People used to play poker, and cheat, and the whole thing was illegal.
Now, people play poker, and cheat, and they want the government to police their poker games and make sure they're fair.
Complete waste of resources.
I think arresting people for cheating legitimizes backroom / mafia gambling. All the other rings (and those left from this one) can say "Look, those other guys got arrested. The law protects you. We don't want that to happen to us. Our game is definitely fair." Of course, they too are cheating.
The only reason the FBI cares here is probably because one of the victims had pull. If you or I get cheated, the FBI won't care about that.
Operating a business that defrauds people is the domain of government enforcement.
I think you’re trying to reduce this to some sort of small scale friendly poker game between friends. It was not. It was an organized crime business operation that was systematically committing fraud.
Fraud is illegal and within scope of government enforcement.
The state / society needs to enforce a basic level of trust for Business A to buy widgets from Business B, and for Customer C to be employed, etc.
Betting on sports / poker / etc. is not part of that. Nobody is creating anything of value when you spin the roulette wheel. At best, the house wins and most players lose... and that is a harm to society. At worst, the house cheats or some subset of players cheat, and most players lose... and that too is a harm to society. (Edit: At worse worst, it leads to violence, extortion, etc...)
Gambling does not deserve the legitimacy of being policed.
Disagree, this case demonstrates the exact opposite -- you think your underground game is legit because there's celebrities playing? Think again, it's a far more sophisticated scam operation than you could imagine.
> The only reason the FBI cares here is probably because one of the victims had pull.
Again, I doubt it. Likely it's because the mafia is involved, and according to the indictment "the defendants and their co-conspirators used threats of force and violence to secure the repayment of debts from illegal poker games."
If you run a Jimmy John’s, most of your customers will pay with credit cards. Everything runs through banks. You can’t launder that easily. It’s all traceable. It’s all taxable.
Run a poker operation and you can get your marks to give you crypto, cash, or small transfers.
$7 million in pure cash and crypto proceeds from a poker game is a lot more valuable than $7 million in revenue from a sandwich shop for an organized crime operation.
You don't need to launder it, it was acquired legally
Nothing about this story makes sense other other than as yet another headline to try to get people talking about something other than Epstein.
Did illegal gambling take place? I’m sure. Were 4 different crime families investing significant resources to take home barely $1m/year? I’m extremely skeptical and given this is coming from Kash “I always look like I just did a line of coke” Patel, I’d say it’s more likely than not we’re getting incomplete, if not bad information
https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/wells-farg...
No, if you personally run a poker game in your house and cheat your friends the government doesn’t care. The FBI isn’t going to be interested.
If you join the mafia and run an organized crime ring that operates poker games as a business which systematically defrauds people for large amounts of money and funnels the proceeds to organized crime through money laundering operations, the FBI will be interested.
If you look at this story and only see “some people cheated at a poker game” you’re missing the real story. This was a full on organized crime business operation
So, their cheating was organized and systematic? Yeah, you can't really cheat consistently without having a scheme.
Did anyone really think the mafia were running fair backroom poker games?
edit: now I think of it: if the cloth is thin enough you don't even need near-IR. Old fashioned IR camera's (those without any fancy filter) from the '00 showed though some relatively thin opaque synthetic material with a tiny IR source so ...
Terahertz radiation is used in airports with (arguable) safety and efficacy. the resolution is sufficient to read protest statements written under a passengers shirt in metallic ink. I wonder if it could read cards should they be specially crafted similarly.
Sounds like FBI invented this very stupid/confusing name for the story when they could have used much something much better and clearer. X-ray really has nothing to do with this.
The table had a bunch of IR emitters pointed up built into the supports holding the table surface but they were at least two feet away and well-obscured into the table leg design by more normal-seeming smooth plastic I associate with being IR-transparent. Of course, if you suspect the use of IR, it's quite easy to detect with your camera phone. There was a camera hidden into the middle of the table supports looking up which transmitted the image wirelessly to a monitor nearby. My own face-down playing cards were visible on the camera plain as day, so it doesn't require special cards.
