Well, it is not with a light heart that I am writing this post. I don't like to get involved in these things because it just ends up being a big mess, I don't really feel like repeating this story 100 times and i'd rather just move on with my life, but at the same time I felt it important to write down everything exactly as I remember it as quickly as I can before any details get lost. I also think its important to inform the community as to what happened. so here goes..

Cliff notes and setup: (I will try to present everything as factual as i can without putting conclusions or emotions into the post)

We are 10 handed at the final table of a satty to the 25k high roller. 7 places get seats and 8th place gets 17,000. 9th and 10th get 0.

blinds are 3,000/6000 and we have just taken a 10 minute break. I run upstairs even though we only have 10 minutes instead of the normal 15 min break. This results in me having to jog on the way back down and coming back later than most of the other players. As I am going past the drink/snack station outside the tourney room I notice lilly killetto and mike dentale standing close to each other and having a conversation. I do not hear the contents of the conversation.

Sit back down at the table and we play the first hand. we have 3 short stacks at the table. lilly has blinded all the way down to 5k as the hand before break there was a double all in and she had to fold her big blind. two other players at the table are also short with around 22k and 32k respectively. rest of players at the table have over 40k and mike dentale and an older man at the table have the big stacks at the table, both over 100k.

Before hand starts, guy in 10 seat can't see seat one and two so he confirms lillys stack, she says aloud i have 4k and he aplogizes saying he wasn't trying to needle just couldn't see.

folds around to lilly in the small blind and she has 3k in for the blind and 1 1k chip behind. she puts the chip in and the dealer announces all in. mike looks at his cards and quickly says i fold. dealer doesn't react right away and so he says quickly again i fold then tosses his cards deep into the muck. as lilly starts to throw her cards deep into the muck also the rest of the table responds and starts saying what is going on. we do our best to stop the dealer from doing anything else and freeze everything in time as is.

Mukul Pahuja leads the charge saying that "mike you can't fold, its all in, we have to go to a showdown.. mean what is going on..this can't be real" while lilly is trying to say that mike folded and his cards are already in the muck and mike first saying i folded...if i had realized she only had 4k, no way i fold.

At this point, there is a lot of confusion. Mukul is still going in on mike saying wtf is going on, mike is yelling back at mukul that he swears on his family that he would never cheat, etc.. Floor comes in and tries to calm it down some. Floorman asks the dealer what happened and dealer confirms events as stated. floorman asks dealer if both hands are retrievable. dealer states with 99 percent certainty these are the 4 cards involved in the hand and that the hands are retrievable. but the cards are really close to each other so it is very hard to tell which two belong to whom although some educated guesses can be made.

Floorman then asks dentale if he remembers his cards. He mumbles something about a 4 and having something else but is not clear on what that something else is. He seems to temporarily only remember one of his cards that he just looked at. the dealer than leaves him alone for a minute and turns to lilly. he asks lilly what her two cards where. she names the 4 and 7 of clubs and the floorman looks at the two cards and they are the 4 and 7 of clubs so he turns to dentale and asks him once again what his hand was.

Now all of a sudden mike remembers that he thinks he had an ace and the floorman turns up the other two cards which are the Ah 4h...

during most of this time dentale and mukul were having a discussion and it was escalating but slowly. Dentale kept swearing on his family that he would never cheat and he would never have folded if he knew she was so short and mukul basically saying come on. once i saw that he did not remember the ace but when pressed with only two cards left that where 99 percent had to be his, he then remembered the ace I then turned to mukul and said

"he had to have known she was short because he suddenly remembered the ace"....somehow when those words hit dentale's ears he gave me the quote "mike is a liar what a ****ing piece of ****"

Mike dentale then lost it as this point and started yelling loud enough to be heard across the entire tournament room. Told me to **** off and **** my family and **** my mother etc and so forth. he stood up halfway from his chair screaming at the top of his voice with spit flying in all directions hunched over in my direction. took it out on me 10x harder than he was going in on mukul. i can only assume this is due to them having a history , knowing each other and playing against each other for many years whereas mike and I barely know each other as i never play on the east coast. So i feel like he almost felt bad for going at mukul and was looking for another target.

