As of now, it is the consensus of the community that Mike was using a mixed strategy, mainly utilizing his self-patented CTO (Crotch Theory Optimal) strategy, evolving and experimenting with techniques overtime. Although there is definitely something going on with his hat, it is hard to say for certain what he is exactly doing. Maybe he was just listening to music, maybe he was getting verbal cues, or maybe he was just touching his head to get a better angle at the dangle.

Nice find, that's crazy

It's great that people are archiving the streams but I'm wondering if there is any way to keep the chats. There are lots of potential clues that could be lost when Stones inevitably takes down the vids

Does he play noticeably tighter in the beginning of streams than toward the end?

Joey Cochran! RIP Johnnie

When all is said and done, I sure hope Stones Gambling Hall and all of the accomplices go down in flames.

A pisstank poker room in Suckratomato tried to emulate LATB and failed miserably..

I go by the jobs a man takes, not by what the internet whispers about his money. Just relax dude you are way off into “what if” land

After listening to some of Veronica on Joey's podcast last night, think it's even more clear that John Doe 1 is Justin and the person whom the plaintiffs believe is the main accomplice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fUz...ature=youtu.be

See time stamps: 19:35; 20:50; 22:40; 23:45; 38:20; 49:50; 56:16; 1:04:44;1:07:27

He doesnt need the hat. He never needed the hat. The hat came later if at all because of the possible phone bans. In the big game with berkey in september he may have been using the bone conduction because of the strictness around “no phone”. Mike took a break from cheating in june of 2019 and my theory is the hat may have started after when he came back to play in july 2019. Before June 2019 it was all phone i suspect. Mike used the hat to help cover his eyes i suspect

Producer to editor: we need to local b roll for this poker story out of Sacramento, ASAP!

Editor: what? I don’t have any local b roll from Sacramento. I guess I could email the editor at their affiliate and ask for...

Producer: we don’t have time for that! Just use some b roll from the last couple WSOP stories we’ve done...

And that’s how something so stupid gets put on TV. I assure you it happened almost exactly like that

Seriously shut up wii you’re not a mod or involved in this back and forth where he’s spinning a theory of Lon and Moneymaker being brought in and it’s spiking the views - it contributes to the “making mike a superstar” theory unintentionally. Just slow down and stop replying to literally every post itt

From the vloggers thread in LVL:

Ty for hand analysis, ty for responding, sorry for questioning you in any way, hope I was fair in my word selection, just calling it weird. Very true about the KK v AQ hand too, I was always trying to see him look down during a few hands, or pause to let cards come up on his suspected phone, and sucks that the stream cuts away in a lot of spots. I'll keep watching the steams.

Hope you get compensated and then some, horrible you were a victim in this. Best of luck!

I suspect we both have the same amount of knowledge as to whatever brought Lon to Sacramento, i.e., zero.

I was just about to comment on this to Jeff.

The producer or director in the field may not be the same person as the segment producer in the studio who works with the editor. So you have one person in front if Jeff and they are on top of it and the other producer just wants stuff finished before broadcast and dgaf

If that's true, then her lawyers are being a little silly about how they pleaded the case. Because you aren't actually supposed to allege that an already-named defendant is a Doe.

OK, now you are being nasty for no reason at all.

I never endorsed the "making Mike a superstar" theory. That's nutso.

But I also think it's nutso to pretend that nobody watched these videos. I watched them, down in Southern California. I discussed them with several other people who play poker and also watched them. They were discussed on at least one poker strat site. The game attracted (if you want to say they were paid, fine, but you are pulling that out of your behind- you don't have any idea of who was or wasn't paid) some A-listers in poker.

I think, in trying to refute an argument you dislike, you are being extremely misleading about the viral nature of this sort of show. A significant number of people watched at least some of these videos, in one way or another. It had some market penetration and was probably beneficial for Stones, which was not a major poker destination.

You can say all that without saying it made Mike a superstar.

So haven't posted on twoplustwo in a long time. But this story has caught my attention.

Anyways though, I saw someone else do a regression in R, and I thought I'd add to that work. I'm by no means a pro at this, so if I made a mistake in what I've done, let me know.

I took the google sheet of Postle's results, and did some work with linear regression in R. I'm trusting that the sheet is accurate. I'm also trusting that if the hat field doesn't say 'backwards', it is forward. I segmented variables as follows. The first segment, which is bolded and italicized, is the reference:

1) Hat - Backwards (or no hat) vs Forwards (HatCat)
2) BB - $3 vs $5-$10 vs $20+ (BBCat)
3) Phone - Rail vs Lap
4) Date - Before vs After the initial cheating accusations on Mar. 13 (I'm guessing he held back a little bit after that point, at least for a while).

Using this, we are trying to predict his hourly BB win rate, and seeing what variables are significant in doing so.

Here's what I got:



How to read this:

(Intercept) is our reference win rate. This would be a non-cheating Mike Postle at the 1/3 game. This is 14.67 BB / Hour, a very strong rate. However, we don't have much confidence in this number (p-value being high demonstrates this). Makes sense because we don't have very much data of non-cheating Mike in the spreadsheet.

