Widespread cheating at high stakes / pinhole cams on the felt

I had a few discussions with regulars of commerce casino. Apparently during WSOP there was a 50/100 game in which 2 unknowns came into the game with phones on table, basically played wild and won the lot. When it was suggested they remove phones from playing area they made some excuses, went to make a call, racked up and left.

During the past 18-24 months while playing mainly 5/10 at commerce I ran really poorly, but ultimately I believe this type of cheating method was behind implemented during some of the games.

Going forward now I know of this method I'll always question any electrical devices in the gaming area(they should be on the rail and only if it doesn't slow the game down).

I also made an observation at the commerce. Half the room is 20/40, 10/20, 5/10 & 5/10 probably 40-50 tables. Most of these tables have DeckMate 2. The other half of the casino is small stakes No limit 1/2 and small limit games which almost every table has DeckMate1. The difference between drop in these games at full cost is $1. $8 total and 5/10 and lower and the other side of the room $7 I believe. The given reason why cardrooms have DM2 is that it's faster and therefore can produce more hands and more rake/drop an hour. Given that there's only $1 difference I'm wondering why they wouldn't update it all and get more revenue. Over 2 years ago some silly side bet game was introduced to the tables and at this table all tables were modified with higher rail, new felt and these electric devices that nobody uses.

Makes me wonder why the owners are leaving money on the table. I don't trust this place. Gaming in California has only been regulated like 20 something years? Place has a history of being shady and now we have all other kinds of stuff to worry about too.

Vote with your feet people, if you don't feel a location is doing enough to protect the integrity of the game avoid it or speak up as a group. That's where NL struggles as a community. We don't have many spokes people.

i havnt played a hand of live poker in 10+ years (waste of time online is superior by every metric) but even back then you had to step away from the table to use your phone . if you werent at the table when your hand is dealt your hand is dead. i cant believe this isnt a thing anymore.

this was not a thing in cash games even 10 years ago. tournaments have different rules.

Certainly quicker is why the room will claim to use DeckMate2. The fact it can be rigged and by sheer coincidence is used on tables where rigging will be more profitable we are supposed to ignore. BTW I started playing in Gardena CA in 1970 which is 54 years ago and the clubs were not new then.

Can actually confirm exactly this in at least 2 more instances. 1 was during WPT Korea and 1 was Cambodia. Pretty sure these guys have been caught at multiple casinos doing this.

This is correct

All it would take is one person to actually get socked in the face and sent night night for people like ^ to be scared to scum ppl. No one ever faces repercussions for their actions so of course it emboldens the sociopaths among us.

AFAIK the threat of getting shot in the 60s and 70s didn't stop people from cheating so not sure a punch to the face is a solid deterrent either

Using your phone during a hand should be STRICTLY forbidden. Cards have to actually start getting mucked, and not after multiple warnings. Or if you *are* operating on a warning system, then it's 3 strikes you're out. (Either 24 hour ban or device confiscated).

Main problem is the enforcement mechanism. Having people who effectively work for the players (tips) and prefer to run a loose, care-free game be in charge of taking people's crack pipe away when they're using it irresponsibly is how we got here in the first place.

In a serious tournament setting, you can perhaps be stricter than that because even consulting your phone between hands can create an unfair advantage. I'm fine with being as strict as keeping phones and other smart devices in a lockbox that can be accessed during breaks. Participants who want to listen to music can be warned in advance and plan accordingly. (Sell branded iPods in the casino store, make extra profit!) Again, though, probably only doing this for premier events, not your $40 BI tournament on a Tuesday afternoon.

I think anything stricter than this is overkill and would be bad for the game.

Banning hats and headphones is not happening except MAYBE as an agreed upon rule for particularly exclusive games. People probably shouldn't have headphones in at a televised live game or social private game anyway. You're there to entertain, not listen to a book on tape while you sit out of 90% of hands. But hats isn't happening in America as far as I'm concerned.

Banning purses/bookbags/etc in a cash game setting is a very bad idea. If for no other reason, separating players from their rebuys does nobody any good.

What about drinks? I guess that means no more chip protectors too, but what about jewelry? Should we all play naked?

Some big cognitive dissonance there.

Sorry, can you explain?

No phones to prevent cheating, but let’s allow other ways to introduce cheating devices in headphones, purses, handbags, chip protectors, drink cups, and jewelry.

I think what you really should want is nothing on the felt other than chips and cards. Hiding a pinhole cam in a price of jewelry or fake drink cup isn’t going to do the cheater much good if it has to be kept on the rail without a low enough perspective to pick up pitched cards.

I think we're in perfect agreement. No reason for anything to be on the felt other than chips and cards.

