7 ms·

This scheme doesn’t really make sense. Once you’ve convinced a wealthy person to play at your underground poker table, you’ve already won - just play better pok

This scheme doesn’t really make sense. Once you’ve convinced a wealthy person to play at your underground poker table, you’ve already won - just play better poker than them, ultra wealthy fish don’t have time to learn to play perfect poker and you do. Trying to extract slightly more money per hand via x ray tables etc kills the golden goose and doesn’t even necessarily increase total winnings, since it makes you win faster but doesn’t increase the amount the fish are willing to lose to have a good time.

prodigycorp 1y ago
I think it's revealing of how diminished the la costa nostra is. This is such trivial work and, yet, this was a multi-family operation.
- mschuster91 1y ago
  Diminished? More like, matured into white collar crime. There's no need to murder people on the street any more, that kind of dirty work is left to some random Southern American cartels, and the white collar crime brings in more than enough profit while also being way less risky should the feds catch up on it.
  - cool_man_bob 1y ago
    > More like, matured into white collar crime. Honestly this is the first “advanced” mafia scheme I’ve heard of in a while. Last time I heard about a mafia crime it was a very sloppy hit that sounded more like what you hear from teenagers in Chicago shooting at each other. Though tbf it could easily have always been like that and I’m just blinded my media bias about a group of people I’ve never known form a time I’ve never known.
    - sosojxbx 1y ago
      [flagged]
  - prodigycorp 1y ago
    I don't know if I buy that. If we were to put this in white collar terms, we'd all be questioning Tim Cook if he decided that selling ice cream was a great resource allocation decision.
    - jimbokun 1y ago
      What business would you take your organized crime organization into for maximal returns? Just stick everything in the S&P 500?
      - skeeter2020 1y ago
        I'd get dirt on the sitting president, then leverage him to make decisions with obvious market implication. Examples: give me a day's notice that the federal government is going to invest in a dinky mining company, or tariffs are coming on foreign electronics... except next week <these companies> are exempt. You gotta believe people on the inside are making fortunes as the markets continue to make big swings up & down.
        mschuster91 1y ago
        > You gotta believe people on the inside are making fortunes as the markets continue to make big swings up & down. Yeah but that's friends of the emperor, not organized crime (although granted, the distinction between these two groups is getting smaller by the day). Organized crime? That money is literally everywhere. Restaurants, real estate, cars, the stock markets... the only place you'll rarely spot it is, ironically, gambling, way too many chances of getting caught on a paper trail. A lot of it is also invested in art pieces stored in one tax haven/freeport or another, really easy to launder money or evade taxes.
  - actionfromafar 1y ago
    Probably going into crypto, the federal government even encourage it now.
- rhcom2 1y ago
  Highlighted perfectly in The Sopranos when they try to extort a Starbucks, it's a different world. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/rtnSe0eKmdI https://www.youtube.com/shorts/rtnSe0eKmdI
arresin 1y ago
It seems like so much work for relatively so little payoff. There’s a lesson here for non criminals also.
- Forgeties79 1y ago
  > In what sounds like an Ocean's Eleven film plot, prosecutors say these "unwitting" victims were cheated out of at least $7m (£5.25m) in poker games - with one person losing at least $1.8m. Definitely a lot of work but that seems like a half decent payday to me.
  - kasey_junk 1y ago
    An nba coach was one of 30 people indicted in the scheme. He made about 5m a year at his straight job.
    - evan_ 1y ago
      $5M is a lot unless you have a crippling gambling addiction.
      - kasey_junk 1y ago
        It’s not so much the absolute amount as the comparative one. Just extorting Chauncey Billips seems like a better ROI than the whole caper if you’ve got some hold on him.
        Forgeties79 1y ago
        Extortion risks exposing you in a way that quietly taking their money through cheating at cards does not. It’s also strikes me as a far more serious crime but I could be wrong.
        kasey_junk 1y ago
        I was replying to the premise that his involvement was under duress for gambling debts. If so it’s extortionate either way.
JohnMakin 1y ago
“just play better poker” like that’s an easy thing to do in a game of chance and incomplete information, with variance having years or decades long tails. not to mention it’s an unsolved game, so “better” poker doesn’t even really have a set definition and depends on tons of variables. and they literally knew what hole cards were coming - that’s vastly more of an edge than playing “better poker” than someone. Besides the fact they were often targeting pros - this was reported on and known by LA area pros for at least two years now. why the FBI decided to act now is weird to me. I can’t stress enough that in the pro scene this was common knowledge. years old podcast clips are coming up talking about it. source: https://sports.yahoo.com/nba/breaking-news/article/professional-gambler-matthew-berkey-called-out-rigged-chauncey-billups-poker-game-2-years-before-coachs-arrest-184422377.html https://sports.yahoo.com/nba/breaking-news/article/professio...
- binarymax 1y ago
  You can spend the time to learn the odds, and play the odds. Most people don't have even that basic skill.
  - robocat 1y ago
    You are ignoring why people play the game: reading people and avoiding being read (lies, misdirection). I would predict your job is technical rather than people oriented. There's plenty of other card games where learning the odds matters, but poker has a bit more depth.
