Honest question: How do you determine that something like this was an honest mistake? Once, when I was much younger, I had a side gig dealing poker at an underground club in NYC. One morning at the end of 10 hours dealing, I accidentally exposed a burn card which turned out to be something one of the players was representing (bluffing), with about $10k on the table. It was an honest mistake - literally a fat finger mistake. I was tired and my dexterity slipped. The player jumped up, upset the chips and started shouting that I was cheating and in league with his opponent. The manager came over to calm things down. He was the young son of a mob boss, whose portfolio encompassed a variety of entertainment franchises. In order to calm the player, he pulled me off the table, told me he believed it was an honest mistake, and then threatened my life if it ever happen again. I quit then and there. Only after I had quit and refused to come back do I think he actually knew for certain that I wasn't pulling a scam. [edit] I'm really enjoying that people are enjoying this post, but I want to clarify what I was getting at: The original article assumes that SBF et. al. concluded by some internal mechanism that this was an "honest mistake", and that this is sufficient. That assumption belies the way criminal organizations actually work, which is to say, they wouldn't assume it was an honest mistake, but they'd happily say it was one and let off a patsy if they had orchestrated it. I kind of hope I can tilt the conversation toward this aspect of the OP's revelation?

keyle 3y ago
Great story! Thanks for sharing.
- noduerme 3y ago
  Heh. I love being able to pseudonymously tell HN my crazy stories from time to time. It's the only online chatter I indulge in. Sadly I have no colleagues who I can both talk shop with and also talk about my previous lives. "Build what makes you happy..." is a darn good philosophy, btw.
  - johndhi 3y ago
    I've played one of those spots by union square. Was fun to feel like a gangster for an evening but ultimately not a crowd I want to spend a lot of time around.
    - noduerme 3y ago
      Hah. That's posh. They used to have apartments all around NYU stuffed with slot machines they brought up from Atlantic City. Club members got a key to let them just go play slots. But I never played or dealt downtown. This gem was in a basement in Harlem up on Malcolm X, steel door and heavy security, 2 blackjack tables, a couple poker tables and some slots. I knew the manager because he came every morning for breakfast to the restaurant on the upper west side where I was a waiter, and we got to talking poker every morning. He asked me to come deal, so they'd pick me up in a decked out black Lincoln Navigator with tinted windows after I changed from my waiting shift, I'd deal for 8-10 hours and make 5x as much as my regular job, and then they'd drive me back. I don't even remember the cross street. Let's just say your money isn't going to anything good if you play in one of those places.
      - johndhi 3y ago
        Wild. The slots thing - seems so easy for someone to rat on them and then so easy for the cops to break it up. The Manhattan one was poker only. Steel door with a camera, get buzzed into a second door where you talk to somebody and they only buzz you up if they recognize you. The poker room had two nice tables and a little bar where you could buy drinks. TVs playing sports. Seemed to be Asian-run.
        noduerme 3y ago
        Similar setup, this was Italian.. but yeah they used to get rooms busted by cops all the time. They had trucks full of slots. No one even sat in those places, they just went to pick up the cash every day (I know this because I accompanied someone on their rounds to pick up cash from the slot machine apartments once, and was kinda shocked that some of them had no one inside at all. Just like, some studio apartment on 14th and another on Canal and another on Ave B. Wall to wall with slightly used slots hah) [edit] There was also one night I showed up to work only a few hours after the cops had raided the poker room, and they were just getting back up and running.
0xDEAFBEAD 3y ago
How does the hand end in a case like that?
- Horffupolde 3y ago
  On the house, especially if players are usual customers.
  - mherdeg 3y ago
    So the house pays $10,000 to everyone who hasn't folded yet?
    - School-Cotton 3y ago
      No, the person you’re replying to is just wrong. In a real casino the card would be burned and play would continue.
  - MaxfordAndSons 3y ago
    Unlikely; if it were lower stakes, maybe, but even high end poker houses are not such high margin enterprises that they can afford to comp $10k to an angry customer because of dealer error. Maybe some smaller comp, but not the whole pot.
- tapotatonumber9 3y ago
  They take you out back and cut it off with a circular saw. At least then there’s no more “fat fingering” to worry about.
  - fouc 3y ago
    Answering the wrong question lol
  - lacrimacida 3y ago
    Or break your kneecaps. I remember it from a movie whose name I don’t recall
cperciva 3y ago
Not a poker player, so maybe I'm missing something obvious, but: How did he think you were cheating? You had no way of knowing what that card was, right? And if you did somehow know what it was, surely you could have pre-arranged more subtle ways to tip off a player you were conspiring with?
- School-Cotton 3y ago
  You must not know many gamblers. They’ll invent any insane story to explain why they lost, no matter how implausible.
