Some professional poker player told me this anecdote: he was playing at a table with a celebrity. He quickly noticed he has a tell (he did something with his chips when he had a powerful hand or was bluffing, don't remember), and half the table also noticed the same or similar tells. They proceeded to clean his stash.

At the table statistics matter between pros, but if you are not aware of your flaws, you might as well play with your cards face up.

This sounds similar to an article I read about major league pitchers, who must learn to avoid "tells" for the pitch they are about to throw, while opposing teams pour over video of their previous outings looking for those tells.

Some pitchers even said they would deliberately perform a "tell" that opponents had identified then throw a different pitch.

Same thing happens in football with audibles. I wonder how many teams are feeding videos like these to AI and asking it to find patterns that might be tough for humans to see. If an AI thinks there's a pattern, verifying shouldn't be too hard either.

My personal favorite example of this in football

https://youtube.com/watch?v=g4SEPufzG7s

Legendary variation from pro tennis between to HoF players, https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/tennis/andre-agassi-bori...

In the exact same way, in cricket there is a style of bowling called legspin and bowlers who use that style have a particular type of ball called a “googly” which turns in the opposite direction to a normal legspin ball. Because legspinners sometimes have to do weird wrist contortions to get this ball to work, batsmen practise trying to “pick” this ball by noticing these tells (mainly whether they can see the back of the bowler’s hand).

So really crafty legspinners sometimes try to develop two versions of the googly: one with a deliberate tell and one without a tell.

Here’s an example of probably the greatest legspin bowler of all time doing exactly this, although with a different ball (a “flipper” or topspin ball) not a googly https://youtu.be/DlyG5wnW7I0?si=O463NAdV6NAAB3cG

>“just play better poker” like that’s an easy thing to do in a game of chance and incomplete information

you just need to beat the table, you don't need to become an over-average pro.

that decades long tail you mentioned is for pros chasing profitability in tournaments -- it's a much shorter tail when you're playing fish in setups.

being better at poker than the guy at the table who is good at making money isn't a big leap, it's what sharks and hustlers have been aiming at for hundreds of years.

> it's a much shorter tail when you're playing fish in setups

A lot of rich people know more about poker than middle-income scrubs. You don't want to find out the fish you're chasing was a shark all along. The point here is to turn a game a chance into a profit center, suggesting they just do it legitimately missed the point and assumes the scammers themselves have the time or talent to become good enough to reliably fleece people legitimately. It also means you have to vet the people you invite, rather than confidently turning out the pockets of scrubs and capable players alike.

You're illustrating why the phrase I am nitpicking is silly, and why poker is somehow still profitable even after the boom of 20+ years ago. What is the definition of "beating the table?" Is it winning? Because I promise you, that's a poor definition. You can be playing perfectly great poker and get slaughtered, you can play terrible poker and win. Look at the career of Phil Helmuth, for instance (joke, I'm joking). Playing live poker, you're very unlikely to get a large enough sample size to have a close to 100% confidence you're actually beating the game. You're even less likely to get a large enough sample from a single table/group of players to know either. And like I said up thread - what is "good" or "optimal" or the highest expected value play can change drastically depending on information. Poker is a game of incomplete information, and you can conjure tons of scenarios where folding something like a pair of Aces is correct before the flop, even though many people who have a shallow understanding of the game or haven't studied it deeply would say you should never do that (for instance, in a double or nothing tournament, where half the table cashes and half doesn't, folding AA with a large chip lead to an all in from a certain stack size is the correct play and happens surprisingly often).

Or like, say you're against a "fish" that goes all in preflop with exactly J7 offsuit and nothing else, no matter how big his stack is, because that's their lucky hand or something. You're not playing as profitably as possible if you lack that knowledge, and if you somehow have that knowledge, there are tons of hands you play there that you normally never would and would appear to others without that information as playing "bad."

It's a deeply complex game people try to trivialize. I've been studying for about 20 years and every year that goes by I think I know less than I did the year before. And I'm just talking no limit hold'em right now - there are tons of variants that all have their own areas of study, and that's not even to get into weird live game areas of theory like tells and stuff (which is not as important as people tend to think).

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.

They almost certainly already have done much of this if they’re going public now. What makes it to the media in the beginning is only ever the proverbial tip of the iceberg.

> They almost certainly already have done much of this if they’re going public now.

Normally I'd agree, but this administration is known for pushing to release public distractions whenever they can.

Exactly. Structures, men behind, organizations involved, networks and other crimes indicated or discovered for example money laundering, betting.

It takes time to build a case. Some laws need people working together and a one time event testing a new table and accidentally having lots of cash in the bags as well as so-called famous people showing up can simply happen by chance.

It is complicated.

I'm not sure I believe this. It seems you can just walk into one of these places and roll the whole place, confiscate electronics, and make all the necessary connections fairly quickly. These games aren't a secret and never have been.

