Poker fraud used X-ray tables, high-tech glasses and NBA players
222 comments
·October 24, 2025QuadmasterXLII
JohnMakin
“just play better poker” like that’s an easy thing to do in a game of chance and incomplete information, with variance having years or decades long tails. not to mention it’s an unsolved game, so “better” poker doesn’t even really have a set definition and depends on tons of variables. and they literally knew what hole cards were coming - that’s vastly more of an edge than playing “better poker” than someone.
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...
otherme123
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.
jimbokun
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.
ecshafer
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.
mattmaroon
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.
_the_inflator
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.
duped
The FBI is also struggling for legitimacy at this point in history
serf
>“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.
JohnMakin
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).
HelloMcFly
> 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.
darepublic
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
yuliyp
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.
jimbokun
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.
dktp
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
binarymax
You can spend the time to learn the odds, and play the odds. Most people don't have even that basic skill.
robocat
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.
dboreham
> why the FBI decided to act now is weird to me
Someone didn't pay a bribe on time?
Scoundreller
Or the wrong person lost
bobafett-9902
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
CGMthrowaway
I read a theory that the poker winnings were not the scam.
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.
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prodigycorp
imo that doesn't make sense. All the online betting platforms will cut off the sharps. If you are net profitable and you make too much money from them, you will get banned.
breakpointalpha
First, people who are banned from online bookies use "horses" or other not-banned players to place bets for them.
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.
dec0dedab0de
Well first of all, organized crime does not need an online platform to profit off of fixing professional sports games. There are still plenty of bookies running around offering better odds than draftkings. Though, if they really wanted to, they could make smaller bets under hundreds of accounts.
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.
Aurornis
Organized crime operations have no problem getting a lot of people involved in their schemes. They wouldn't use one account. They'd spread the bets over a large number of people and accounts and also possibly sell the information.
skeeter2020
You're focusing on a game with player vs. house odds, like a casino. Online betting platforms do offer some of these games but they are clearing markets for gambling; they manipualte the odds to arbitrage wagering and take a cut regardless of the outcome. It's all about volume. If you make a huge wager on a long-odds parlay, they no longer look the same for the next (or other side) of that specific (or components of the) wager.
ClarityJones
Yeah, that would limit the scale if they were betting against the platforms.
However, if you assume they were feeding the information to the platforms...
evan_
with that level of sophistication I’m sure they’re not using the inside info to place bets on retail platforms.
im3w1l
An organization could place the bets through different people each time.
im3w1l
5d-poker.
alexpotato
> Once you’ve convinced a wealthy person to play at your underground poker table, you’ve already won - just play better poker than them,
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.
btilly
The trick isn't winning when the celebrity is at the table, it is in getting the celebrity to the table, then keepong the victim there.
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.
Sammi
Ooooh you use all these tools in order to _control_ the game, so that is is as fun as possible. So the victim still loses, as they would without the tools, but now they're happy as it happens.
morkalork
Exactly, to a pro poker player a celebrity or athlete looks like an easy target. Someone with a lot of money, likes to play for fun, and doesn't have the same skills as a pro. They are at the table to bait the pros. But now the problem is you need those same players to win in order to extract any money from the game, hence the high-tech cheating.
dfxm12
You don't want to extract more money per hand, you want to build up the fish (check the text message screenshots in the article) and then strike at the right point. The x rays remove the luck from those big hands.
SaltyBackendGuy
Exactly. You want zero risk asymmetric payouts.
Aurornis
> just play better poker than them
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.
CaptainOfCoit
> just play better poker than them
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.
BurningFrog
The self made ultra rich are quite smart on average.
I doubt the same is true of these Cosa Nostra and NBA guys.
everdrive
This is probably a very HN comment, but I cannot imagine why people actually like gambling and poker:
- 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
jm4
Poker is a great game. There are so many aspects to it where you can go down a rabbit hole of strategy to improve your game - there's math, making decisions with incomplete information, deduction, reading people, all kinds of non-verbal communication, etc. Although there's chance involved, it is undoubtedly a skill game. The gambling is one of the unfortunate aspects, but it just doesn't play the same without some money involved. You can get around that a little bit with house games where everyone throws in $20 or small buy-in sit and go games at a casino.
