Allegations of a cheating scandal featuring Mike Postle, a regular at the Stones Gambling Hall, have taken over the poker world the past few days.
Postle is a regular on the livestreamed cash games at Stones, which feature $1/$3 and $5/$5 games, sometimes with an ante. On these streams, Postle has consistently been heralded for bizarre plays that have work out well for him. He is considered to be one of the biggest winners in the game.
The allegations were brought forward by Veronica Brill, known as Angry_Pollack on Twitter. In the tweets, she alleges that Stones failed to launch a proper investigation when brought forward with complaints.
Postle himself responded with an emotional thread on Twitter, claiming that he has been a long-time winner both live and online and utilizes exceptional live reads while implementing a high variance style:
Stones also issued a statement backing Postle and whole-heartedly denying the allegations and claiming that an investigation has already occured:
Justin Kuraitis, the tournament director of the room, issued similar sentiments on his personal twitter:
These responses from Stones sparked outrage from the poker community, including from famous poker pro Scott Siever:
The scandal has drawn interest from many in the poker world, including poker pro and podcaster Joey Ingram. Ingram spent hours reviewing the footage and analyzed it on his YouTube channel here.
Throughout the video, you can see several strange hands where Postle makes very out-of-line players that work. Some of these hands can be seen here:
In addition to this, Ingram found that Postle has had some pretty insane results while playing on the stream. According to Ingram, Postle made $93,200 on live streams in 2018. Highlights from this time frame include Postle being +36,120 in 52 hours at $1/$3 and +56,800 in 64 hours at $5/$5. During this frame, he recorded 34 winning sessions and two losing ones.
To put this into context, poker pro Matt Berkey weighed in by saying that even during the best stretch of his low-mid stakes career, he never came close to winrates like that:
Just to provide a little context to this in 11 years of grinding 2/5 & 5/10 (’03-’13; pre Ivey room; pre evolution of poker; pre solvers) my biggest upswing ever was 65k over 45 sessions (~275 hrs), the vast majority of which were 5/10/20 uncapped. I won 29 lost 16. Chew on that.
The most difficult question to answer in regards to the allegations is how the cheating would have occurred. The best case so far comes from the poster ‘RedOak’ on 2+2 who believes that if cheating occurred, it came from someone feeding Postle the information. RedOak writes the following:
A friend of mine is an electrical engineer for a slot machine gaming company. This is what he has to say about the matter:
“I know a lot about RFID. I’ve designed circuits using it. The claim of RFID misreading an 8 as a 7 is ridiculous. It doesn’t work like that. RFID tags have a long string of numbers. For example 2839489359595. That number would correlate to a specific card. Let’s say that is the 8 of hearts. The 7s would each have another long string of numbers that would be unique to each of them. The 7s could be numbers such as 8347382020, 28493847393, 1930384394, and 28494839393. If the RFID misread, the overwhelming odds are it would come up with a blank card as the numbers have to exactly match for each card in the deck and it would require reading the card a second time. There’s virtually no chance a misread would come up with a 7.
It’s possible to read RFID with a phone, but it requires an additional antenna. It would be possible to modify a phone to integrate the antenna. It would be relatively easy for a casino to detect whether there was an extra RFID reader at the table if they wanted to check.
It’s far more likely that he’s got someone communicating with him. To be able to read RFID across the table and distinguish between all of the cards would almost require some magic. If you have 2 RFID tags and try to read them at the same time, it’s difficult to put it mildly.
In order to read RFID tags, the reader has to be transmitting a signal. It would take a simple RF sniffer to detect such a device. The casino could easily find someone to check for that. If they’re using RFID, it’s something they should be checking.
I’ve designed some wireless equipment for casino use. Most casinos are beyond paranoid about hacking and most are afraid of wireless stuff. If they’re using RFID, it’s beyond negligent for them not to be checking for cheaters.
It would take a very sophisticated device to be able to read all the cards on the table. I kind of doubt that’s what he’s doing. It’s far more likely that someone is cluing him in from outside. There are literally thousands of people who could write a custom phone app to send him hole card data.”
We will continue to update the story as more information becomes available.
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