https://twitter.com/berkey11/status/1577132725940539393?s=20&t=Nkuj9FxQSCDGYW-Jjt7tLQ
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Berkey just letting his full moron flag fly in the wind now.
Impossible to know for sure, but I think this is the case even if GMAN just wins one of the two runouts. In that scenario I think he takes back his chips, keeps playing, and he probably never goes on Twitter to make the public cheating accusation.
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good points. if I were him I’d honestly just consider giving it back. like she’s not some degen where the money’s just gonna disappear if she cheated.
dont know, whole things a mess. i feel really bad for him at this point, he’s getting a lot of heat
So suggesting that they tighten security on the software, RFID technology, etc, used for the livestreams is moronic? Berkey actually did a really good job breaking down some of the weaknesses and some of the solutions.
A basic example is that we don’t know how often they change out the decks, but the RFID cards have to be mapped separately for each deck. Swapping out the deck more often makes it much harder to cheat with the RFID.
For a more complex example, apparently the software HCL uses was originally developed as a very low budget solution for a home game with no security concerns whatsoever, and it’s widely available for like under $3K. Meanwhile, TCH had a proprietary software developed that only they use, which means nobody can buy it for a few grand and try to reverse engineer it, and there’s much less concern over an insider at the software company having a trojan horse. It also sends the data from the table to the server more securely, with fewer intermediary steps, as they developed it with security in mind.
Regardless of whether you think Robbi cheated, it’s pretty clear that:
A) People will try to cheat live streams if the opportunity exists
and
B) The opportunity right now is greater than it could/should be
The industry needs to evolve on this front and make these live streams much harder to cheat, regardless of what happened here. Postle probably wasn’t the first and definitely wasn’t/won’t be the last.
FWIW I think they should wand people, too. I’d feel safer playing on a live stream that way, for sure. It doesn’t rule out all possibilities but it does make it harder and anything that isn’t invasive that makes it harder should be done. It takes 10 seconds per player to wand them on the way in and out of the stage. And the walls around the stage shouldn’t be glass, either, IMO.
You can’t make it impossible, but you can make it a lot harder.
Berkey is saying you can solve cheating by tightening up that stuff so not need to wand people, check their bags, etc. The first part about improving IT security makes sense, the second part doesn’t.
He talks about how you’ll have complete logs of everything - but cheaters can find new ways to cheat that won’t be logged or if it’s an inside job, find a way to just remove evidence of their cheating from the logs.
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If he gives it back and the investigation concludes she was cheating, why would she ever return the money? At that point her reputation is ruined, returning it is definitely an admission of guilt, and she will have potential legal ramifications. Her lawyers would be telling her not to return it, most likely.
He should just release a simple follow up statement that he’ll return the money if the investigation fails to prove she cheated. I don’t think it’s in his best interest to be speaking publicly much right now, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s retained counsel that’s telling him that, given that Robbi’s husband threatened to sue. Like if someone’s lawyer husband threatened to sue me over this, I’d be calling a lawyer asking what I should do.
I’m pretty sure you can collect from a gambling cheater. For instance, Ivey had to pay back the casino for “cheater” at baccarat. Possible poker has different laws, but still think you’d be able to collect.
Why would he need to hire a lawyer? Poker Twitter can give legal advice on par with it’s medical advice on vaccines or its financial advice on investing in cryptocurrency.
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Yeah I mean I think it should be a best of both sides approach, tighten the back end and wand people. Problem is, I don’t think wanding people is totally conclusive. Do we really want to do TSA style body scanners? It wouldn’t bother me to go through one to get on stream, but that’s a big invasion of privacy.
At some point the question is where the tradeoff of comfort/enjoyment versus security has diminishing returns. Tightening the back end has no impact on comfort/enjoyment and wanding is not invasive, so those should be no brainers. Not filming in a room with glass walls seems pretty obvious, too.
I have no idea what a Faraday cage costs, especially of that size, but if you used a hard wired transmission out of the stage room for the broadcast and made the stage room a Faraday cage, you’d basically make it impossible to cheat wirelessly, I think, except within the stage room which is borderline impossible without a screen/phone/computer.
But a quick Google says the Faraday cage room would cost mid six figures, so that’s probably a non starter.