- ecshafer 1y ago
  The FBI is going to take time building up the case, flipping people, getting recordings, and trying to get as many people involved to not just stop the games but hopefully take down the entire crime families involved. LA Poker pros will start talking as soon as they suspect something fishy.
  - duped 1y ago
    The FBI is also struggling for legitimacy at this point in history
dfxm12 1y ago
You don't want to extract more money per hand, you want to build up the fish (check the text message screenshots in the article) and then strike at the right point. The x rays remove the luck from those big hands.
- SaltyBackendGuy 1y ago
  Exactly. You want zero risk asymmetric payouts.
raincole 1y ago
> don't have time to learn to play perfect poker Probably don't have time to play so many hands with you that the better player is statistically guaranteed to win, either.
CGMthrowaway 1y ago
I read a theory that the poker winnings were not the scam. The scam was that the criminal element would HELP the NBA players cheat at poker, and then blackmail them with that info to change the outcomes of NBA games, which they were betting on, from which they could derive greater scale of winnings.
- prodigycorp 1y ago
  imo that doesn't make sense. All the online betting platforms will cut off the sharps. If you are net profitable and you make too much money from them, you will get banned.
  - ClarityJones 1y ago
    Yeah, that would limit the scale if they were betting against the platforms. However, if you assume they were feeding the information to the platforms...
    - SoftTalker 1y ago
      ... or if you assume that they control the platforms...
  - im3w1l 1y ago
    An organization could place the bets through different people each time.
  - dec0dedab0de 1y ago
    Well first of all, organized crime does not need an online platform to profit off of fixing professional sports games. There are still plenty of bookies running around offering better odds than draftkings. Though, if they really wanted to, they could make smaller bets under hundreds of accounts. There is also the very strong possibility that they are colluding with the online betting platforms in some way. Coupled with the fact that any difference-maker athlete is getting a huge salary, and blackmail/extortion becomes your best option to getting one on your side.
IT4MD 1y ago
Most criminals have a specific type of cleverness, but not intelligence. If they were smart people, they wouldn't do the crimes in the first place. I dealt with a low-tech breach at one of the hospitals I worked for. The criminal worked in HIM, and used paper and pencil to note specific info about specific types of patients. Since they worked in HIM, it was expected for them to view many medical records in a day and no app detects paper/pencil, so quite clever so far. Ultimately, they used this info to file false tax returns to steal the refunds. The problem? They filed 881 false tax returns annnnnnd used the same address for all of them. DOH. They were busted/arrested and off to jail they went. Clever, right until the end, then abysmally stupid.
- dec0dedab0de 1y ago
  HIM = Health Information Management for anyone else wondering. If they were smart people, they wouldn't do the crimes in the first place. There are tons of smart people committing crimes. The levels of Intelligence, success, luck, greed, and morals can co-exist in every possible combination within one human.
  - IT4MD 1y ago
    [dead]
- wildzzz 1y ago
  The intelligent ones don't get caught, or at least find the right loopholes to make their obvious crime technically legal.
Blackthorn 1y ago
You don't need to play better poker. You can just have multiple people on the same team at the same table and communicating, vastly increasing your odds of your team having the best hand.
empath75 1y ago
> Once you’ve convinced a wealthy person to play at your underground poker table, you’ve already won - just play better poker than them, ultra wealthy fish don’t have time to learn to play perfect poker and you do. You would be surprised at how good some very wealthy people are at poker. There is a lot of variance in the game and they don't want that. In fact what they want is _exactly_ wealthy people who are quite good at poker because they make big bets and you can reliably bust them out on _one hand_ if you set it up properly after playing a fair game all night. And the great thing about that is that they feel like the night overall was fair and fun, because it was. You just cheat them on one or two hands at the most. People who are bad at poker can also be quite difficult to reliably take money from fairly because they play randomly and sometimes win huge pots out of complete luck. For one thing, they are near impossible to bluff out of hands, so you end up having to fold a lot more than normal because you can only play with strong hands against them. If you are interested in making a lot of money, you certainly want those strong hands more often than normal.
btilly 1y ago
The trick isn't winning when the celebrity is at the table, it is in getting the celebrity to the table, then keepong the victim there. It's not about winning mote on each hand. It's about keeping the target happy as money drains away. And that was their aim. By controlling the whole game, they were able to psychologically manipulate the situation. The target was at tbe table with someone they respected. Saw others win and lose large amounts of money. Sometimes won themselves.
- Sammi 1y ago
  Ooooh you use all these tools in order to _control_ the game, so that is is as fun as possible. So the victim still loses, as they would without the tools, but now they're happy as it happens.
  - wildzzz 1y ago