Interestingly, the magic distributor showing it wasn't giving out any info on who made it, what it cost or when it might be available. They just said they were "showing it to gauge interest" and might carry it at some point in the future. They're a large, long-time, reputable distributor of other people's products so I don't think they were involved in creating it. It hasn't made an appearance at subsequent conventions, so they must have decided it wouldn't be popular with magicians - which makes perfect sense. It would have been expensive and pretty technically involved for a limited-use magic prop. Good magicians have a many easier and cheaper ways to learn the identity of hidden cards :-). But the fact such a thick, textured, optically opaque surface could be IR transparent was pretty nifty.
As a former magician I was surprised to read the gang was using 'reader' cards (backs marked with ink visible to special glasses). No one uses those anymore as there are so many better ways to do the same thing. Seems like this gang was just into various tech toys and kind of lazy. In reality, once you control the environment, cards and have confederates in the game - cheating to win is trivial without any tech if you know what you're doing.
Honestly this is the first “advanced” mafia scheme I’ve heard of in a while.
Last time I heard about a mafia crime it was a very sloppy hit that sounded more like what you hear from teenagers in Chicago shooting at each other.
Though tbf it could easily have always been like that and I’m just blinded my media bias about a group of people I’ve never known form a time I’ve never known.
Just stick everything in the S&P 500?
Yeah but that's friends of the emperor, not organized crime (although granted, the distinction between these two groups is getting smaller by the day).
Organized crime? That money is literally everywhere. Restaurants, real estate, cars, the stock markets... the only place you'll rarely spot it is, ironically, gambling, way too many chances of getting caught on a paper trail. A lot of it is also invested in art pieces stored in one tax haven/freeport or another, really easy to launder money or evade taxes.
Definitely a lot of work but that seems like a half decent payday to me.
Just extorting Chauncey Billips seems like a better ROI than the whole caper if you’ve got some hold on him.
The article says "A cut OF THE PROFITS went to those who helped in the plot," implying that the $7m wasn't truly profit but actually revenue? The writing is unclear to me. I'm not sure if this is before paying out to 30+ people over several years, or after, but article implies before, that it's how much was taken from victims. That I think makes the difference on whether or not it was a decent payday. The profit would be how much supposedly went to fund their other operations, which the article does allege some went to.
Same reason there are people out there who shoplift even though they don’t need what they’re grabbing. The thrill of the act.
And that they just didn't want to operate it at a loss.
The poker game itself in high-roller situations could be a million plus per night depending on the stakes.
Then there's the whole "you owe the Mafia" angle with NBA players and coaches. It's a pretty clear line to the Mafia making tens of millions of dollars on rigged NBA games.
Besides the fact they were often targeting pros - this was reported on and known by LA area pros for at least two years now. why the FBI decided to act now is weird to me. I can’t stress enough that in the pro scene this was common knowledge. years old podcast clips are coming up talking about it.
source: https://sports.yahoo.com/nba/breaking-news/article/professio...
The political prosecution vendettas are dumb but here in LA they are disrupting “Armenian” crime rings
Normally I'd agree, but this administration is known for pushing to release public distractions whenever they can.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Some pitchers even said they would deliberately perform a "tell" that opponents had identified then throw a different pitch.
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.
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.
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
Someone didn't pay a bribe on time?
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.
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.
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).
Probably don't have time to play so many hands with you that the better player is statistically guaranteed to win, either.
The scam was that the criminal element would HELP the NBA players cheat at poker, and then blackmail them with that info to change the outcomes of NBA games, which they were betting on, from which they could derive greater scale of winnings.
However, if you assume they were feeding the information to the platforms...
There is also the very strong possibility that they are colluding with the online betting platforms in some way. Coupled with the fact that any difference-maker athlete is getting a huge salary, and blackmail/extortion becomes your best option to getting one on your side.
Second, the FBI is targeting real world Mafia members, who will typically be the bookies taking action from others. If they know in advance, through blackmail or collusion that an NBA player or coach will throw a game, they can exploit this versus their entire betting pool for massive wins against the suckers placing bets with them.
I dealt with a low-tech breach at one of the hospitals I worked for. The criminal worked in HIM, and used paper and pencil to note specific info about specific types of patients. Since they worked in HIM, it was expected for them to view many medical records in a day and no app detects paper/pencil, so quite clever so far.
Ultimately, they used this info to file false tax returns to steal the refunds.
The problem? They filed 881 false tax returns annnnnnd used the same address for all of them. DOH.
They were busted/arrested and off to jail they went.
Clever, right until the end, then abysmally stupid.
If they were smart people, they wouldn't do the crimes in the first place.