I responded with "**** my mother bro? thats really where we are taking this?" then he responded by saying **** your mother louder three more times. at this point i lost my cool some and yelled back saying you don't bring family into this **** and that he had no class.

at this point floorman and security where around. they discussed the situation for quite sometime but they could not get ahold of the top TD to figure out what to truly do.

They ended up giving mike dentale a two round penalty and they run out the hand and lilly hit a 7 and doubled up. Most of us protested to the floorman that no way was a 2 round penalty an appropriate punishment and could we address the collusion/cheating but at the time we were just kinda pushed aside and told to play on. I found out later that they were calling the top TD over and over trying to figure out what to do and that they knew they had to give him at least a two round penalty so where trying to get it sorted while that was running.

They eventually got ahold of the top TD but by this point lilly had busted out of the tournament and things had changed so i think they decided to let him play instead of the disqualification i feel he would have gotten if play had been stopped until issue was resolved.

After serving the two round penalty mike then came back to the table and he thought that he had been punished extra hands and should have been able to come back sooner, but he didnt' realize that someone had busted and that changed the position he would return to. that set him off again and he commented to the table.. "keep me out two extra hands....thats how you 8 gotta do it ...cheat to win".

This set mukul off and he couldn't take it anymore. i only heard him start with... "12 years....12 years i've known you...you were one of the first that i played with.." Mike said some more things which got him removed from the tournament room once again.

When he was finally allowed back, he was super short and got it in on the first or second hand back. he was called in several spots and busted. As he came back into the room to collect his cash, he mouthed the words "****ing ******" to mukul.. he wasn't sure that mukul saw it so he mouthed the words again. i was standing behind mukul and saw it happen..at first thinking maybe he was speaking to me...mukul responded by saying.."you can say whatever it is you wanna say outloud". mike went off again saying some other things then when security went to take him out of the room he tried to say that he did nothing but come back in the room to get his cash and that mukul had started with him.

Now those are the facts..

here is what i believe:

Mike and lilly had conversation outside right before coming back.. this conversation could have led to what occurred next. in all the time that i and others have played with him, i've never seen him verbally declare a fold in that spot. seemed weird when he said it. i believe it was a preplanned move to say i fold...then guage whether or not the dealer got on to it and if he could get his cards into the muck fast enough. mike figured at worst he could play it off as honest mistake and at worst penalty wise, they might give him up to one round which didn't matter as he was guaranteed a seat with his stack. He figured that we might make a stink about it but that without being able to retrieve the cards, we'd have no real proof or recourse. i think he figured it was a no lose situation. either the dealer would be hip and right away tell him that she is all in and cards on their backs and he would just be like oh wow didn't realize or dealer would not realize that it was an all in situation until mikes cards where already unretreivable. Clearly it seems really unusual that when first pressed for his card holdings he cant remember he has A 4 suited but when he is pressed for his holdings with only two cards left outside of the muck he suddenly remembers that he might have had an ace. i've played with a lot of players..not many people forget they had AX suited. also find it extremely hard to believe that mike did not know that lilly was down to less than one bb and all in next hand when they were just talking together before returning from break.. i mean what are they talking about. she only has 1/2 a bb and they are having discussions about weather or tv shows? no obviously not. especially after the player in the 10 seat just asked lilly in front of the whole table what her stack was before the hand was dealt..also we are at a final table..when does a player not check a players stack and also they were sitting next to each other so there is no case of he can't see all of her chips clearly..When combined with the fact that he made a verbal delcaration of fold which is something he hadn't done all day or that often in the history that i've played with him, combined with not remembering then remembering his hole cards and his hole cards consisting of A4hh, i can only conclude that Mike was trying to cheat me and 7 others deep in a satelitte and lilly was at least aware of it or complicit.

now i've gotta get some sleep.

super cliff notes:
everyone at the final table of the satty to the 25k at shrpo believe that mike dentale and lilly killeto where trying to collude/cheat in order to keep her in the satty. only people who might not agree with this statement are those two. there was a lot of screaming and inappropriate comments made in between 99.9% of it coming from mike.

seems like a pretty cut & dry case of collusion....pretty naive to pull that **** in a high stakes satty with other sharp players around.

