The only way to get a larger winrate out of an uncapped buyin is to cooler people. If Mike had a 200+ bb/hr winrate because he managed to set over set, flush over flush people once an hour that would be insane, but less so than what actually happened. He achieved that winrate almost exclusively by winning pots that did not go to showdown. By executing river bluffs with air. This has really no impact on the depth of the game.

There is a ton of information in this thread (no kidding). There are numerous Postle hands that have been discussed and analyzed.

There are numerous spreadsheets that 2+2 wizards have put together summarizing Postle's sessions including info on whether or not he was cheating (in god mode) based upon extensive video review.

There have been numerous videos that have been created pertaining to Postle's sessions. I've lost count but I think ChicagoJoey has done 9 videos. I think Doug Polk has done 2 videos, Matt Berkey has done 1 or 2 (?), Jonathan Little has done 1 or 2 (?), and surely there have been others.

One of the commentators of the Stones Live Stream has put her name to the cheating allegations and was one of the first to bring this whole mess to light.

There is more than enough evidence out there for anybody who is willing to put the time and effort into looking into these allegations.

This thread and this scandal has been very fast-moving over the last 9 or 10 days. The scandal just broke recently. At this early point in the "investigation", I don't think anybody has put together a "definitive" video "proving" the allegations. Maybe such a video will be produced in the future. I guess it depends upon people's time, interest, and what purposes such a video would be used for (media outlets, civil suit, criminal case, etc.).

For those and other reasons, I don't think it reasonable or appropriate to ask to be spoon-fed the most damning evidence of Postle's cheating. If you aren't convinced yet, and don't have the time or inclination to go through the thread and videos, that's your choice.

FFS. It’s the results during sessions he’s staring at the phone in his crotch (yet supposedly using his ‘reads’ to be successful) versus his results during sessions his phone is in plain view on the rail.

Play seems to be that many times it's like 1k$+ in the middle with two or three players in flop.

It's live 5/5 and it's played pretty big.

One extra 2000bb pot per 1000 hands won gives that 200bb/100. And variance is huge.

100k$ winnings are pretty much possible to be just good variance in such game.

Btw. It's pretty obvious that players in those games don't play stellar postflop game and Postle outplay them many times. No big suprises there it's not like 300/600 with table full of pros.

I don't get how you're this delusional. Nobody on earth has ever won 2 stacks an hour on average in live poker in an honest game. Good players lose. They get stacked. Their bluffs fail. When that happens, you're not winning a few thousand bigs that night.

Earlier today you actually thought good PLO players could average 1k an hour in deep games. How do you know this little about live poker and basic statistics?

Lots of really dumb people defending Mike bring up how bad the other players are. That's true! But I would also adjust my play if I saw a guy calling 4 bets with 95, 54 etc. I would 100% have gotten destroyed isolating Mike. He didn't "outplay " people. He cheated them. It's like me saying I outran a marathon runner because I used a Honda civic.

Please stop. You have made your point. You are not convinced Postle is cheating. Good for you. You believe Postle's win rates are possible without cheating. Again, bully for you.

At this point you are simply derailing the thread since people (like me) are taking time, energy, and real estate to respond to you. There is only so much oxygen to go around and you are using it up for no purpose (other than provide you with information or entertainment).

Please do not post in this thread for the next 24 hours. Thank you for your cooperation.

P.S. In case it is not clear, my green name means that I am a mod and will enforce my preference with a lengthy temp-ban if I have to.

I am wondering if anyone has looked more into the sunglasses possibly being bose bone conduction headphones in the 5/10/50 session. It kind of makes sense that if this was done to remove the bulge from his hat

do some research. we'll see you in three days. bye for now.

Can you elaborate on what you mean?

thank god the braindeadtroll is gone

Blocked PiB. Life is better.

Far be it from me to stick up for PiB, but he may truly have believed what he posted. Of course, after a full day of non-stop posts like that with no sign of letting up or any indication that he would actually try to educate himself on this scandal, he became the equivalent of a troll. And therefore had to take a time-out.