There are tons of smart people committing crimes. The levels of Intelligence, success, luck, greed, and morals can co-exist in every possible combination within one human.
You would be surprised at how good some very wealthy people are at poker. There is a lot of variance in the game and they don't want that. In fact what they want is _exactly_ wealthy people who are quite good at poker because they make big bets and you can reliably bust them out on _one hand_ if you set it up properly after playing a fair game all night. And the great thing about that is that they feel like the night overall was fair and fun, because it was. You just cheat them on one or two hands at the most.
People who are bad at poker can also be quite difficult to reliably take money from fairly because they play randomly and sometimes win huge pots out of complete luck. For one thing, they are near impossible to bluff out of hands, so you end up having to fold a lot more than normal because you can only play with strong hands against them. If you are interested in making a lot of money, you certainly want those strong hands more often than normal.
It's not about winning mote on each hand. It's about keeping the target happy as money drains away. And that was their aim.
By controlling the whole game, they were able to psychologically manipulate the situation. The target was at tbe table with someone they respected. Saw others win and lose large amounts of money. Sometimes won themselves.
I remember as a kid, I'd play battleship with my siblings. I was really good at it, they were not. They hated when it was obvious that I let them win but also hated when I beat them badly so I found a way to make the game go longer. Often we'd play on a glass table and I'd "drop" a piece so I could peek under the table and see where their pieces were. I could get a hit and then miss many follow up shots to slowly destroy their ship and give them more time to find and destroy mine. They'd gloat over their hard-fought win but I'd just smile and beat them for real next round. I could have done this without peeking but I wanted to make sure I didn't accidentally play too well.
I doubt the same is true of these Cosa Nostra and NBA guys.
If you get introduced to a 'friendly' game of 5 players there's a good chance that these guys are signalling to each other and basically folding to whoever's got the best hand. You can't win against that. Even if you have 2 new players showing up at a table existing players could worry about collusion.
If you don't have the fancy trappings those guys did it is almost impossible to catch people colluding in poker.
You really don't understand the mind of fraudsters and criminals. The reason they do what they do is because they don't want to "just be better at X than Y" and spend the effort for that, they want to take the shortcut and they think they've found the best shortcut considering their situation.
Once you start to look at what people are doing with that perspective, things will start to make more sense.
That's a big "just".
They were using sports celebrities as the draw to the table, not expert poker players.
Cheating at poker also looks less threatening than playing against an expert, counterintuitively. Someone who cheats can pull out some big wins on some bets that look statistically bad. The target can see this and think the other party is playing poorly (betting on non-obvious hands) but simply getting lucky.
Contrast this with a shrewd expert poker player who will be easier to spot.
They want the target to think the celebrity sports figure is just getting lucky on bad bets, not that they're an expert poker shark who's going to take all of their money.
EDIT: Here's a 2 year old YouTube video from before all of this confirming this https://youtu.be/G-TKR5ca5jI?t=1790 (Skip to 29:50)
Having the cheating poker players look bad is a key part of the scam. It tricks the other players into coming back and betting big.
This is why in the book Molly's Game [0], the author mentions explicitly that she didn't want professionals in her game.
This b/c her game was seen as a game between "regular/amateur" players who just happened to be famous and/or have a lot of money. This was also DESPITE poker professionals both asking her to play AND offering to give her a stake of their winnings.
Granted, certain players (e.g. Tobey Maguire) were MUCH better than the other players but it seems that didn't matter as long as poker wasn't their primary source of income.
Boring pros who play these games straight up and don't "give action" don't get invited back.
This is how you can have some of the best poker players like Tom Dwan get absolutely wiped out while playing against whales in Macau
If you want to see a more recent example of this - the amateur whale Monarch recently took on one of the best cash game heads up players Bjorn Lee. I won't spoil the result because it's highly entertaining and demonstrates how the game works at these stakes:
In Molly's Game, Tobey Maguire was the celebrity shark. (In the movie he was played by Michael Cera). He could easily have been a professional poker player, but he makes way more from acting and he prefers the easy play in private games.
Would love to know more about such a machine, if anyone has any insight. Are these developed underground? How expensive could they be?
If it can efficiently take in a deck of cards and deterministically return a rigged deck in a reasonable amount of time, I would be fascinated at how they solved that problem.
Crazy that there is a USB port exposed outside the machine.