    Poker requires skill but there's still a major amount of chance involved. Removing the chance and conspiring against a single player turns the game into a show. You can set up cheap wins and expensive losses. It doesn't really matter how well the other players win or lose because they are all on the same team, you're the only one actually losing any money. I remember as a kid, I'd play battleship with my siblings. I was really good at it, they were not. They hated when it was obvious that I let them win but also hated when I beat them badly so I found a way to make the game go longer. Often we'd play on a glass table and I'd "drop" a piece so I could peek under the table and see where their pieces were. I could get a hit and then miss many follow up shots to slowly destroy their ship and give them more time to find and destroy mine. They'd gloat over their hard-fought win but I'd just smile and beat them for real next round. I could have done this without peeking but I wanted to make sure I didn't accidentally play too well.
- morkalork 1y ago
  Exactly, to a pro poker player a celebrity or athlete looks like an easy target. Someone with a lot of money, likes to play for fun, and doesn't have the same skills as a pro. They are at the table to bait the pros. But now the problem is you need those same players to win in order to extract any money from the game, hence the high-tech cheating.
ZiiS 1y ago
No need to learn; just hire players who are better than the fish and split the profits??? Once it is your shuffler, I could cobble together a Raspberry Pi to light a slightly different wavelength LED when it dealt them two pictures and would need to concentrate to lose enough to get all their money.
sandworm101 1y ago
Organized crime groups are rarely interested in "the long game". They work on the assumption that the party will end sooner than anticipated. Each game must be total victory.
BurningFrog 1y ago
The self made ultra rich are quite smart on average. I doubt the same is true of these Cosa Nostra and NBA guys.
PaulHoule 1y ago
My understanding is that collusion is rampant in poker. If you get introduced to a 'friendly' game of 5 players there's a good chance that these guys are signalling to each other and basically folding to whoever's got the best hand. You can't win against that. Even if you have 2 new players showing up at a table existing players could worry about collusion. If you don't have the fancy trappings those guys did it is almost impossible to catch people colluding in poker.
tqi 1y ago
They were also targeting pros, not merely wealthy players: https://x.com/OnlyFriends_Pod/status/1981379130190156129?s=46 https://x.com/OnlyFriends_Pod/status/1981379130190156129?s=4...
CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
> just play better poker than them You really don't understand the mind of fraudsters and criminals. The reason they do what they do is because they don't want to "just be better at X than Y" and spend the effort for that, they want to take the shortcut and they think they've found the best shortcut considering their situation. Once you start to look at what people are doing with that perspective, things will start to make more sense.
terminalshort 1y ago
But you are already breaking the law running an underground poker game.
Aurornis 1y ago
> just play better poker than them That's a big "just". They were using sports celebrities as the draw to the table, not expert poker players. Cheating at poker also looks less threatening than playing against an expert, counterintuitively. Someone who cheats can pull out some big wins on some bets that look statistically bad. The target can see this and think the other party is playing poorly (betting on non-obvious hands) but simply getting lucky. Contrast this with a shrewd expert poker player who will be easier to spot. They want the target to think the celebrity sports figure is just getting lucky on bad bets, not that they're an expert poker shark who's going to take all of their money. EDIT: Here's a 2 year old YouTube video from before all of this confirming this https://youtu.be/G-TKR5ca5jI?t=1790 https://youtu.be/G-TKR5ca5jI?t=1790 (Skip to 29:50) Having the cheating poker players look bad is a key part of the scam. It tricks the other players into coming back and betting big.
alexpotato 1y ago
> Once you’ve convinced a wealthy person to play at your underground poker table, you’ve already won - just play better poker than them, This is why in the book Molly's Game [0], the author mentions explicitly that she didn't want professionals in her game. This b/c her game was seen as a game between "regular/amateur" players who just happened to be famous and/or have a lot of money. This was also DESPITE poker professionals both asking her to play AND offering to give her a stake of their winnings. Granted, certain players (e.g. Tobey Maguire) were MUCH better than the other players but it seems that didn't matter as long as poker wasn't their primary source of income. 0 - https://amzn.to/4o05BFi https://amzn.to/4o05BFi
nikcub 1y ago
Wealthy people aren't dumb - they don't join games where the odds are tilted against them. In these high-stake private games they can usually demand and set the rules like shallow stacks (100BB), enforced straddles, raising stakes after a loss, button games etc. that remove the GTO / poker element and make the game more gambly. Boring pros who play these games straight up and don't "give action" don't get invited back. This is how you can have some of the best poker players like Tom Dwan get absolutely wiped out while playing against whales in Macau If you want to see a more recent example of this - the amateur whale Monarch recently took on one of the best cash game heads up players Bjorn Lee. I won't spoil the result because it's highly entertaining and demonstrates how the game works at these stakes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCd7giB9s5U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCd7giB9s5U
gamblor956 1y ago
Sometimes the wealthy person is the shark, and you're the fish... In Molly's Game, Tobey Maguire was the celebrity shark. (In the movie he was played by Michael Cera). He could easily have been a professional poker player, but he makes way more from acting and he prefers the easy play in private games.