From this point, add or subtract BB/Hour in the 'estimate' column for each variable you want to apply.

IMPORTANT POINT: This dataset is not large, so it's important to remember that the numbers are not 'real' winrates, but rather estimates confined to this dataset.


Thoughts:

1) Hat forwards postle at $1/$3 (but phone on rail), spikes up to 124 BB/hr predicted win rate. Hat forwards AND Phone in Lap postle at $1/$3 spikes up to over 300 BB/hr predicted win rate. However, the hat is close, but not quite, to the p<.05 value we look for.

If the Hat and the Phone are both significant variables, this changes the model of the cheating. It's possible Mike had both visual information of the hands, AND someone giving him strategy advice on how best to cheat, as crazy as that seems. When one or the other went away, he loses winrate, but he's still at a ridiculously high level.

This could explain why he has some sessions with both looking at his crotch and pulling at his head, but some where he seems to only do one or the other. If these are separate variables which can apply independently of each other, I think this implies there are two accomplices (one supplying info on phone, one supplying info in hat). I can't think of a reason why some sessions he'd only put his hands on his hat, while some sessions he'd only look down at his crotch, while some sessions he would do both.


2) Game Stakes (BBCat) looks to be a significant predictor of performance. Mike performs significantly worse in higher stakes games. Full blown cheating Mike still has an estimated win rate of 200 BB/hr in these games, but without cheating his predicted win rate is deep in the red. This would probably have a better p-value if I had just segmented the games into $3 BB and not $3 BB.

Obviously, Mike doesn't lose 100 BB's an hour at $10 BB poker in his natural form. However, it's certainly possible that when Mike's cheating winrate is 300 BB/hour, that playing against good players can lower the cheating winrate down to 200 BB/hr. It's also possible Mike decided he couldn't make his cheating as obvious at these levels and toned it down a bit.


3) Finally, it's plausible that Mike intentionally toned down the cheating after his first accusation, but it is not proven by this analysis. The adjusted R-squared did slightly improve by adding the variable, however the p value is .162 (which is basically the probability of getting this result by chance). If this is true, he looks to have adjusted about 50 BB/hr downwards to try to deflect attention. I'm sure his opponents appreciated that.

A few comments.

I am not a lawyer and can't discuss it technically. However, the punitive damages seem like they were brought in for negotiation purposes. It may be unlikely, but the possibility of a big award may encourage the defendant to settle for a little more. Otherwise, the damages are relatively small and distributed over many people.

It is hard to believe they were doing this televised over the Internet. It was so blatant. You could use that sort of information in a higher stake game just when you need it in a big pot. Perhaps, there were poker room personnel involved who didn't understand poker and how ridiculous the play would look, but wanted their big cut.

Veronica and Joe Ingram implied that they were purposefully having unqualified people like poker dealers as commentators, because a real commentator would realize there was something up. Of course, they weren't paying much.

Maybe I have a vivid imagination but a couple of odd things Mike is saying I think are

- I try to be entertaining
- Stones gave me attention I did not ask for this

It's almost like he's saying that he was approached to cheat and be entertaining for the stream etc

Some lawyers do this, but it's not generally a good strategy. If Stones has competent counsel, they will be advising them about the actual probability and amount of a punitive award.

And at any rate, most lawyers don't take punitives into account at all when doing settlement calculations, because they are so contingent and hard to obtain.

The most likely reason they did this was because they wanted the number to be as high as possible in the press coverage. "Suing for $10 million" or "suing for $20 million" sounds better than "suing for $750,000" or "suing for $1.5 million".

1. im not a mod
2. im not part of this back and forth
3. law dude is unintentionally adding to the superstar theory
4. i am literally replying to every post

What does any of this have to do with what I posted. You're just throwing out random irrelevant attacks and hoping it forms a coherent argument.

How ironic is it that this guy was around for the UB cheating scandal, saw how it unfolded and how Russ Hamilton got greedy, never sprinkling in any major losses, to get caught. And he goes and does the same thing

I remember his screen name, yngmanN4quicki, used to be an excellent tourney player relative to everyone else (along with PokerH0, westtexaspoker, and Wachovia).

Don't remember seeing him at the big cash games on UB at the time, but he was a tourney crusher.

Very ironic to see him implicated in the second biggest cheating scandal I can remember.

I have a bit of speculation on that.

The fact that they had to do this in low stakes (for reasons discussed elsewhere in this thread) and on televised streams (which severely limits the number of hours they can play) puts a pretty hard cap on the amount of money they could make doing this.

And there were at least 2 co-conspirators, maybe more.

And, of course, there are all the things that can prevent Postle from doing it, such as when his co-conspirators are out of town, phone bans, etc.

Doing this over more than a year, the scheme only netted $250,000. That's not a lot when shared among multiple conspirators. It's also possible that some bribes might have had to be paid, we don't know.

Given all that, he couldn't afford to make any big payoffs. Sure, he could put in small amounts (such as his blocking bets and an occasional flop call with no equity) to make the thing look legit, but he can't pay off any big river bombs. It would just cut too much into what is already a relatively small sum of money. So he basically has to hero fold every big bet with no equity, no matter how ridiculous it looks.