Not defending their actions but any tournament format where the marginal value of chips and EV start to diverge greatly is guaranteed to have cheating especially at high stakes where the player pool is small and the payoff is huge. It's why double or nothing sit & gos stopped being offered online. IMO high stakes sattys should be STTs winner take all.

Obviously something very wrong here but a great story, wish I had been there to witness it, sounds fun !

Yeah it was an interesting experience being in the room when it happened. I was watching the 1k turbo final table on the other side of the room when Mike started screaming. I thought a fight had broken out.

i agree, but this wasn't a 3 blind shove. this was a 1.3 blind shove sb v bb and theres still 2 or 3 more people who need to bust to get a seat

Yea they were obvious enough to be obscene, but we can only assume this would happen on a lower level almost every time.

was wondering where i heard that of that guy dentale before

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/19...-tl-dr-372382/

sounds like a massive PoS.

he commented to the table.. "keep me out two extra hands....thats how you 8 gotta do it ...cheat to win".

people who continue to lie after being clearly caught are the nut worst

don't know what's more ridiculous the fact that they are cheating/soft playing/colluding or think they will get away with how obvious an inexcusable this was lol..

I don't know this guy so won't make accusations but doesn't seem to have the best reputation and seems many incl reputables have said he's shady or cheated on the past so I would be cautious when playing with him at least.

also someone suggested a while ago in satellites to make all of them bounties where you get $x for busting people to prevent collusion issues and have no excuse for huge stacks making folds (it doesn't matter for my stack etc). or pay a bonus depending on stacks when satellite ends

Can't think of many people still in the game that would surprise me less to be caught cheating in an obvious and stupid way.


Seems every 2 months that guy does something scummy, outright cheating or lies about how he busts MTT's to stay backed.

I think in like 2 years of following him like 5 or 6 different MTT's he got caught up straight lying to make his bust out spew look better than it really was.

He was flipping peoples cards over after hands in poker night in america as well and caused some people to be pissed at him.

Dentale going be beating somebody ass for this!

Seems like clear cut collusion to me

The fact those two clueless ******s were that close to winning a 25k seat in the first place is just as worrying as their blatantly cheating behaviour tbh.

Ruh roh. This is not surprising at all, the amount of cheating that goes on with NJ/NY regs is mind blowing

he mad

"@JDPC27you are a lying sack ****, you would sell your mother for a dollar or a 25k seat you ****ing low life, you want to exaggerate a story"

and he's not very good at this twitter stuff since he addresses tweets to himself: "@Mikunbelievable want to lie and say we made up-stories"

https://twitter.com/Mikunbelievable/...52682204270592

Sounds like there is no possible way this is anything but clear collusion.

Get Em Mukul!

According to the story as OP tells it, it wasn't even a shove, she had less than 1 bb. So when she announced all-in from the sb, she actually called all-in.
The big blind literally couldn't fold even if he wanted to.

Not that it changes that much, it's blatantly obvious collusion either way. There is no way you are unaware of stacksizes on a 1table satellite. There is no way you snapfold Ax in the bb without even looking at your opponents chipstack.

If story happened as told, it's clear collusion beyond reasonable doubt.

It wasn't even 1.3bb, she was all in for 5k and he had 6k already posted for the big blind - hence why it needed to go to showdown and why he tryed so hard to muck the cards.

Thanks for posting this, Jason!

Love how she(?) would have won the all in anyways if they didn't try this nonsense.

I like how his Twitter profile explains he's a Pro Business Owner.

Dentale has always been an angry bothered dude. I played a ton with him at borgata, he is also not good.

Mukul is one of the most pleasant people to play with. All class all the time.

Other than labeling him a cheater (which non internet people will not care about in 1.2 years) nothing will come of this.

He will still be featured on blogs he won't be blackballed he won't lose friends.


Found these tweets that seem to be deleted




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I'm sure this wouldn't even fly in a live $10 buy in.

This Mike guy seems like a massive dick head, and scumbag.