Quote:
Originally Posted by DumbosTrunk
Looks like cheating in poker is actually a crime in Massachusetts under the Expanded Gaming Act of 2011, hence the arrests:
https://www.mass.gov/news/holyoke-ma...gm-springfield.
We should enact more laws like these across the country. If California had one, Mike Postle would have been dead to rites.
Hard to say. The Massachusetts Gaming Commission certainly has specific laws governing cheating (namely Section 39), but California also has similar laws. It's not like California allows cheating and a judge just went, "Whelp, Mr. Postle, you've done nothing wrong."
No, what kept Postle from a trial was a statute that the courts do not get involved in gambling losses between citizens in the first place. And that's what sucks. Since the Postle case ultimately came down to a number of players losing to another player in an otherwise legal, licensed game of poker, then it became less of a "you've done nothing wrong" and more of a "we're not gonna even look into whether you've done wrong." (Why PC section 332 didn't apply is beyond me, though, but this has been covered ad nauseam in the Postle thread.)
If Postle had cheated the casino, then he would have faced the music in the way Daniel Ruiz did with MGM Springfield. And you'll notice that Ruiz had to pay restitution to the casino, not to other players. That's the subtle but key difference.
As for this most recent arrest, this seems to be a situation of players being caught marking cards – at least, based on the Twitter thread that David Stefanski initiated. Put another way, they got caught cheating, while Postle got caught winning in a way that can only be done if he was cheating. This may seem like semantics, but it always strikes me that a good chunk of our judicial system consists of arguing over semantics.