Unless I'm misunderstanding, the post I was replying to said all of these things should be prohibited from the room altogether.

Gonna have to ban earrings too. Thanks Kamela! Way to ruin it for everyone.

She was clearly being fed Trumps hole cards.

Haven't watched HCL in a while but watched a newer YouTube clip where the cards were completely different and my immediate thought was wow those look like some sorta fake cheating deck. I know they are not but definitely looked/looks strange and in one clip i coulda swore the players whole cards were shown in the graphic before the cards were even dealt out lol?

Also unrelated but how does Ryan Feldman just have 100s of thousands to just donk off? I get he owns part of the show but seems a bit odd after he never plays then is all of a sudden in 300k pots donating like a 1/2 game

When all is said and done I hope the story of all the shady things at HCL are told. The owners have been sketchy long before HCL and suddenly playing at stakes that are multiples of what they have ever played before is definitely suspect.

As far as banning phones from the table, technology has already moved far beyond the phone. Unless we all play naked (and I would rather be cheated out of multiple buyins than witness that), there will be a chance someone is using a device to cheat. Few of us play on a stream so the main chance of being cheated is not a coordinated effort by production, but in ways that are yet to be known similar to the pinhole cams under discussion. Best defense is to be aware and leave a game when something does not feel right. I trust my gut and have no problem calling it a session or changing tables when I think something is off. Fortunately I think the chances of that are slim in the 5-5-10 game I play at Hustler, but obviously sounds like this ring infiltrated commerce so my radar is up.

Ryan has been behind the scenes running the stream. A lot of the games carry on after the stream ends and he joins them. I don't think it's too farfetched he could have gained a large bankroll throughout the years.

There have been very creative, well-resourced and well-connected people who manage to gain an unfair advantage on the house and/or other players for as long as gambling has existed, but we should make the barrier to entry high and the schemes complicated enough that there are a maximum number of potential failure points. I've suspected people of colluding using nothing more than the text app, to say nothing of all the myriad other resources available on a phone. It's almost irresponsible giving potential perps that much TEMPTATION to cheat, much less leaving potential victims that exposed. (Sometimes it's not even clear where the line is.)

Simply enforcing the rules that already exist would be an enormous improvement. The pandemic showed they can afford to have extra floor sweeping the room constantly telling people to put their mask on, I'm sure if floor were walking around killing violator's hands while the dealer just gives an apologetic shrug while pulling them into the muck, it wouldn't take long for people to take the "no looking at phones during a hand" rule as seriously as the "don't try to peak at your neighbors' cards" rule.

Since this is an extreme comparison, let's use another one: string bets. Look at how religiously people follow and enforce a rule that just protects you from giving off a fatal read in the time it takes for a player to reach for two different stacks of chips. I think we can be a little more serious about the "don't consult with your device that contains all of the known knowledge in the universe during a hand" rule.

Although I would not support banning phones at the table entirely, I would be 100% supportive of killing any hand if the player looks at their phone during the hand. No reason any one needs their phone during the hand even when players are tanking for unreasonable lengths of time. Based on what we know about these specific cheating allegations, a pinhole cams in any device is capturing cards as dealt, relayed to bad actors, and info fed back to the player via an earpiece so banning access to a phone during the hand would not have prevented the cheating.

Taking the phone out of the mix during the hand does eliminate one more device that can be used to receive information, but my main point was that tech has moved way past the ability to detect and prevent the scenario in question. Ultimately the best defense is players policing themselves, but I do worry if people start to accuse villains of cheating any time they call down light.

This is hilarious...Ryan and Nick run a highly raked private online game on 1 of the app sites multiple times a week for many years now. Same way Rampage and Mariano got funds rapidly to play huge. This works until you get arrested by the Feds.

As poker keeps drying up and technology advances we will see an increase in the methods and occurrence of cheating. Next thing you know we will see AI robots at live poker tables passing off as human.

I agree with this 100%. Absolutely no doubt.

However I think it would be really hard to implement. The reason is that there is more grey area in this than people realize.

As someone who has dealt in a room where it is "illegal to consult" with their phones during a hand, it is very unclear what this means.

A player has headphones in while in a hand, post flop there is a bet, a raise, and then the action gets to them. They tap on their phone pausing the song/movie/podcast they were listening to. Have they consulted their phone? They clearly touched it.

Or I have seen a player deep in the tank while phone starts ringing. Usually they just touch the phone to decline to answer it, but on rare occasions the player will answer and say they cannot talk and then hang up. Either way, have they consulted their phone?

Point is, "consulting their phone" needs to be clearly defined. Not to be nitpicking, but the grey areas matter because that is where the cheating will come from.

this deserves more love