I play private games. At any reasonable stakes electronics have been banned from the room for years now.
For the shuffling machine there is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQ20ilE5DtA
There are _so many_ ways to cheat at poker that you should basically never play a private game outside of close friends.
If you wanted to spend a year or so practicing, you can learn how to do false shuffles and cuts, bottom deals, cold stack a deck etc...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3Mu7jocdew This guy was a professional card cheat for decades before going honest.
As someone who knows a bunch of card tricks myself, I have learned to resist the temptation to do an impromptu 'ambitious card' routine just because a deck of cards and an audience is in front of me before a poker game.
Playing in an actual regulated casino or poker hall eliminates most of the technical risk of a fraudulent shuffle. The risk to the enterprise of losing their gaming license keeps things honest. Imagine the net effect of Bellagio’s shuffling machines or dealers being rigged.
But nothing can eliminate collusion of players. You’re best bet for that is your own self awareness. If your spidey sense is tripping, listen to it.
But I'm provisionally calling BS on the "X-ray table." Based on (admittedly limited) experience with X-ray imaging, I don't believe that X-rays can read ink on playing cards. It would have to be a backscatter machine, which is even less discriminatory than a transmissive machine. Would need to see some evidence that this is possible.
If nothing else, the sheer size and bulk of such a machine renders the concept incredible. If I could build something like that, I wouldn't use it to cheat at cards, I'd sell it to the TSA!
But yeah they surely make much more selling fentanyl.
However, don't overlook the value of $7 million in cash and cryptocurrency. For an organized crime operation that's a lot more valuable than $7 million in revenue from an actual business subject to taxes, business records, and bank tracking. This was an easy way to get millions of hard to trace dollars into accounts they could use.
Think about the crime families as making e.g. 50% money from construction corruption, 40% from drug sales, 5% from extortion… someone has to run the other smaller departments and that is a lot of money for that “Dept Head”. Also from the FBIs perspective they want to unravel conspiracies, often by yanking on one piece of yarn like this one.
Also, they spelled "Bonnano" wrong in that article. It is Bonanno.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonanno_crime_family
Bon Anno = Good Year
https://www.gao.gov/products/t-osi-88-7
https://www.amny.com/news/the-mob-is-making-a-comeback-in-co...
And...
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/donald-trump-crimin...
"One of the key figures involved in these deals has been the Russian-born, mob-linked businessman Felix Sater, who plead guilty to racketeering for his role in a $40 million stock fraud scheme involving the Genovese and Bonanno crime families49 and was convicted of stabbing a man in the face with a broken margarita glass in New York."
"Despite their long association, Trump has repeatedly denied knowing about Sater’s criminal past, notwithstanding the fact that Sater widely represented himself as a Trump associate in business deals."
It sounds like each of them could get at most a six-figure payday out of this. Which is no chump change, to be sure, but it sounds like many of them could have made as much money without the risk of going to jail just by getting a desk job.
Plus, there's no way a conspiracy that big is going to remain secret for long.
Maybe the expected to get away with it for longer and get a bigger payoff. But wow, it seems like a ton of effort.
Usually when they pull out the big piles of drugs for the TVs, I assume that's the tip of the iceberg. So why is it that here, with four families involved, we think the only money they've made is what's been shown to us?
Also, x-ray tables, rigged card shufflers, and funny glasses don't necessarily sound like they're the most expensive things in the world.
So my guess is...
Combined with these fellas other hustles this was probably a nice chunk of change to bring in for a relatively low amount of work post initial set up. I mean, you're sitting around playing rigged poker with a bunch of millionaires and basketball players or whatever. Probably having some drinks, I'd imagine there's pretty ladies around, cigars, cocaine. Whatever.
Sounds more relaxing than extorting deli owners block by block like all those movies about the 70s show.
And the best part? The people you're robbing are probably much less likely to resort to violence as recourse.
Almost nothing about crime is indicative of an intelligent mind that could be put to good use. It's a lot of lowlife midwits who are bitter they have no chance to compete or associate with real players.
The blazers didn't really listen to Dame at all, and the GM has known Chauncey for more than 30 years.
At the time of Chauncey being hired, his only coaching experience was ~1 year of being an assistant coach.
They didn't do any search at all, and just went straight to hiring Chauncey.
