The Cheating Scandal That Ripped the Poker World Apart

 

MIKE POSTLE WAS on another tear. The moonfaced 42-year-old was deep into a marathon poker session at Stones Gambling Hall, a boxy glass-and-steel casino wedged between Interstate 80 and a Popeye's in suburban Sacramento. The September 21, 2019, game, which Stones was broadcasting to audiences via YouTube and Twitch, had attracted several top players to the casino's card room, a gaudily lit space done up like an Old West saloon. One pro from Las Vegas had flown in on a chartered jet with $50,000 in cash. Yet, as usual when he appeared on Stones' livestream, Postle was shredding the competition; he was the evening's chips leader by a comfortable margin.

Five hours into the show, a curious hand took shape. Like all games of Texas Hold 'Em, the most widely televised form of poker, the action began with each player receiving two face-down cards the hole cards. Five community cards were then to be dealt face-up in three rounds, with opportunities for betting in between. The first face-up batch, called the flop, would consist of three cards. After that, the dealer would add a single card “the turn” followed by one more “the river”. Players would vie for the pot by assembling the best five-card hands using their hole cards and the shared array.

Even before the flop, though, seven of the nine players chose to fold. Postle, who'd been dealt the queen of diamonds and jack of hearts, pressed forward with the hand. His sole opponent would be Marle Cordeiro, a Las Vegas-based pro with a large social media following.
Postle, his white baseball cap nearly concealing his eyes, clutched his right shoulder with his left hand as he mulled his options. Most seasoned players would call or raise in his situation: The statistical likelihood that his hand would yield a favorable monetary outcome was high enough to make proceeding to the river an easy choice. But Postle had an unorthodox style of play, and he often made decisions that his rivals deemed either wildly aggressive or inexplicably meek. Those instincts had served him well in recent months: He was in the midst of an epic winning streak a “heater” that had turned him into a local folk hero. He'd become such a force on Stones' livestream, in fact, that casino regulars had taken to calling him the Messiah and even God.
Postle spent half a minute in quiet contemplation, almost motionless in his black leather chair. Then, pursing his lips in resignation, he chucked his cards forward to fold.
Postle's surrender, though counterintuitive, turned out to be a canny move because Cordeiro was holding “the nuts” poker slang for the most valuable hand. Her hidden hole cards were the 10 of diamonds and queen of spades, so she'd already secured a queen-high straight before the river; she had a 96 percent chance of maintaining her edge once all the cards were dealt.
Kelly's co-commentator, 42-year-old Veronica Brill, did not share his sense of awe. She had been observing Postle up close for a while, both as an opponent at the table and a broadcaster, and she'd come to believe there was a nefarious reason for his success. For months she'd resisted mentioning her suspicions on the livestream, hoping that Stones would handle the matter behind the scenes. But the fold against Cordeiro struck her as so fishy that she could no longer keep quiet. Brill leaned back, gently shook her head, and took a half-step toward calling out God.
Late that night, as she drove in silence toward her Bay Area home, Brill turned the broadcast over and over in her mind. Her insinuation about Postle, though subtle, had the potential to cause a stir. Fellow players would gossip that jealousy had driven her to smear a more accomplished rival, a decent man who'd just come through a harrowing family drama. Gliding west on Interstate 80, Brill realized she had no choice but to commit one of poker's cardinal sins.
Everyone was thus surprised when Postle began to dominate the casino's livestreamed Texas Hold 'Em games starting in July 2018. The once middling Postle suddenly turned formidable, even taking thousands of dollars off some big-time players during their swings through Northern California. (Stones is not ordinarily a mecca for high rollers, but its popular livestreamed games occasionally draw big names from Las Vegas and points south.) As Postle's heater stretched over months, Stones' broadcast team did its best to turn him into a poker celebrity. They created a series of graphics designed to hype his talents: One was a mock book cover that listed Postle as the author of a guide to “crushing souls and running pure”; another showed Postle's face superimposed over that of Jesus.
Brill, a self-described analytics geek whose day job is building medical software, was among those who got clobbered by Postle at the table, and she served as a livestream commentator during much of his streak too. By early 2019, she had seen enough to surmise that Postle's success didn't make mathematical sense. She thought he was winning far too often, particularly for a player whose strategy didn't jibe with game theory optimal, or GTO, the prevailing strategy in Texas Hold 'Em today.
The fundamental idea behind GTO is that there's a single best decision for every imaginable betting scenario a decision that will maximize a player's winnings over time. In any given hand, a player who perfectly executes game theory optimal may still lose; there's only so much you can do if your opponent lucks into the nuts. But in the course of thousands of hours of poker, a player who adheres to GTO at every moment is virtually guaranteed to come out ahead.
Tremendous effort is required to develop the ability to know which single move to make in the millions of possible betting situations. There are 2,598,960 possible hands in five-card poker, a figure that vastly understates the game's intricacy. Players must also have a feel for how their opponents are likely to react to each gambit. To hone their GTO chops, top pros spend hours a day analyzing past hands with software that pinpoints the precise moments when they flubbed a probability calculation.

The flop contained the 8 of spades, 9 of diamonds, and jack of diamonds a promising trio for Postle, who now had a pair (jacks) and was just a 10 away from a queen-high straight 8–9-10-jack-queen. There were two shared cards left to be dealt. The turn produced the relatively useless 4 of spades, after which Cordeiro placed a $600 bet.

Justin Kelly, one of the livestream's two commentators, gushed over the genius of Postle's eccentric play. “This is what I'm talking about people!” he exclaimed from his broadcast booth across the room. “Postle takes the weirdest lines and gets people to lay down huge hands all the time. But when he has top pair and a straight draw, he is able to just lay down against the nuts. Postle is just like a freak! He's just a freak of nature.”텍사스홀덤사이트

“It doesn't make sense,” she said, her soft monotone tinged with mockery. “It's like he knows. It doesn't make sense. It's weird.” Sounding caught off guard by his cohost's skeptical remarks, Kelly continued effusively “Absolute insanity, guys!” before managing to change the subject.

LIKE MANY OTHERS who spent huge chunks of time at Stones, Brill had long considered Postle a friend. A generous soul who exuded a puckish charm, Postle was the sort who'd pay for everyone's drinks while regaling the bar with bawdy tales. (He was particularly fond of a story about getting banned from Caesars Palace over a misunderstanding involving a sex worker.) But up until the summer of 2018, few of the pro players at Stones thought much of his poker prowess. “He was playing well enough to support himself, it seemed,” says Jake Rosenstiel, a Sacramento pro. “But none of us thought Mike was this great poker player.”