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.
captn3m0
There's also Match Poker, which makes a Team Sport out of Poker and removes all the gambling and chance - https://matchpokerfed.org/match-poker/
capncleaver
Yes. See 'Thinking in Bets' by Annie Duke for a good summary of why Poker is interesting / useful. World is Casino!
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.
rideontime
"the only victory condition is that you take money from other people" is also why I cannot be interested in day trading or cryptocurrency speculation, and will likely die penniless.
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mattmaroon
As a former poker pro: I hated gambling, I just was willing to do it when I had an edge and at poker I had an edge. I almost never gambled at anything else unless I was getting an edge from promotions. Still don’t.
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.
CGMthrowaway
This tracks. Not a pro here, but if you have a 5% edge at a $20 8-seat home game your EV is BEST CASE maybe $20/hour. Which is good for entertainment but not much else
mattmaroon
Well, if you’re paying NL against people who don’t know what they’re doing, your win rate should be much higher. But yeah you can only take however much money is on the table so nobody makes a living playing the really low stakes.
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.
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metabagel
Playing poker on a more than casual basis seems like work. But, then again so does something like Farmville. Gotta keep grinding.
xandrius
With that mindset literally anything is unfun. Do you enjoy anything in particular that does not produce value? If so, you're also very likely losing something, stuck somewhere, etc.
floam
You don’t just get to beat and be handed currency from people; you get to keep their money (now it is your money!)
matwood
I don't consider poker gambling (that would be something like craps which I also find fun). It is a skill you can build and not necessarily lose money. I also don't consider it lying when everyone at the table agrees to how the game is played. Playing 'good' poker requires folding a lot and it can get boring sitting at a table.
Poker is a lot like business distilled down. The player is managing resources and deciding where to use them while dealing with incomplete information.
MetaMalone
“An X-ray poker machine was employed to read facedown cards and a rigged card-shuffling machine was also used in the plot, prosecutors say.”
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.
jjmarr
Many shuffle machines read all the cards, do the shuffle in software, then sort the cards accordingly. Here's a guy on Wired showing how to rig a poker game:
ogig
The rigged card-shuffling machine method is documented in this recent video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQ20ilE5DtA
MetaMalone
Thanks for the link. So basically, you are at a private game and if everyone has their phones out (and you are also an unsuspecting idiot), you are screwed.
Crazy that there is a USB port exposed outside the machine.
8organicbits
Slight of hand? You put the deck to be sorted at the "in" side, the machine shuffles it, then it ejects a different rigged deck.
mikkupikku
Maybe it doesn't return rigged orders, but records the order of the output deck with high speed cameras.
empath75
There's a device that can scan the _sides_ of specially marked cards and tell you the complete deck order.
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.
koolba
> There are _so many_ ways to cheat at poker that you should basically never play a private game outside of close friends.
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.
jjmarr
Regulated casinos take a certain % of every pot and players don't want to give up $5 or $10 a pot to pay for regulations/oversight/etc.
bobafett-9902
All this potential jail time and reputation lost for $7 mil stolen over multiple years total??? And how many criminals split those winnings?? So the take home pay for an NBA HOF was like under $1 mil? Billups just signed an extension as an NBA head coach making well over that amount EVERY YEAR. Just sad imo
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Nifty3929
I think what happens is that many of these professional athletes grow up in communities and circumstances where it's just normal and expected to be "hustling," getting away with things, and avoiding the law. Wrong, but maybe understandable under those circumstances (poverty primarily).
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.
cattown
Doesn’t sound that profitable to me. $7m is a lot of money. But not that much after building all of that custom tech, setting up a dedicated space, training and paying a whole bunch of people to run these games. Then whatever’s left over gets split between multiple crime families? Seems like a lot of work.
Aurornis
This is likely one part of a larger operation including blackmail opportunities, as others have mentioned.
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.
ranadomo
as others have speculated, the real money was probably in blackmail and rigged sports betting.
dec0dedab0de
That was my first thought, especially because they could get similar results with a marked deck. To me, this leads more credibility to it being part of a bigger operation.
mattmaroon
Well it’s kind of an annuity. A million a year ain’t nothing for a small operation.