I don't like the private (illegal) scene because it's killed action in casinos and games I used to love playing in. The risk to me of breaking the law, being robbed/scammed, or worse is not worth it to play in these games and I wish they'd go away.

Even the mafia angle - the NY families must have fallen a long way if they're resorting to high profile but ultimately petty scams like this. This seems like PR for the FBI and nothing more, like I said up thread this has been common knowledge for years.

> the NY families must have fallen a long way if they're resorting to high profile but ultimately petty scams like this

The presence of petty scams does not indicate they have stopped their large scale operations. The Mafia has always done scams like this; it's basically the bush leagues to train for the really big stuff.

> NY families must have fallen a long way

I spent a fun few hours a couple years back deep diving into what has become of the old-school "Goodfellas"-style mob these days. Looking into both media reports as well as posts by 'mob fans' - niche forums of those who obsessively follow mob and mob adjacent activities via open-source intel methods - I got the sense the traditional Italian mob families have indeed shrunk to a smaller, sadder version of what they once were due to being eclipsed by new, different kinds of organized crime.

Guys who are known "made men" getting out of prison after doing 10-15 and then ending up doing relatively nickel and dime crimes like daylight armed robbery of a jewelry store themselves for lack of enough income. 25 years ago guys like that wouldn't normally do that stuff themselves. Others have even sunk to basically LARPing being old-school mobsters on social media.

It seems there are two key drivers behind the decline: the real money in organized crime has shifted to new kinds of activities which scale better and can grow much larger. That's attracted new competitors. Some are smarter, some more brutal and some which are both. There's also an aspect that these new, bigger opportunities are far more complex, long-term and can also require successfully operating legitimate businesses as one necessary component. I guess it's not surprising. Even illicit industries undergo accelerating change over time. The old crime families still exist and can certainly still be dangerous - they're just no longer the top of the criminal food chain in terms of earnings.

It's all petty crimes. I've known a handful of low-level "members" and they were all morons (imo) running the most absurd scams.

Things like: "Hey I'm organizing a trip to Vegas. $1000 / head. Great hotel, meals paid, etc. etc."

Then the organizer has the great misfortune of being "robbed" of all the money he collected by a masked assailant.

Maybe the higher level guys were were brighter, but I kind of doubt it.

The FBI is also struggling for legitimacy at this point in history

Name a decade without a major FBI scandal

Name a less competent FBI director ever.

The difference it that what used to be a decade-defining major FBI scandal is more like monthly in the current administration.

I think they’re also doing good investigations into local crime rings that the states and prior administrations didn’t touch

The political prosecution vendettas are dumb but here in LA they are disrupting “Armenian” crime rings

This did strike me as quite a small scale crime for all the attention it's getting. I guess the notable part is using a couple celebrity athletes to recruit marks for rigged high-stakes poker games. If you think about it, poker games don't scale up into a truly big money. After paying off everyone involved, maybe they clear a few hundred grand in cash? That's chump change in modern organized crime.

Matt Berkey called out this exact game a couple years ago: https://x.com/RTNBA/status/1981433175390687603

I understand the "need" for cheating but it does seem like overkill the way they cheated, at least as described. They've already got colluders, and then the auto shuffler reads the cards, and then they've ALSO got the contact lenses? Just some marked cards would have been sufficient. And then the rare time the fish catches up after being behind is your "let them win a hand and get traction". It just seems like they really went too far to control every part of the hand

Perhaps those were different iterations of the technique over time. Start with marking cards to identify face cards, then move on to x-ray table.

What's the increased risk of cheating more?

Once you're cheating and colluding you are in danger of going to jail, and it's not clear that more cheating makes it more likely to be caught.

How could more cheating avenues not equal a more likelihood of being caught?

Car analogy--I never had to take my 1976 Olds Cutlass in because the key fob got out of sync or because the touchscreen got fried or the electronic power steering module shorted or... or .. or

More points of failure = more failure.

Is a 76 olds the car to use to make a point about reliability?

Not regarding the paintjob, certainly.

People making most money _playing_ poker are really really good players that get invited to games with the wealthy people. This takes both poker skills, social skills (being entertaining) and potentially doing some occasional "fun" (incorrect) plays.

They are not the best poker players in the world. Best poker players have the misfortune of not being invited to "fun" millionaire games

If you have enough of an edge, the variance is really not that big. The only reason to have high-tech cheating when you already have a table full of fish - is if the people running the scheme are not very good at poker

You can spend the time to learn the odds, and play the odds. Most people don't have even that basic skill.

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.

> why the FBI decided to act now is weird to me

Someone didn't pay a bribe on time?

Or the wrong person lost

think of the spotlight the NBA had because of opening night! Someone in the FBI/admin wanted this news to drop right when the NBA was trying to make a splash and tarnish their new season

Why FBI decided to act now is that they probably ripped off the wrong person...