prodigycorp 1y ago

I think it's revealing of how diminished the la costa nostra is. This is such trivial work and, yet, this was a multi-family operation.

mschuster91 1y ago
Diminished? More like, matured into white collar crime. There's no need to murder people on the street any more, that kind of dirty work is left to some random Southern American cartels, and the white collar crime brings in more than enough profit while also being way less risky should the feds catch up on it.
- cool_man_bob 1y ago
  > More like, matured into white collar crime. Honestly this is the first “advanced” mafia scheme I’ve heard of in a while. Last time I heard about a mafia crime it was a very sloppy hit that sounded more like what you hear from teenagers in Chicago shooting at each other. Though tbf it could easily have always been like that and I’m just blinded my media bias about a group of people I’ve never known form a time I’ve never known.
  - sosojxbx 1y ago
    [flagged]
- prodigycorp 1y ago
  I don't know if I buy that. If we were to put this in white collar terms, we'd all be questioning Tim Cook if he decided that selling ice cream was a great resource allocation decision.
  - jimbokun 1y ago
    What business would you take your organized crime organization into for maximal returns? Just stick everything in the S&P 500?
    - skeeter2020 1y ago
      I'd get dirt on the sitting president, then leverage him to make decisions with obvious market implication. Examples: give me a day's notice that the federal government is going to invest in a dinky mining company, or tariffs are coming on foreign electronics... except next week <these companies> are exempt. You gotta believe people on the inside are making fortunes as the markets continue to make big swings up & down.
      - mschuster91 1y ago
        > You gotta believe people on the inside are making fortunes as the markets continue to make big swings up & down. Yeah but that's friends of the emperor, not organized crime (although granted, the distinction between these two groups is getting smaller by the day). Organized crime? That money is literally everywhere. Restaurants, real estate, cars, the stock markets... the only place you'll rarely spot it is, ironically, gambling, way too many chances of getting caught on a paper trail. A lot of it is also invested in art pieces stored in one tax haven/freeport or another, really easy to launder money or evade taxes.
- actionfromafar 1y ago
  Probably going into crypto, the federal government even encourage it now.
rhcom2 1y ago
Highlighted perfectly in The Sopranos when they try to extort a Starbucks, it's a different world. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/rtnSe0eKmdI https://www.youtube.com/shorts/rtnSe0eKmdI