I will try.
Joey Ingram believes that the 10/15/50 game where they brought pros in to play was made when Mike Postle was bing investigated for cheating. So for people to not be suspicious of the bulge in hat Mike went out and bought a pair of discreet bose headphones.

I may be completely wrong in this assumption but I feel it may be possible

I guess you got temp-banned, so you'll have plenty of time to read the thread or use the spreadsheet I linked to a couple of pages ago.
Spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...gid=2044248290

Screengrab of one of the pages from that spreadsheet:


Those are just some of the most suspicious hands (featuring crotch-stares and Godlike play). There are timestamped links to them. More will be added in due course.

The legal case isn't based on some airy-fairy suspicions. We're finding the ****ing receipts.

I respect your effort. I disrespect how stupid you are. It's really tearing me apart here, but I'm gonna go ahead and disregard every opinion you've ever expressed in this thread because you're truly dumb and awful at poker. I made this decision with a heavy heart.

Who even cares, we are way past the point if he cheated or not now, it’s just a matter of how much and what evidence is needed for court to prosecute, if ppl don’t want to watch the videos, then that’s their problem, if you watched even just 1 of joeys streams it’s beyond obvious

I completely agree and I'll add that it's very hard not to suffer from confirmation bias when looking for evidence. I'm convinced he's a cheater, but it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking (incorrectly) "He must be cheating in this particular hand, because he made a correct fold", or deciding "It doesn't look like he cheated in hand #1, so this must be a non-cheating session", when the cheating is probably intermittent.

FWIW, when I had a cursory look at the game with Berkey that you've been watching (the very last one in the spreadsheet) I got the impression that Postle was - at times - consciously hiding his phone from prying eyes, but didn't have much opportunity to superuse. I think Postle was very aware of who was on his left (Berkey). Postle is more relaxed when he's ripping off the usual regs and businessmen.

Not sure if this has been covered already.
$10/$25/$50 No Limit Hold'em with Justin and Veronica (9/21/2019)

Referring to the full house hand at 1hr 35 min Postle is holding 88 vs ??. Then someone tells the commentator that he is holding 10-2 before the hand was revealed.

Good find! Definitely could be used as an example. He laughs too, like when he looks down, sees neither of them have an ace. The more of these examples the better, the pause to let the numbers come up, look at cards, look at crotch, look at cards, then play perfect. Just so much evidence👏 Thanks for going through the stream!!

You can tell how far I've reached in my attempts to catch up with a thread that grows faster than I can follow it. I like this post, and I want to address a few of the points:

Stones is a relatively new player in town, and it's likely trying to draw area players who mostly frequented Thunder Valley, Cache Creek and Capitol Casino. Thunder Valley and especially Cache Creek are very well-branded properties for the area – hell, the latter name pretty much can't be missed if you watch a Sacramento Kings game. Capitol also runs a lot of television and radio ads in the area, maybe even more than Thunder Valley.

Stones has the best of everything: it's clean and non-smoking (a huge deal for me), it's in a decent location (TV and Cache are way out of town), damn good food (I would go just for that if I lived closer), with an extremely friendly staff and player base. This is why this entire saga is so disappointing to me.

But with all of those advantages, Stones didn't seem to gain much footing, perhaps because they didn't do the ad buys that TV, Cache and Capitol did.

Instead, running the live stream put them on the map. I had friends who don't play poker and who only casually follow it suddenly talking about it. (I'll admit I had never heard of the place until someone asked me if they might ever see me playing on the stream.) Having a live stream also seemed to draw more high-profile players in town, and eventually landed them promotions like PokerStars Platinum Pass events.

And yet I still don't think I've seen a televised ad for Stones. (I know they did one, as I've seen it online.) So whatever it costs to have a regional ad, or a corporate partnership with the hometown NBA team, one can argue that Stones saved that money by having a modest live stream serve as their advertising.

As for some of the bullet points:

I'm fairly sure they still use the table when it's not streaming. I'd have to defer to people who are there more regularly, though – last time I was there was the Moneymaker Tour thing, and they were streaming pretty much all day.