But yeah they surely make much more selling fentanyl.
chidog99
Chauncey Billups was mentioned by name 2 years ago for running scam high stakes poker games [26:41] https://www.youtube.com/live/G-TKR5ca5jI?si=TBsKcTi2ZG1-h1G0...
comrade1234
X-ray table? That can't be good for your balls or ovaries.
consp
Looks like near-IR of some sort but media calls everything x-ray since it's what people know. X-Rays would go through cards anyway. But you'd get nice pictures of peoples hands though, and cataracts after a night of play.
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 ...
runjake
From the photos it looks like regular IR photos to me. Also note you don’t see the bones in the hands at the top of the photo.
consp
Yes, my conclusion as well. Especially with a bright enough IR source. The bones reference was as a bit sarcastic reference if they'd used x-rays but since nobody got seriously ill that did not happen..
CGMthrowaway
Could also be mm wave maybe? Cheap mm wave security gates and similar tech are ubiquitous now
swores
I'm pretty sure it was just marks on the back of the cards that glasses/contacts then converted into an xray-like view, not any actual technology for seeing through the cards.
Aurornis
The table didn’t actually use X-rays. They’re using X-ray to mean it could be seen through with special cameras, perhaps IR sensitive.
rs186
I looked up the term "X-ray table" but couldn't find anything relevant except very recent results about this specific news.
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.
dboreham
I remember as a kid seeing comics imported from the US that had ads for "x-ray specs". My first clue that the US advertising standards were not quite the same as other countries. Perhaps it's a similar idea to that?
exasperaited
[flagged]
jackric
Next podcast sponsor fad: lead-lined underwear. PbUndies
The_President
Bundies! Mascot should be Al Bundy.
brianbreslin
wasn't tim ferris promoting one of these products years ago? was like a faraday cage for your nether region.
breckenedge
Gotta call them “Weighted Undies”
nimbius
i wonder if we're not conflating xray with terahertz radiation perhaps? the former being used by a company called corrections one that produces a horrifying whole-body X-Ray of a prisoner to detect contraband (certainly not healthy.)
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.
zwog
Semi related: A couple of years ago a waste facility in Berlin measured increased levels of radio activity and traced it back to a restaurant where 13 cards laced with radioactive Iodine-125 were found:
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...
mastazi
> including members of La Cosa Nostra crime families,
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".
Lucasoato
Cosa Nostra is a well defined organization operating in Sicily, that term isn’t used for other Mafias around Italy or other Sicilian criminal organizations. Among its past leaders you can find Bernardo Provenzano and Matteo Messina Denaro.
croes
Mafia nowadays is used as a synonym for organized crime so Cosa Nostra makes it clear it means the original Mafia.
y-curious
I can’t help but think this recent Wired video[1] has some accidental overlap with how they cheated.
mckirk
Sorry to be completely off-topic, but: I'm really reluctant to click on anything with these 'share IDs' and usually remove them from any link I share with anyone. I don't want to make it even easier for the platforms to build networks of associated accounts.
daveevad
Sorry to be pedantic but if you're clicking the link, YT gets the referer header even without the share id url parameter.
throwaway314155
I believe the Firefox extension CleanURLs helps with this.
hsuduebc2
I do the same thing!
cyrialize
The story behind how Chauncey got his coaching job is kind of sketchy as well!
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.
beoberha
Former players being hired as head coaches without much other coaching experience is fairly common in the NBA.
cyrialize
Yes, but in this case the blazers head office said they were going to search for a coach, and they also took input from Dame on what coaches he thought would be good for the team.
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.
smallstepforman
This can be done with no tech at legit casinos. Just have a group of people with a predetermined “tell” system so that only the best hand in the group competes against the fish. In a 4 player game, with 3 teamplayers and 1 fish, thats 75% of games you’ll win. With zero tech.
awb
A few issues:
* 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
This scheme doesn’t really make sense. Once you’ve convinced a wealthy person to play at your underground poker table, you’ve already won - just play better poker than them, ultra wealthy fish don’t have time to learn to play perfect poker and you do. Trying to extract slightly more money per hand via x ray tables etc kills the golden goose and doesn’t even necessarily increase total winnings, since it makes you win faster but doesn’t increase the amount the fish are willing to lose to have a good time.