arresin 1y ago

It seems like so much work for relatively so little payoff. There’s a lesson here for non criminals also.

Forgeties79 1y ago
> In what sounds like an Ocean's Eleven film plot, prosecutors say these "unwitting" victims were cheated out of at least $7m (£5.25m) in poker games - with one person losing at least $1.8m. Definitely a lot of work but that seems like a half decent payday to me.
- kasey_junk 1y ago
  An nba coach was one of 30 people indicted in the scheme. He made about 5m a year at his straight job.
  - evan_ 1y ago
    $5M is a lot unless you have a crippling gambling addiction.
    - kasey_junk 1y ago
      It’s not so much the absolute amount as the comparative one. Just extorting Chauncey Billips seems like a better ROI than the whole caper if you’ve got some hold on him.
      - Forgeties79 1y ago
        Extortion risks exposing you in a way that quietly taking their money through cheating at cards does not. It’s also strikes me as a far more serious crime but I could be wrong.
        kasey_junk 1y ago
        I was replying to the premise that his involvement was under duress for gambling debts. If so it’s extortionate either way.

JohnMakin 1y ago

“just play better poker” like that’s an easy thing to do in a game of chance and incomplete information, with variance having years or decades long tails. not to mention it’s an unsolved game, so “better” poker doesn’t even really have a set definition and depends on tons of variables. and they literally knew what hole cards were coming - that’s vastly more of an edge than playing “better poker” than someone. Besides the fact they were often targeting pros - this was reported on and known by LA area pros for at least two years now. why the FBI decided to act now is weird to me. I can’t stress enough that in the pro scene this was common knowledge. years old podcast clips are coming up talking about it. source: https://sports.yahoo.com/nba/breaking-news/article/professional-gambler-matthew-berkey-called-out-rigged-chauncey-billups-poker-game-2-years-before-coachs-arrest-184422377.html https://sports.yahoo.com/nba/breaking-news/article/professio...

binarymax 1y ago
You can spend the time to learn the odds, and play the odds. Most people don't have even that basic skill.
- robocat 1y ago
  You are ignoring why people play the game: reading people and avoiding being read (lies, misdirection). I would predict your job is technical rather than people oriented. There's plenty of other card games where learning the odds matters, but poker has a bit more depth.
ecshafer 1y ago
The FBI is going to take time building up the case, flipping people, getting recordings, and trying to get as many people involved to not just stop the games but hopefully take down the entire crime families involved. LA Poker pros will start talking as soon as they suspect something fishy.
- duped 1y ago
  The FBI is also struggling for legitimacy at this point in history

dfxm12 1y ago

You don't want to extract more money per hand, you want to build up the fish (check the text message screenshots in the article) and then strike at the right point. The x rays remove the luck from those big hands.

SaltyBackendGuy 1y ago
Exactly. You want zero risk asymmetric payouts.

raincole 1y ago

> don't have time to learn to play perfect poker Probably don't have time to play so many hands with you that the better player is statistically guaranteed to win, either.

CGMthrowaway 1y ago

I read a theory that the poker winnings were not the scam. The scam was that the criminal element would HELP the NBA players cheat at poker, and then blackmail them with that info to change the outcomes of NBA games, which they were betting on, from which they could derive greater scale of winnings.

prodigycorp 1y ago
imo that doesn't make sense. All the online betting platforms will cut off the sharps. If you are net profitable and you make too much money from them, you will get banned.
- ClarityJones 1y ago
  Yeah, that would limit the scale if they were betting against the platforms. However, if you assume they were feeding the information to the platforms...
  - SoftTalker 1y ago
    ... or if you assume that they control the platforms...
- im3w1l 1y ago
  An organization could place the bets through different people each time.
- dec0dedab0de 1y ago
  Well first of all, organized crime does not need an online platform to profit off of fixing professional sports games. There are still plenty of bookies running around offering better odds than draftkings. Though, if they really wanted to, they could make smaller bets under hundreds of accounts. There is also the very strong possibility that they are colluding with the online betting platforms in some way. Coupled with the fact that any difference-maker athlete is getting a huge salary, and blackmail/extortion becomes your best option to getting one on your side.