  - lacrimacida 3y ago
    I guess. What I don’t know is whether you can call a misdeal and cancel the round. But if you’re the one who’s not advantaged by the situation will probably be upset if you had a good hand. I suspected there are rules for such a scenario since Im sure it was not the first or last time occuring…
    - School-Cotton 3y ago
      In a casino the hand would not be canceled for that. The card would just be burned.
      - noduerme 3y ago
        In this game, the hand was rewound and nullified. I can't speak for what a legitimate casino would do.
- lacrimacida 3y ago
  You can deduce odds by seeing a burn card. It could help more or less in certain situations
- noduerme 3y ago
  I guess they thought I produced the bluffing player's card to prevent the other player from folding. But you're right that a dealer who was trying to do that could've done so in any number of subtle ways. I couldn't really figure out why they were accusing me at the time, or what I would've gained from it, but it all happened very fast. There are dealers who are true shuffle mechanics and either know for sure or have a very good idea of who has what. I'm not that skilled. I re-watched the movie "Casino" recently, and there's a scene where the Joe Pesci character cans a floor man for not stopping a slot machine run after the first or second time someone hits a jackpot in a night. Paraphrasing the movie: "Either he was in on or he's a fucking moron, either way we can't have him here". To bring it back to the original topic, I think in the gambling world, the default assumption is that there's a scam and the employee is guilty until proven innocent. I wonder why that wouldn't apply to a shady firm like Alameda, too, unless management was "in on it". Come to think of it, I guess that's the point of my story, which I didn't realize when I wrote it.
charlieyu1 3y ago
I played poker at casino and these kinds of mistakes happen all the time.
- pclmulqdq 3y ago
  Yeah, play just continues usually. High stakes dealers are usually more experienced and less likely to make these kinds of mistakes, but at 1/2 or 2/5 games (max buy-in around $500 at these stakes, so pots tend to stay under $1k), this sort of error isn't uncommon in my experience.
sneak 3y ago
> Honest question: How do you determine that something like this was an honest mistake? Good question. It's not like the errant trader couldn't have had a friend of a friend put in a bunch of $10k limit buys the day before, knowing the price would recover nearly instantly...
- noduerme 3y ago
  Right, this was my original question and I'm wondering how SBF would've gotten to the bottom of it. What I'm speculating is that a gangster would've either punished the employee or been in on it.
FireBeyond 3y ago
I once watched a new (I assume) dealer make two large mistakes at a blackjack table, in Vegas, of all places. One, I had put down $500 in twenties, and he was giving me chips, except he was going to give me $1,250 in chips, like he thought they were fifties. Pit Boss looked at him, looked at the chips, "What are you doing??", let him fix the error. A couple of hands in, dealer gets an Ace, so he checks the hole card. Satisfied, he continues, and we all bet and play out the hand, until he goes to turn over the hold card... and has Blackjack with a King. Pit Boss again, situation explained, voids the hand and returns everyone's stake to them. What blew my mind was that after two mistakes like this in a matter of minutes, the dealer wasn't pulled off the table.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- testfoobar 3y ago
  Would you mind explaining the second story? I don't play casino blackjack. Isn't the goal of the house to get blackjack? So if the dealer had Ace face up and King down, isn't he assured to win the hand and collect all the stakes?
  - Cruncharoo 3y ago
    If he has ace face up and checks and sees a king he is supposed to flip it over, show his blackjack, and take everyone's money. He instead let them play the hand out as if he didn't have the king.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - cortesoft 3y ago
      Minor point of clarity... it doesn't have to be a king... in blackjack, a 10, jack, king, and queen all have the same point value (10), so any one of them paired with an ace makes a blackjack.
  - 3y ago
jmyeet 3y ago
I'm skeptical about the "honest mistake" story as it's self-serving because an "honest mistake" isn't a crime, or at least it isn't as serious a crime. I can easily believe that development was lax without proper monitoring, controls and testing. Typically for any kind of trading system there'll be multiple layers to help catch these kinds of errors or deliberate fraud. This could include some or all of: 1. A separate system that monitors and clears orders looking for pricing mistakes; 2. A risk management system that looks at your total position and can block orders if they would make your position too long or short; 3. Another system might monitor actual assets vs custodial assets to see if you ever "leak" assets. To trade any US securities you'd have to go through SEC compliance to make sure you have sufficient systems and monitoring in place, particularly if your system is facing unsophisticated investors. Crypto has largely avoided this kind of scrutiny and rigor. Part of all this is separate systems help prevent both accidents and fraud. A pricing check in a trading system could be broken by a code change or bypassed by a malicious change. Subverting an external system you may not have access to gets more difficult.