This partially contributed to Dame leaving - it also didn't help that Chauncey and Dame didn't quite get along (and also deciding to bench him in the last 10 games of the season to tank).
I'm honestly fine with players being hired as head coaches. Before looking into it I thought it was totally fine with Chauncey, especially given his track record as a leader on the Pistons and being a phenomenal classic point guard.
The main issue for me is just telling people you're going to do a search... and then not doing it.
- high likelihood you lose money
- the point of the game is to lie to friends and strangers
- you're stuck sitting at a table and following rules for hours
- the only victory condition is that you take money from other people
When I play games like this, I don't bet more than I can afford to lose - and paying $20 to sit at a table with friends playing poker is actually cheaper than going out to a bar with them.
> - the point of the game is to lie to friends and strangers
Are there any games with hidden information that you find interesting? Or any competitive games at all? Things like Werewolf, or Go Fish, or Settlers of Catan? For that matter, even in a game without hidden information, like chess, you're still trying to outwit your opponents.
> - you're stuck sitting at a table and following rules for hours
I mean, you can leave if you're not having fun.
> - the only victory condition is that you take money from other people
But you also spend time with friends.
The amount of money involved is small compared to the incomes of those playing, where most players have the expectation that they won't get money back and that is fine for the enjoyment they get out of the game, and the pot isn't big enough to be worth cheating about. Everyone puts in the same amount of money. You play texas hold 'em no limit with escalating blinds starting with a pretty big stack of chips, just like a real tournament. When people are out, they can't buy back in. You play until everyone is out, and the Top N players get some money back.
Lots of fun games involve lying, but you can play all night long and never tell a single lie and still win. Your only necessary verbs in a game of poker are "Call, raise, fold". Everything else is optional. If you bet big on a hand, you aren't saying anything about what is in your hand, lie or not. All the interpretation of what that means is in your opponents head. Lots of very good poker players don't talk about the hands at all.
My family quite commonly plays Texas Hold 'em for _no money at all_, everyone just gets a stack of chips.
Would you pay for an experience somewhere and then call it a loss because your bank balance is now lower?
It’s not lying, it’s a game and everyone knows the rules.
Cant the victory condition be… having fun? Why so transactional
It's deception at a minimum. Lying could have a stricter definition depending on who you're talking about.
There's something very satisfying about making thousands of decisions that have a positive expected value and seeing the math win throughout the variance, resulting in a proven edge.
Like anything in life, it's fun to get good at something and at some point it's beyond the math and theory, it feels like the cards become transparent at times, you just have a gut feeling that this hand, this person is trying to bluff. It can be based on what you know about them or just how fast they clicked or their bet size, but this guy wants you to fold so you'll call with almost nothing and still win.
But overall as a profession fuck poker, you don't contribute anything to the world.
There’s a approximately a 45% chance of losing money on any given day, even for the best players, but it decreases over a big sample. It’s definitely a marathon, not a sprint. That’s true of most things worth doing though.
It’s not lying when it’s part of the game, and kinda silly to view it that way. Is it lying by omission to not tell your chess opponent your strategy?
You are stuck sitting at a table, that’s true. But you choose when you’re there and the only rules really are basic civility so I never found that part difficult.
Money is the scoreboard. Everyone who sits down knows that. I’d argue it’s a lot less bad than how most tech companies make money these days. I’m not selling anyone’s data without them knowing about or understanding it. I’m just taking money from a guy who is trying to take my money. We both voluntarily put the money up to be taken and can stop doing so at any point.
Back in my day most cash games were limit hold’em (it’s been awhile) and you could pretty easily get to making $50 an hour beating up an amateurs. That was equivalent to about $90/hr today which is pretty great if you’re a young kid playing a game you enjoy.
The buy in would be something kind of low for everyone playing, like $20. No repeat buy-ins. So the loss if you didn't win wasn't much, and the payout wasn't exactly life changing but like take your spouse out to a nice date night with the winnings kind of thing. I'd often spend $20 or so doing some other kind of event with friends from time to time anyways, so its not like its some large amount being spent on entertainment. Paying for a batting cage for the evening or go-karts or renting a karaoke booth is also a 100% chance of losing money, should we also never do these things?
There's lots of deception to be played in tons of card games and board games, I don't know why poker would be held as something odd. Any game where you're holding a secret hand pretty much involves some amount of hidden motivations. One might also bluff in Catan or deceive their opponents in their strategy, should we also avoid playing that game? I'll try and hide my routes from everyone else when I'm playing ticket to ride, is that bad?
