On the Only Friends Podcast, Matt Berkey and his co-hosts discussed a live poker cheating scandal with far-reaching implications. Even though many of us are hearing about it for the first time, it's been a hot topic among high-stakes players.
For now, it appears that low-stakes games may not be profitable enough to attract these cheaters, but high-stakes are a different story. According to Berkey, it may have even been used in a $50k WSOP event this year. On the podcast, he discussed the scam, the methods, and possible solutions to stop this in the future.
Matt Berkey: There's been these cheating rings going around for the better part of 18 months. Some have said it dates all the way back to 4 or 5 years ago, perhaps even further. We're not really sure, but in any event, as recently as two days ago, somebody was finally caught and arrested. This is the first smoking gun that we've actually seen accessed whereas, everything else I'm going to speak to today is speculation with a high degree of conviction.
What happened was French police caught a casino fraudster using a mini earpiece and a camera. They didn't divulge any images of what they found or anything like that, but they just described it.
I think people are always really aloof about giving details because they don't want to give the opportunity to replicate. But the thing is, once it's out, then we have something to look forward to. I can give you guys more details as we go on about how we perceive the cheating to have occurred.
Anyway, he had a pinhole camera in some sort of device on the felt. Call it a card protector, call it a phone, a key fob, or something like that. He had a very microscopic camera and additionally, he was wearing an earpiece that was so small it had to be removed from his ear with a magnet. So it's just totally undetectable by the naked eye.
How This Method of Cheating Works
So in any event, they basically cased this guy out who they suspected of being a part of, and the article says allegedly, using this sophisticated technique to fraudulently win only tens of thousands of dollars in this particular instance only. Well, when I start to tell you the numbers that are getting kicked around some of the games that I frequent and others, this is a slap on the wrist.
The way that it works is the pinhole camera captures the dealer's pitch (method of dealing cards to players). As the dealer is pitching the cards out around the table, it's able to capture an image of each card as it's being dealt out, and then you know what each seat holds.
From there, that information is passed back to a third party. Now in this particular instance, that third party was sitting in a car outside of the casino. You can't write this. You truly can't. If you scripted this, someone would throw it away and be like, "That's so unbelievable." I'm sure the guy was smoking a cigarette, you know.
So what ends up happening then is he relays the information back to the player via the earpiece. The camera is connected to the phone – the player's phone at the table. And then he's just sharing his screen on an open WhatsApp call or Discord call to whoever's on the outside.
So that information then gets passed two ways. The information gets received from the game to a third party. That third party then relays it back.
This is speculation, I don't know how true it is, but I've heard some of the more sophisticated rings that are doing this at scale have a call center in Indonesia. Just like, $8 an hour workers that are just sitting around watching a poker game, relaying back to you the hole cards of your opponents.
Which Stakes of Poker Are Affected?
The only reason they're getting caught is because they got greedy and went to high stakes. It's virtually impossible to catch something like this in low stakes because there's no barrier of entry. There are no private games, everything is public. Not only that, to split profits at those games, it's just not really worth it. Well, it is if you can put in volume, it's too slow. The money isn't really worth it all that much.
It's also very tricky because you want to be in the 1 or the 2 seat specifically, because most dealers are right-handed. So they pitch around like this, whereas if you're on the other side, you're missing that whole half of the table. In public games, that's doable, I guess. You could even have multiple people in the same game with devices so that somebody ends up in the 1 or the 2 seat.
I think the bigger issue with smaller stakes, or why it's not going to be super common at small stakes, I suppose, is the money factor like Guapo mentioned. The risk just isn't really worth the reward all that much. If you do this at 5/10, you might be able to do it for like $300 an hour.
If you had an operation of like a few dozen people, I think this might crush low stakes.
For what it's worth, I heard that LA, specifically Commerce, was plagued with it, and maybe still is. The most recent stories have all come out post-World Series because everybody was here for the summer, so obviously these games were getting hit. I know of at least three high-stakes games that were hit, including a high roller.
The irony though is they were all effectively caught. I mean, not caught red-handed with the device on you, you're banned from all properties but confidently caught to where everybody got banned from the games. One person had to have his device removed. We're pretty sure he had it in his sunglasses.
This is all here during the summer, but now that the World Series is over, everybody's dispersing. I heard that the high-stakes game in Parx got hit most recently. I heard that a bunch of games in Commerce were being targeted over the last two or three weeks.
How Many Cheaters Are Involved?
It's a large network of people.
To give you a little bit more framework of what we're dealing with here and what to look for, essentially there was this statement made in Korean that was then translated. It's a very rough translation, but in essence, the long and short of this statement is that there's a cheating ring going around that is mixed between Russians and Uzbek nationality.
They're basically saying it's a distribution of like 70% Koreans, 30% Russians. The way that these rings are working is just how I described: somebody sits in the 1 or 2 seat, they have a device that catches the dealer's pitch, that information is then relayed to a third party who relays it back to the player and now has relatively perfect information. Obviously, some cards might get missed here and there, but you're going to be working with a lot of information when it's all said and done.
The scale of which this extends out is maybe a bit unknown. But what we do know, is the way they're cheating, as well as where these stories are coming out of. We've heard from the Bahamas, Texas, LA, Pennsylvania now in Philly, obviously the WSOP. There was an instance in the 50K event. There was an instance in pretty much every major room here this summer. That's Triton, WPT, private cash games, Cyprus, Norway, Korea, Florida, and Montenegro – all of these are on the list.
In order to hit that mass over 18 months, the operation's obviously not small. At this point, I think we all are kind of the impression that it's a concentrated effort amongst a relatively well-comprised group.
Some of the people are believed to be incredibly connected. That's not really a risk I want to take on by being a bit of a whistleblower. I'm mostly doing this to get the word out and try to influence operators a little bit better.
Solutions
There's an easy way to correct this.
You have to go to the core of the problem, which is the dealer's pitch (the method that dealers use to send cards to each player). You have to correct the dealer's pitch. It was hard to burn a card too until you made it protocol. Things just have to get instituted that are good for the long-term health of the game. Sure, it'll be a slow process, but it has to start with somebody deciding that this is worth retraining.
The corrective action between now and the next World Series would be every event that has a $3K buy-in or larger has dealers who use the Euro pitch. Now you're only talking about a few dozen, maybe a couple hundred at most dealers that need to be trained. So you're talking about somewhere between 10 and 20% of the dealers staffed need to be capable of a Euro pitch. That's not that hard. That's like being able to deal a mixed game.
Editor's Note: The European-style pitch is a dealing method where the top card moves directly from the deck to the felt. This way, it's not exposed, even to a camera at a very low angle. However, it is not the most popular dealing method because it reduces the speed of dealers (at least when first learning the technique. Often called the American-style pitch, this method gives cameras enough view of the card's underside and brings the opportunity for cheating. It looks better and appears to be the fastest way to deal, but is less secure.
Catch the full episode of the Only Friends Podcast right here.
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