- noduerme 3y ago
  Yeah, and - someone correct me - aren't at least some of the charges against SBF related to intentional backdoors in the code?
defrost 3y ago
> Only after I had quit and refused to come back do I think he actually knew for certain that I wasn't pulling a scam. In interactions of bluff, bluff, and double bluff suspicion never dies. Quitting indignantly on principal is either a sure sign of innocence or a true con artist cutting and putting distance from a 'scam', staying can be just as ambiguous. I'm not doubting your innocence here, just doubting that there was any action you could take that would convince a suspicious mind that you were clean. I dare say had you stayed then eventually something else would have happened around you down the track (that's just life). Parting ways and moving on saved you from that at least.
- noduerme 3y ago
  The value of a bluff - and the value of a hand - is all about what's in the pot. I made clear that my integrity and my life were worth a lot more than whatever fraction of $10k a crooked dealer would've gotten. There are plenty of guys who might try to do something like that for $5k, but I'm not one of them. I'm sure the doubt remained. What you wrote kind of reinforces my point that it's very hard to be sure that an expensive mistake was an honest mistake. Personally, though, I didn't quit to try to double-bluff. I'm a self-preservationist. I'm in the business of keeping myself alive, and I draw the line at working for someone who threatens me. I'm aware that quitting could've seemed shady, but at that point it was the least of my worries. And I doubt it's the normal course of behavior, either, if someone were caught skimming. Someone who was guilty of malfeasance, who was offered to keep the job, would have almost certainly chosen to stay and lay low while finding some new way to scam them, because that person needs either the money or the frisson. I enjoyed 'em both but I didn't need either enough to risk my life on another accident. Someone who lacks any trust will always find reasons to assume the worst, as you say. There's a bit of a corollary, though, in my experience, which is: People who choose to continue working around those people also mostly can't be trusted. And I feel like the trust-less parties are well aware of that.
  - nostrademons 3y ago
    It's also possible that the manager just didn't care whether you were guilty or not. By quitting and not coming back, you removed yourself from the equation, and so it's immaterial whether you were trustworthy or not. There could be nothing more at play here than rational self-interest. You quit to preserve your life; this is rationally the best move for your risk-adjusted interests. The house gets to say (possibly very visibly - did you quit on the spot?) that the dealer no longer works here, which mollifies the customer, because the potentially-corrupt dealer is no longer in a position where they can influence outcomes. So it's the best outcome for the house. And then the hand has already been played, so the customer now has a sunk cost on their bluff, but you're gone, so at least they know that if you are corrupt, you won't be dealing any more hands to them. So it's the best outcome for the customer. You don't need to trust people who aren't in a position to hurt you anyway. That's why walking away is sometimes so powerful: you just change a bad situation by removing yourself from the equation, and start over somewhere better.
MaxfordAndSons 3y ago
Funny that the top comment here is about poker - there's a rumor in the poker world that SBF was a whale in some of the biggest private app games, and owed the game runners north of $10m when he went down, which the winners in that game (apparently including legend of the game Dan "Jungleman" Cates) are now never going to see.
- SilasX 3y ago
  Don’t they generally have ties to the underworld/extralegal means of reprisals against people who owe them money? So wouldn’t they have acted by now if this were true (even if not “successful”)?
  - philipov 3y ago
    I imagine right now while the spotlight is on him might not be a great time to carry out any kind of revenge. There will be time for that later.
  - MaxfordAndSons 3y ago
    I mean, there are gangsters that play poker, and there are private games run by gangsters (I imagine), but the idea that the poker world is highly entangled with the underworld is pretty outmoded at this point. High level pros like Jungleman aren't going to risk their rep/access to other good games by breaking someones legs, even over a few million. He and his backers have the risk of losers defaulting baked into their EV calculus already when he plays those games.
- noduerme 3y ago
  That's an interesting coincidence... it wouldn't surprise me in the least. Never heard he had a bad losing poker habit, though. Sounds juicy if it comes out.
fsckboy 3y ago
> let off a patsy if they had orchestrated it the patsy in that scenario would have been the guy screaming the game was rigged or you, if they had popped you in front of the gambler to prove they took his allegations seriously the patsy is not "in on" what's happening. They might let you off if they thought it was intentional but that somebody more important had put you up to it wiktionary patsy: (informal, derogatory) A person who is taken advantage of, especially by being cheated or blamed for something.