I'm stuck sitting at a table and following rules for hours. Like any other board or card game. People are stuck sitting at a table and following rules for hours playing tabletop role-playing games as well. To me, it was a chance to catch up with these friends, which at that point in time in our lives catching up at the poker game was kind of the big quarterly check-in with each other. I loved spending the time with these friends, sitting around the table and sharing life with each other, often also partaking in meals and drinks.
The victory condition is winning the pot, yes. Which, as mentioned, for at least in my games wasn't exactly some life changing amount of money one was taking from friends. We all went in knowing we'd probably be out the $20 in the end, and in the end the winner would have a small amount of money as a little bonus. And as mentioned, most of us would use it to take our significant others out on a date the next night.
I honestly don't see it as any different from spending a night playing any other board game or roleplaying game with friends, other than with a small bit of money involved as well. Obviously, other people go way harder with this gambling, which quickly just becomes an addition to the high of winning.
- 100% likelihood you lose money
- the point of the game is fly down a mountain and not hit any trees (about 45 more deaths per year than poker in the US)
- you're stuck sitting in a lift or a line and following rules for hours
- there are no victory conditions
But I think Sisyphus must have gotten at least some satisfaction for almost reaching the top.
Paying money for a service and losing money gambling are two different things.
> the point of the game is fly down a mountain and not hit any trees (about 45 more deaths per year than poker in the US)
It's not a game. It's an activity.
> you're stuck sitting in a lift or a line and following rules for hours
Not the whole time.
> there are no victory conditions
Right, because it's not a game.
Reason is rarely our motive.
(Reason can be how you get from a motive to a chosen action to fulfill that motive, though.)
The point of the game isn’t to lie to friends. Is this how you see the point of chess or sports in general? Or any game where revealing your strategy would diminish your chances of winning?
I don’t think your comment is very HN typical, but it does indicate some other qualities you may have - not bad or good, but not typical.
When it comes to lying, in the real world I tend to be hypermoral and honest to a fault. It’s fun to have a game structure where dishonesty and aggression are acceptable.
Another game that's worth checking out if some of this sounds interesting but you really don't like gambling is "Blood on the Clocktower". It's a social logic and deduction party game. There's chance, bluffing, incomplete information, trying to figure out what other players have, etc. It's completely different, but it can scratch some of the same itches and it's a blast to play. My friends and I play it with our kids.
Blood on the Clocktower is great! My 15yo son is always trying to get a group of 8+ together for a game.
Came here to recommend Skull, a quick and easy to learn bluffing game, of which the designer said he was aiming for 'the feelings of poker without the money or luck' and I would say succeeded.
Poker is a lot like business distilled down. The player is managing resources and deciding where to use them while dealing with incomplete information.
> - high likelihood you lose money
The game is similar to chess when played at a moderate to high level.
Poker doesn't require lying or table talk. Bluffing is rule-legal strategic deception expressed through betting. More like a feint in sports than cheating.
If "sitting at a table following rules" is the issue, that's true of most games. And formats vary: many are short and cash games are leave-anytime.
At one job, we used it as a social time, 6 to 15 people from work (had to run two tables for those big nights) got together Saturday night, bbq'd some food, maybe watched a game on tv if there was a good one, and played a friendly game. Had a few drinks and enjoyed the company, while cards were played in the background.
Mildly competitive, but it was a flat $40 buy in with no more money allowed so the stakes were never incredibly high.
At another company, one guy in particular was the driver to get games going and he always wanted the stakes too high (for my taste) with lots of money moving around. I only went to two of those, wasn't my style.
I'm not sure if this reflects common usage in English but in Italian, Cosa Nostra is just a synonym for Mafia, not the name of a specific family. Also, in Italian it's never preceded by the article "La".
The term was coined by the FBI specifically to make that geographic distinction.
Is this a case of bureaucracy forcing people into illegality?
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-42157129
I couldn't find anything about how the cheat actually worked, though. In Mongolia they found radioactive dice at an airport: https://conferences.iaea.org/event/16/contributions/7187/att...
But then you take that person out of the "hood," and give him a $1M/yr sports contract, and the mentality doesn't necessarily go away. It's still about the hustle. They might not stop to consider that they don't NEED to hustle anymore. And they're probably also surrounded now by grifters/"friends"/family who do still need/want to hustle, and essentially using these guys.
