Quote:
Originally Posted by Donkey Schon
Similar to the thread on Robbi, those who claim that there is no evidence fundamentally misstate what the threshold should be.
Many of the posts defending Martin use an unreasonable standard when applied would result in Mike Postle being an innocent victim of the mob mentality.
To those on the no cheating side, what is your position on Mike Postle and why? The common denominator in defense of Postle, Robbi, Martin, etc seems to be that unless the exact method of cheating is known and verifiable no one can claim cheating.
Even in our legal system with a high standard being beyond a reasonable doubt jurors are often asked to make a decision based on circumstantial evidence.
Catching someone cheating in the act is almost impossible as it is often determined retrospectively by examining the evidence (circumstantial or otherwise) in totality.
Similar to my view on Robbi, I do not think anyone minds will change and both positions can be argued in good faith.
I don’t know if I’d be considered a defender of Kabrhel, but I’ll explain my thinking.
First, I don’t think he should be allowed to be doing what he’s doing. He should be told by the tournament directors that his behavior is unacceptable and continuing to do it will result in penalties and, eventually, banning. I just don’t think at this point there’s any definitive evidence of cheating worthy of an immediate ban.
I’ll also mention that I don’t have PokerGO, so I haven’t seen hours of his play. I’m going off clips that others have posted and other free clips of him that I’ve seen online.
But my read is that Kabrhel has all sorts of weird ticks and mannerisms and behaviors. Some of these are weird and harmless. Some or weird and very annoying, but clearly not cheating. Some are weird and could be interpreted as evidence of cheating. But taken together, his persona doesn’t seem like someone who is trying to cheat because I don’t know why he’d be doing all the other stuff to draw attention to himself if this were his intent.
But more importantly, I just haven’t seen much evidence at all of cheating in the play of the hands.
This is the key difference from Postle. People found literally dozens of examples of hands where Postle played in a highly unusual way that was really only explainable if he knew exactly what his opponent was holding. This happened consistently over and over again. And there were other examples where he clearly played differently in contexts where for some reason he couldn’t see the feed of his opponents’ hole card. His actions at the table (primarily looking at his phone) and his unrealistic win rate were merely supporting evidence, not the primary evidence, or even what prompted anyone to suspect him of cheating in the first place.
This is also why I don’t believer Robbi cheated. Even after going through hours of video concentrating on hand movements or people looking in a certain direction, no one found any definitive evidence of hands that were played in a way suggesting Robbi knew what her opponents’ card were (even the J3 hand doesn’t qualify here).
So if you want to convince me that he cheated, give me at least five examples of hands that Kabhrel played in a way that only makes sense if he knew his opponents’ cards. Given that there’s many, many hours of streamed video of his play, this really shouldn’t be that hard.