keyle 3y ago

Great story! Thanks for sharing.

noduerme 3y ago
Heh. I love being able to pseudonymously tell HN my crazy stories from time to time. It's the only online chatter I indulge in. Sadly I have no colleagues who I can both talk shop with and also talk about my previous lives. "Build what makes you happy..." is a darn good philosophy, btw.
- johndhi 3y ago
  I've played one of those spots by union square. Was fun to feel like a gangster for an evening but ultimately not a crowd I want to spend a lot of time around.
  - noduerme 3y ago
    Hah. That's posh. They used to have apartments all around NYU stuffed with slot machines they brought up from Atlantic City. Club members got a key to let them just go play slots. But I never played or dealt downtown. This gem was in a basement in Harlem up on Malcolm X, steel door and heavy security, 2 blackjack tables, a couple poker tables and some slots. I knew the manager because he came every morning for breakfast to the restaurant on the upper west side where I was a waiter, and we got to talking poker every morning. He asked me to come deal, so they'd pick me up in a decked out black Lincoln Navigator with tinted windows after I changed from my waiting shift, I'd deal for 8-10 hours and make 5x as much as my regular job, and then they'd drive me back. I don't even remember the cross street. Let's just say your money isn't going to anything good if you play in one of those places.
    - johndhi 3y ago
      Wild. The slots thing - seems so easy for someone to rat on them and then so easy for the cops to break it up. The Manhattan one was poker only. Steel door with a camera, get buzzed into a second door where you talk to somebody and they only buzz you up if they recognize you. The poker room had two nice tables and a little bar where you could buy drinks. TVs playing sports. Seemed to be Asian-run.
      - noduerme 3y ago
        Similar setup, this was Italian.. but yeah they used to get rooms busted by cops all the time. They had trucks full of slots. No one even sat in those places, they just went to pick up the cash every day (I know this because I accompanied someone on their rounds to pick up cash from the slot machine apartments once, and was kinda shocked that some of them had no one inside at all. Just like, some studio apartment on 14th and another on Canal and another on Ave B. Wall to wall with slightly used slots hah) [edit] There was also one night I showed up to work only a few hours after the cops had raided the poker room, and they were just getting back up and running.

0xDEAFBEAD 3y ago

How does the hand end in a case like that?

Horffupolde 3y ago
On the house, especially if players are usual customers.
- mherdeg 3y ago
  So the house pays $10,000 to everyone who hasn't folded yet?
  - School-Cotton 3y ago
    No, the person you’re replying to is just wrong. In a real casino the card would be burned and play would continue.
- MaxfordAndSons 3y ago
  Unlikely; if it were lower stakes, maybe, but even high end poker houses are not such high margin enterprises that they can afford to comp $10k to an angry customer because of dealer error. Maybe some smaller comp, but not the whole pot.
tapotatonumber9 3y ago
They take you out back and cut it off with a circular saw. At least then there’s no more “fat fingering” to worry about.
- fouc 3y ago
  Answering the wrong question lol
- lacrimacida 3y ago
  Or break your kneecaps. I remember it from a movie whose name I don’t recall

cperciva 3y ago

Not a poker player, so maybe I'm missing something obvious, but: How did he think you were cheating? You had no way of knowing what that card was, right? And if you did somehow know what it was, surely you could have pre-arranged more subtle ways to tip off a player you were conspiring with?