It is sad.
I think the simpler answer is that some people are especially poor at risk vs reward analysis. Others enjoy the thrill of getting away with something. It's been 30+ years since Chauncey Billups has had to worry about money. I think your point about friends around them is very fair though. Lots of these guys have hangers on with their hands out and despite making lots of money in their careers they cant just give cash to everyone. So I can imagine them thinking "hey place a bet on my under for the next game because I'm going to go out early" seems like a low risk, not so evil way to put a few dollars in a friend's pocket.
* The casino takes a rake, so you lose money every hand, but you only win when the fish bets and loses. You’re also expected to tip the dealer
* Everything is on camera and dealers remember players, so there will be a lot of witnesses and evidence
* Seats often open one at a time, so you’d potentially lose money at other tables waiting to play together. Or, you all show up at once and ask to start a new table together, which would get suspicious.
* If you don’t know the fish’s cards, there’s still a chance you lose and lose big
1) Most card rooms these days are 8 or 9 players, so your team would need to be at least 3, maybe 4 to really swing the odds in your favor.
2) You need a subtle but effective way to signal to your team the relative strength of your hand. Think baseball signals, but way more low key. "If I touch my watch, I have an Ace" etc. You'll probably want to mix these up across the hours or days of play.
3) Seats typically do open one at a time, and you want to trickle in your team to avoid suspicion. Higher stakes games, like $5-10, where there are thousands of dollars in front of most players are your goal, and good news is that these are typically more rare so there may be only one table running. Your teammates will have to wait it out, but once at the table, they can stay for hours.
4) You'll never know exactly what your targets are holding, but knowing that your teammates folded a flush draw for example can help you narrow your opponents cards to a smaller range of possibilities. You'll want to position your teammates around the table to create "squeeze" situations where two of the team can trap a target in between.
It takes some creative subtlety, but it can be very hard to impossible to detect collusion in live games.
This appears to be the / a source for the devices in question. It's worth reading over the technical details of how it all works. It's both terrifying and impressive. Cards can be identified using a barcode encoded on their thin edge from meters away.
Mistletoe•12h ago
prodigycorp•12h ago
Everything Silver did grew revenue fourfold. By every metric, he’s a good commissioner. And yet I don’t know a single person in real life who actually likes the NBA. People I talk to find the NBA anywhere from inaccessible to an outright turnoff, due to load management (and player pay), tanking, a glacial pace of play, and so on. And so the only way I can engage the game is by listening to podcasts about it. Podcasts that now belch gambling ads at me constantly.
codyb•11h ago
Let's go Jays! Looking forward to this World Series.
Also not a fan of the constant inundation with gambling ads even if they have literally no interest to me. Just seems like a net negative for a society that realized cigarette ads are bad, but can't seem to figure that out for alcohol or gambling.
At least the public education campaigns have started earlier, I definitely see ads talking about where to get help if you're having an issue fairly frequently.
whycome•7h ago
codyb•6h ago
But it's also important to remember just how successful the smoking psa campaign has been. Especially given the cost! Rates have fallen dramatically, just by telling people to "watch out!" in public spaces that reach young folks ears.
whycome•4h ago
We could be doing equivalent things for gambling (and we have in the past) so this erosion will have consequences for decades.
svachalek•11h ago
bluedino•9h ago
NFL Network, ESPN, Prime, Peacock, YouTube...
rkomorn•9h ago
Of course the NFL isn't gonna turn down $1B per year from Amazon for TNF. They get ~$2B from CBS and Fox each for the combined 10 Sunday games, then another couple billion from NBC for one Sunday night game, and another couple billion from ESPN for Monday night.
I think it's unlikely a single broadcaster would spend $12+B/year for exclusive rights to all games.
prodigycorp•8h ago
rkomorn•8h ago
The number of games you can watch on network TV is decreasing slowly but steadily.
typpilol•10h ago
It was crazy
drdec•10h ago
You are clearly referring to calendar time, in which case the NHL season is longer
deelowe•12h ago
sojournerc•11h ago
https://open.spotify.com/episode/3LUPh7waoWtydoiwjEgP16?si=-...
tclancy•11h ago
sojournerc•11h ago
xbar•10h ago