Nobody collected from Postle, right? I think the two most likely outcomes are:
-
Investigation is inconclusive, but the preponderance of evidence points one way or the other.
-
Investigation is conclusive to the extent that even Clovis and I agree one way or the other, however if that agreement is that she cheated, it still can’t be proven in a court of law to a degree to allow him to recover losses.
I think it’s extraordinarily unlikely that anything can be proven in a court of law. I think in order for that to happen you basically have to catch the person red handed with the device and/or figure out what they’re doing before they do it and trap them into cheating while you’re detecting it.
Right - you’d need pretty clear evidence of cheating. For Postle there wasn’t really anything beyond his crazy play and some other suspicious stuff, but I don’t think they could ever prove how he was hacking the system.
Here, since it’s only one hand, I think to even prove to the general public she cheated you’re going to need the smoking gun, so I think if you get that you’d also have a pretty strong case in court.
Maybe these streams should have some sort of contract that requires adjudication of disputes via arbitration and have players place an amount like 100-200 bb in escrow in case such a dispute should arise. Might make it harder to play stakes that are quite as big, but game integrity should take precedence over maximizing the entertainment value of bigger pots.
I followed it but I don’t remember all the details, but he had an inside guy on the production right? And likely bone conduction headphones in his hat? Could have just been that dude dialing him up on a hidden cell in his pocket with a bluetooth mic, and talking in the production booth about the hands as they were being played.
The problem is, unless you physically get the devices or have them on video with those devices when they aren’t supposed to have them, you can’t really prove it unless they were dumb enough to make actual phone calls and not use an app of some sort.
Let’s say they catch her putting a cell phone or some electronic device into her pants on a surveillance camera, which she’s not allowed to have on stage, which would then catch her in a lie. Then they catch her on casino surveillance dumping said device somewhere in the casino (trash, whatever) after being accused. That combined with the hand would probably convince most people that she was 99.9% cheating, but I don’t think it would hold up in a court of law.
She could just say, “I didn’t want to give up my phone for privacy reasons, but I didn’t do anything wrong or use it at all on the stage. Then I panicked when falsely accused and dumped it.”
I’m not sure how you’d be able to prove the device was used for cheating.
I think it was pretty well known that he was receiving info on his phone, he was constantly looking into his crotch during hands and was shown to be holding his phone down there in some clips
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Berkey said one thing last night that resonated with me, but I wouldn’t expect a newcomer or non-pro to necessarily think this way. But basically, he said if he was ever accused of cheating on a live stream he’d demand to be immediately searched. Pat him down, wand him, empty his pockets, search his bag, do whatever you need to do.
That would definitely be my approach. You can’t force people to submit to that or let people abuse that tactic to make people uncomfortable, but if I made some sick hero call and got accused I’d just say get the floor, get Feldman/Vertucci/whoever, get security over here and search me and pat me down right now.
Would he do the same thing if accused of a crime by a cop?
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Sure but as you said, no amateur is ever doing this. Especially a woman getting yelled at by a table of men about how insane her play was.
And what if you happen to be carrying some illicit / nonprescribed drugs? I mean, if we’re going down crazy hypothetical highway, do I really need to list out all the reasons why a woman who is the center of a raucous argument is not going to immediately think, “well maybe I can diffuse this whole situation if I just let Ryan Feldman and whoever runs security at the Husler Casino go through all my stuff and give me a quick strip search?”
[Oh, and, side note, even if she did that, there would STILL be a good number of folks who would just say that she was using contacts to read the cards, or that RIP had the device and was using hand signals to give her info, etc. ]
[And note 2 - I’m not even sure where I come down on the cheating / not cheating question. I guess I lean slightly towards fish gonna fish, but I think the hand is weird enough that there’s probably fuel for confirmation bias for any initial gut reaction. As just another example, people bring up Postle to provide evidence for statements like “electronic cheating is possible” and “cheaters will get greedy and cheat even in spots where using the info significantly increases the odds of getting caught”… But when they want to argue that Robbi only gave the money back because she was guilty they seem to ignore the fact that Postle doubled down on his innocence and even went to court rather than settling with his victims. And they ignore the fact that despite supposedly being a greedy cheater, she had a relatively low VPIP and played several hands earlier in the stream in ways that cost her real money and/or EV.]
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