School-Cotton 3y ago
You must not know many gamblers. They’ll invent any insane story to explain why they lost, no matter how implausible.
- lacrimacida 3y ago
  I guess. What I don’t know is whether you can call a misdeal and cancel the round. But if you’re the one who’s not advantaged by the situation will probably be upset if you had a good hand. I suspected there are rules for such a scenario since Im sure it was not the first or last time occuring…
  - School-Cotton 3y ago
    In a casino the hand would not be canceled for that. The card would just be burned.
    - noduerme 3y ago
      In this game, the hand was rewound and nullified. I can't speak for what a legitimate casino would do.
lacrimacida 3y ago
You can deduce odds by seeing a burn card. It could help more or less in certain situations
noduerme 3y ago
I guess they thought I produced the bluffing player's card to prevent the other player from folding. But you're right that a dealer who was trying to do that could've done so in any number of subtle ways. I couldn't really figure out why they were accusing me at the time, or what I would've gained from it, but it all happened very fast. There are dealers who are true shuffle mechanics and either know for sure or have a very good idea of who has what. I'm not that skilled. I re-watched the movie "Casino" recently, and there's a scene where the Joe Pesci character cans a floor man for not stopping a slot machine run after the first or second time someone hits a jackpot in a night. Paraphrasing the movie: "Either he was in on or he's a fucking moron, either way we can't have him here". To bring it back to the original topic, I think in the gambling world, the default assumption is that there's a scam and the employee is guilty until proven innocent. I wonder why that wouldn't apply to a shady firm like Alameda, too, unless management was "in on it". Come to think of it, I guess that's the point of my story, which I didn't realize when I wrote it.

charlieyu1 3y ago

I played poker at casino and these kinds of mistakes happen all the time.

pclmulqdq 3y ago
Yeah, play just continues usually. High stakes dealers are usually more experienced and less likely to make these kinds of mistakes, but at 1/2 or 2/5 games (max buy-in around $500 at these stakes, so pots tend to stay under $1k), this sort of error isn't uncommon in my experience.

sneak 3y ago

> Honest question: How do you determine that something like this was an honest mistake? Good question. It's not like the errant trader couldn't have had a friend of a friend put in a bunch of $10k limit buys the day before, knowing the price would recover nearly instantly...

noduerme 3y ago
Right, this was my original question and I'm wondering how SBF would've gotten to the bottom of it. What I'm speculating is that a gangster would've either punished the employee or been in on it.

FireBeyond 3y ago

I once watched a new (I assume) dealer make two large mistakes at a blackjack table, in Vegas, of all places. One, I had put down $500 in twenties, and he was giving me chips, except he was going to give me $1,250 in chips, like he thought they were fifties. Pit Boss looked at him, looked at the chips, "What are you doing??", let him fix the error. A couple of hands in, dealer gets an Ace, so he checks the hole card. Satisfied, he continues, and we all bet and play out the hand, until he goes to turn over the hold card... and has Blackjack with a King. Pit Boss again, situation explained, voids the hand and returns everyone's stake to them. What blew my mind was that after two mistakes like this in a matter of minutes, the dealer wasn't pulled off the table.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
testfoobar 3y ago
Would you mind explaining the second story? I don't play casino blackjack. Isn't the goal of the house to get blackjack? So if the dealer had Ace face up and King down, isn't he assured to win the hand and collect all the stakes?
- Cruncharoo 3y ago
  If he has ace face up and checks and sees a king he is supposed to flip it over, show his blackjack, and take everyone's money. He instead let them play the hand out as if he didn't have the king.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - cortesoft 3y ago
    Minor point of clarity... it doesn't have to be a king... in blackjack, a 10, jack, king, and queen all have the same point value (10), so any one of them paired with an ace makes a blackjack.
- 3y ago

jmyeet 3y ago

I'm skeptical about the "honest mistake" story as it's self-serving because an "honest mistake" isn't a crime, or at least it isn't as serious a crime. I can easily believe that development was lax without proper monitoring, controls and testing. Typically for any kind of trading system there'll be multiple layers to help catch these kinds of errors or deliberate fraud. This could include some or all of: 1. A separate system that monitors and clears orders looking for pricing mistakes; 2. A risk management system that looks at your total position and can block orders if they would make your position too long or short; 3. Another system might monitor actual assets vs custodial assets to see if you ever "leak" assets. To trade any US securities you'd have to go through SEC compliance to make sure you have sufficient systems and monitoring in place, particularly if your system is facing unsophisticated investors. Crypto has largely avoided this kind of scrutiny and rigor. Part of all this is separate systems help prevent both accidents and fraud. A pricing check in a trading system could be broken by a code change or bypassed by a malicious change. Subverting an external system you may not have access to gets more difficult.