IT4MD 1y ago

Most criminals have a specific type of cleverness, but not intelligence. If they were smart people, they wouldn't do the crimes in the first place. I dealt with a low-tech breach at one of the hospitals I worked for. The criminal worked in HIM, and used paper and pencil to note specific info about specific types of patients. Since they worked in HIM, it was expected for them to view many medical records in a day and no app detects paper/pencil, so quite clever so far. Ultimately, they used this info to file false tax returns to steal the refunds. The problem? They filed 881 false tax returns annnnnnd used the same address for all of them. DOH. They were busted/arrested and off to jail they went. Clever, right until the end, then abysmally stupid.

dec0dedab0de 1y ago
HIM = Health Information Management for anyone else wondering. If they were smart people, they wouldn't do the crimes in the first place. There are tons of smart people committing crimes. The levels of Intelligence, success, luck, greed, and morals can co-exist in every possible combination within one human.
- IT4MD 1y ago
  [dead]
wildzzz 1y ago
The intelligent ones don't get caught, or at least find the right loopholes to make their obvious crime technically legal.

Blackthorn 1y ago

You don't need to play better poker. You can just have multiple people on the same team at the same table and communicating, vastly increasing your odds of your team having the best hand.

empath75 1y ago

> Once you’ve convinced a wealthy person to play at your underground poker table, you’ve already won - just play better poker than them, ultra wealthy fish don’t have time to learn to play perfect poker and you do. You would be surprised at how good some very wealthy people are at poker. There is a lot of variance in the game and they don't want that. In fact what they want is _exactly_ wealthy people who are quite good at poker because they make big bets and you can reliably bust them out on _one hand_ if you set it up properly after playing a fair game all night. And the great thing about that is that they feel like the night overall was fair and fun, because it was. You just cheat them on one or two hands at the most. People who are bad at poker can also be quite difficult to reliably take money from fairly because they play randomly and sometimes win huge pots out of complete luck. For one thing, they are near impossible to bluff out of hands, so you end up having to fold a lot more than normal because you can only play with strong hands against them. If you are interested in making a lot of money, you certainly want those strong hands more often than normal.

btilly 1y ago

The trick isn't winning when the celebrity is at the table, it is in getting the celebrity to the table, then keepong the victim there. It's not about winning mote on each hand. It's about keeping the target happy as money drains away. And that was their aim. By controlling the whole game, they were able to psychologically manipulate the situation. The target was at tbe table with someone they respected. Saw others win and lose large amounts of money. Sometimes won themselves.

Sammi 1y ago
Ooooh you use all these tools in order to _control_ the game, so that is is as fun as possible. So the victim still loses, as they would without the tools, but now they're happy as it happens.
- wildzzz 1y ago
  Poker requires skill but there's still a major amount of chance involved. Removing the chance and conspiring against a single player turns the game into a show. You can set up cheap wins and expensive losses. It doesn't really matter how well the other players win or lose because they are all on the same team, you're the only one actually losing any money. I remember as a kid, I'd play battleship with my siblings. I was really good at it, they were not. They hated when it was obvious that I let them win but also hated when I beat them badly so I found a way to make the game go longer. Often we'd play on a glass table and I'd "drop" a piece so I could peek under the table and see where their pieces were. I could get a hit and then miss many follow up shots to slowly destroy their ship and give them more time to find and destroy mine. They'd gloat over their hard-fought win but I'd just smile and beat them for real next round. I could have done this without peeking but I wanted to make sure I didn't accidentally play too well.
morkalork 1y ago
Exactly, to a pro poker player a celebrity or athlete looks like an easy target. Someone with a lot of money, likes to play for fun, and doesn't have the same skills as a pro. They are at the table to bait the pros. But now the problem is you need those same players to win in order to extract any money from the game, hence the high-tech cheating.