The "dead space" is pretty minimal, if not non-existent. I can probably a find a good wide shot of the room from my photo archives, but you'd quickly see that the tables are all fairly well spaced out in general. You would also notice that the feature table is spaced similarly to the others. The lights sit above the footprint of the table itself, so they take up no extra floor space. Finally, the cameras are mounted from the ceiling. i.e. the setup for the live stream doesn't take up any more space than if it was a regular table.

You can see the cameras in this shot:





The booth (both the commentator's booth and the "peek room") itself is small and only carves out space from the main bar and dining area. Sure, if you didn't have it, you probably could shove one more poker table into that corner. But it really isn't THAT much space.

JFK mostly serves the poker room as a tourney director. If there's no tournament playing – which there generally isn't when a live stream is going – then he's not nearly as busy. This also probably explains why he can spend so much time in the booth as a commentator.

I'd also like to know who got paid and who didn't. I would assume people like Brent Harrington and David Tuchman got some sort of appearance fee. When people like Jason Somerville, Chris Moneymaker, Daniel Negreanu, Joe Stapleton, et al were in the booth during a PokerStars event, it probably was part of their arrangement with the site.

The funny thing is, I actually meant to ask JFK about getting involved with the stream as a play-by-play guy. I know I'm not experienced enough as a player to provide color, but I'd like to try my hand at the PxP part of a poker broadcast. (I have just enough on-air experience with actual sports to stoke this interest.) However, I got busy and never got looked into it –*probably a sign that I wouldn't have time to do it.

how many viewers did stones have per episode? how could cheating go on for so long without viewers bringing up cheating? if i only saw one hand that doug or joe covered with mike postle cheating, that would be enough for me to know he's cheating or at least SUSPECT it since it is indeed a live stream. if i was a regular viewer of the stream it would be even more clear. how did players not suspect it too? in my regular game I always know who are the 1-3 best players at the table and am well aware of their frequencies and went to showdown %. how could they play with postle so long and realize he's playing impossibly good? is that game really that weak.

just kind of crazy it went on for so long without any viewers bringing it up. or maybe there's a thread from the past that i never read.

I'm a bit late to this (I'm in Aus so a lot of posts happen while I'm asleep), and I've seen that Passive has been banned now so this might be moot, but felt compelled to reply.

But wowee is that off the mark. First off, if we assume that Mike can see the holdings, then he's going to be much looser pre-flop, happily getting putting money in even when he's a decent bit behind - while a lot of poker is playing the player rather than the cards, this is turned up to overdrive when you know exactly what they have. So the pre-flop call is totally fine - if any sort of wet board comes, or even just a single ace, he has room to push the opponent off.

He hits middle pair on the flop, and his opponent hits top set. While Postle knows he's unlikely to win, it'd be way too suspicious to fold now when he has middle pair and two backdoors to the nuts (when you consider his maniac persona), so a call is what you'd expect him to do.

Turn comes, the backdoors are officially dead and opponent is at the top of his range and never getting pushed off. Given that he can justify folding second pair, of course he's going to for what would've been a pretty sizable bet.

I'm a very average rec and even I can see how standard Postle's line is for someone that knows exactly what his opponent has.

Matt Berkey pretty much figured it out and put it on a youtube video how it could have been done rather easily. All Postle needed was a confederate in the Stones control room who could send the live stream directly to his phone as long as he had Windows Media Player. He laid it all out on the video and demonstrated exactly how to do it using the RFID technology for reading cards. A very interesting piece of evidence and perhaps proof of what was going on.

He got 54o in pre vs two players deep... That wasn't suspicious enough? If he is at least a little bit smart, then you would find more hands like this T8 hand. Hands that would strengthen his defense. The thing is that everyone is only focusing on the might be cheating hands.

Did anyone go through streams and collected his normally played hands? I could see a trial going south, caus he can just counter present 20 hands of normal non cheating play VS 50hands of cheating hands the other party presents or smt like this..

The most damming evidence might be berkeys video and the blue screen on his phone lol

I think Justin is watching that hand in real time and then tells the commentators on the delay, weird how the card reader doesn’t pick up his hand though when it’s right on the mark. Kind of tilting how often this happens when you’re searching for evidence.