noduerme 3y ago
Yeah, and - someone correct me - aren't at least some of the charges against SBF related to intentional backdoors in the code?

defrost 3y ago

> Only after I had quit and refused to come back do I think he actually knew for certain that I wasn't pulling a scam. In interactions of bluff, bluff, and double bluff suspicion never dies. Quitting indignantly on principal is either a sure sign of innocence or a true con artist cutting and putting distance from a 'scam', staying can be just as ambiguous. I'm not doubting your innocence here, just doubting that there was any action you could take that would convince a suspicious mind that you were clean. I dare say had you stayed then eventually something else would have happened around you down the track (that's just life). Parting ways and moving on saved you from that at least.

noduerme 3y ago
The value of a bluff - and the value of a hand - is all about what's in the pot. I made clear that my integrity and my life were worth a lot more than whatever fraction of $10k a crooked dealer would've gotten. There are plenty of guys who might try to do something like that for $5k, but I'm not one of them. I'm sure the doubt remained. What you wrote kind of reinforces my point that it's very hard to be sure that an expensive mistake was an honest mistake. Personally, though, I didn't quit to try to double-bluff. I'm a self-preservationist. I'm in the business of keeping myself alive, and I draw the line at working for someone who threatens me. I'm aware that quitting could've seemed shady, but at that point it was the least of my worries. And I doubt it's the normal course of behavior, either, if someone were caught skimming. Someone who was guilty of malfeasance, who was offered to keep the job, would have almost certainly chosen to stay and lay low while finding some new way to scam them, because that person needs either the money or the frisson. I enjoyed 'em both but I didn't need either enough to risk my life on another accident. Someone who lacks any trust will always find reasons to assume the worst, as you say. There's a bit of a corollary, though, in my experience, which is: People who choose to continue working around those people also mostly can't be trusted. And I feel like the trust-less parties are well aware of that.
- nostrademons 3y ago
  It's also possible that the manager just didn't care whether you were guilty or not. By quitting and not coming back, you removed yourself from the equation, and so it's immaterial whether you were trustworthy or not. There could be nothing more at play here than rational self-interest. You quit to preserve your life; this is rationally the best move for your risk-adjusted interests. The house gets to say (possibly very visibly - did you quit on the spot?) that the dealer no longer works here, which mollifies the customer, because the potentially-corrupt dealer is no longer in a position where they can influence outcomes. So it's the best outcome for the house. And then the hand has already been played, so the customer now has a sunk cost on their bluff, but you're gone, so at least they know that if you are corrupt, you won't be dealing any more hands to them. So it's the best outcome for the customer. You don't need to trust people who aren't in a position to hurt you anyway. That's why walking away is sometimes so powerful: you just change a bad situation by removing yourself from the equation, and start over somewhere better.

MaxfordAndSons 3y ago

Funny that the top comment here is about poker - there's a rumor in the poker world that SBF was a whale in some of the biggest private app games, and owed the game runners north of $10m when he went down, which the winners in that game (apparently including legend of the game Dan "Jungleman" Cates) are now never going to see.

SilasX 3y ago
Don’t they generally have ties to the underworld/extralegal means of reprisals against people who owe them money? So wouldn’t they have acted by now if this were true (even if not “successful”)?
- philipov 3y ago
  I imagine right now while the spotlight is on him might not be a great time to carry out any kind of revenge. There will be time for that later.
- MaxfordAndSons 3y ago
  I mean, there are gangsters that play poker, and there are private games run by gangsters (I imagine), but the idea that the poker world is highly entangled with the underworld is pretty outmoded at this point. High level pros like Jungleman aren't going to risk their rep/access to other good games by breaking someones legs, even over a few million. He and his backers have the risk of losers defaulting baked into their EV calculus already when he plays those games.
noduerme 3y ago
That's an interesting coincidence... it wouldn't surprise me in the least. Never heard he had a bad losing poker habit, though. Sounds juicy if it comes out.

fsckboy 3y ago

> let off a patsy if they had orchestrated it the patsy in that scenario would have been the guy screaming the game was rigged or you, if they had popped you in front of the gambler to prove they took his allegations seriously the patsy is not "in on" what's happening. They might let you off if they thought it was intentional but that somebody more important had put you up to it wiktionary patsy: (informal, derogatory) A person who is taken advantage of, especially by being cheated or blamed for something.