ZiiS 1y ago

No need to learn; just hire players who are better than the fish and split the profits??? Once it is your shuffler, I could cobble together a Raspberry Pi to light a slightly different wavelength LED when it dealt them two pictures and would need to concentrate to lose enough to get all their money.

sandworm101 1y ago

Organized crime groups are rarely interested in "the long game". They work on the assumption that the party will end sooner than anticipated. Each game must be total victory.

BurningFrog 1y ago

The self made ultra rich are quite smart on average. I doubt the same is true of these Cosa Nostra and NBA guys.

PaulHoule 1y ago

My understanding is that collusion is rampant in poker. If you get introduced to a 'friendly' game of 5 players there's a good chance that these guys are signalling to each other and basically folding to whoever's got the best hand. You can't win against that. Even if you have 2 new players showing up at a table existing players could worry about collusion. If you don't have the fancy trappings those guys did it is almost impossible to catch people colluding in poker.

tqi 1y ago

They were also targeting pros, not merely wealthy players: https://x.com/OnlyFriends_Pod/status/1981379130190156129?s=46 https://x.com/OnlyFriends_Pod/status/1981379130190156129?s=4...

CaptainOfCoit 1y ago

> just play better poker than them You really don't understand the mind of fraudsters and criminals. The reason they do what they do is because they don't want to "just be better at X than Y" and spend the effort for that, they want to take the shortcut and they think they've found the best shortcut considering their situation. Once you start to look at what people are doing with that perspective, things will start to make more sense.

terminalshort 1y ago

But you are already breaking the law running an underground poker game.

Aurornis 1y ago

> just play better poker than them That's a big "just". They were using sports celebrities as the draw to the table, not expert poker players. Cheating at poker also looks less threatening than playing against an expert, counterintuitively. Someone who cheats can pull out some big wins on some bets that look statistically bad. The target can see this and think the other party is playing poorly (betting on non-obvious hands) but simply getting lucky. Contrast this with a shrewd expert poker player who will be easier to spot. They want the target to think the celebrity sports figure is just getting lucky on bad bets, not that they're an expert poker shark who's going to take all of their money. EDIT: Here's a 2 year old YouTube video from before all of this confirming this https://youtu.be/G-TKR5ca5jI?t=1790 https://youtu.be/G-TKR5ca5jI?t=1790 (Skip to 29:50) Having the cheating poker players look bad is a key part of the scam. It tricks the other players into coming back and betting big.

alexpotato 1y ago

> Once you’ve convinced a wealthy person to play at your underground poker table, you’ve already won - just play better poker than them, This is why in the book Molly's Game [0], the author mentions explicitly that she didn't want professionals in her game. This b/c her game was seen as a game between "regular/amateur" players who just happened to be famous and/or have a lot of money. This was also DESPITE poker professionals both asking her to play AND offering to give her a stake of their winnings. Granted, certain players (e.g. Tobey Maguire) were MUCH better than the other players but it seems that didn't matter as long as poker wasn't their primary source of income. 0 - https://amzn.to/4o05BFi https://amzn.to/4o05BFi

nikcub 1y ago

Wealthy people aren't dumb - they don't join games where the odds are tilted against them. In these high-stake private games they can usually demand and set the rules like shallow stacks (100BB), enforced straddles, raising stakes after a loss, button games etc. that remove the GTO / poker element and make the game more gambly. Boring pros who play these games straight up and don't "give action" don't get invited back. This is how you can have some of the best poker players like Tom Dwan get absolutely wiped out while playing against whales in Macau If you want to see a more recent example of this - the amateur whale Monarch recently took on one of the best cash game heads up players Bjorn Lee. I won't spoil the result because it's highly entertaining and demonstrates how the game works at these stakes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCd7giB9s5U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCd7giB9s5U

gamblor956 1y ago

Sometimes the wealthy person is the shark, and you're the fish... In Molly's Game, Tobey Maguire was the celebrity shark. (In the movie he was played by Michael Cera). He could easily have been a professional poker player, but he makes way more from acting and he prefers the easy play in private games.