[captncraig]

It seems to me that security at the venue is extremely inconsistent. They care enough about cheating to time-delay the stream (even to the announcers), but players are allowed to have phones and keys and things at the table? Maybe don't allow that?

[cepth]

A 30-minute (minimum) time delay on a live stream is usually a legal requirement in most jurisdictions, enforced by the state gaming commission.

Most poker rooms also allow you to use your phone, as long are you're not a participant in the current hand. The alleged cheater (Mike Postle) is said to have hid his phone under the table, in his crotch area. Obviously, it's going to be pretty hard for other players and the dealer to check for that at that angle.

In the end, the no-phone rule in most poker rooms is going to be largely an honor-system based thing.

Edit:

Jason Somerville, who founded one of the most popular poker streaming companies (Run It Up), has described how stringently the Nevada Gaming Control Board inspects casinos that are hosting streams. E.g. multiple inspections of the streaming equipment, a requirement for a guard at the streaming booth, etc. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZS47DB94-vk). He mentioned that California does not seem to have the same level of on-site scrutiny.

Edit2:

On TwoPlusTwo (the popular poker forum), long time players at Stones Gambling Hall (where the alleged cheating took place) mentioned that their poker room did not institute a no-phone policy until sometime into the alleged cheater's crazy run of success.

[Analemma_]

The Nevada Gaming Control Board doesn't mess around. I remember there was an HN thread about reproducible builds, and someone who worked on slot machine software mentioned that the NGCB would walk up to a slot machine on the floor of a casino, dump the filesystem onto a memory card, hash it, and the hash had better match what they had on file or someone was getting dragged into court.

[SilasX]

I usually hear that in the context of comparing to our (much worse) voting machine security...

[jumpingmice]

That strikes me as pure security theater. There’s no relationship between what the machine is doing and what is contained on an apparent copy of the machine’s purported storage device. Just like TSA booting my laptop ... when they do it my laptop boots into a Microsoft Windows environment that I’ve literally never used. When I boot the same machine I get netbsd. Weird, right ?

[archgoon]

Just because a test doesn't catch all attacks doesn't mean that performing the test is security theatre.

It's a bit like saying that ASLR and stack canaries are security theatre because they can be defeated by information leaks.

[marcinzm]

The number of people who can change the code on the machine is much larger than the number of people who can change the hardware on the machine to hide code changes. Checking the code prevents that group from having the opportunity to cheat.

[debatem1]

It's basically an ad hoc attestation mechanism. In your case, it would be as if the TSA hashed your hard drive and you had already been compelled to give them a copy of it which they could analyze at their leisure. They could only tell if you had changed it, but in this case that's a smoking gun.

[anarchodev]

wait, TSA boots your laptop now? I don't even understand what they'd expect to find?

[gnu8]

Obviously, a laptop shell filled with semtex won't boot up. I think it's also possible that explosives or drugs packed into the shape of battery cells might not be distinguishable from real batteries on an x-ray. So even though they don't want to snoop through your data (customs does that), they want to verify that it is a real working laptop.

[jml7c5]

It's a pretty crude test, since you could always gut the laptop (e.g., replace the battery with a tiny one that could only run the laptop for 20 minutes) and fill the remaining space with explosives. But as with any security, it does mean more technical skill and planning required to pull off such an attack.

[huffmsa]

Ah, classic bureaucratic thinking at work.

Let's boot the semtex filled laptops right in the middle of the most crowded, heaviest choke point at the airport. Right next to the 30 gallon trash cans filled with liquid explosives and other combustibles we force people to discard.

250:1 kdr. Gg no re. See you later alligator, after 'while crocodile, don't forget to write.

[bonestamp2]

I had customs boot my laptop once and they just searched for jpg and gif images. While the search ran she turned to me and said, "What kind of images am I going to find on here?". I had just got a new DSLR a few months earlier so it took about 30 minutes for the search to complete (2006 windows computer). She didn't say, but I guess they're looking for egregious images?

[brewdad]

They are looking for child porn.

Or the classified images from Jason Bourne's personnel file.

[smcl]

Where was this!? They not only boot the device but they search it too?

[NullPrefix]

> Just like TSA booting my laptop ... when they do it my laptop boots into a Microsoft Windows environment that I’ve literally never used. When I boot the same machine I get netbsd. Weird, right ?

What environment do devices with explosives instead of batteries boot into? Windows or *BSD?

[cududa]

...you’re insinuating the TSA can install Windows on your machine in a matter of seconds somehow?

[hobofan]

No, just that they can show the TSA a Windows installation, and they will take it at face value. Just like the Gambling Comission is taking it at face vale that whatever they are "dumping" from the slot machine is what is actually running on it.

[splonk]

Almost every poker room allows phones at the table. Turns out poker's a really boring game when you're at a table for hours and hours. Many of them technically don't allow use of them during a hand, but those rules tend to not be strictly enforced. Often players at the table are even playing online games against each other concurrent with the poker game - sometimes gambling on things like open face chinese/pineapple, or just regular games like Words With Friends.

Source: played thousands of hours of high stakes live games, and I'll bet that some of the regulars are among the best Angry Birds players in the world.

[ryandrake]

I play at Stones a bit, and last time I was there, there was this dude with a laptop open on his drink cart playing a few tables online on the side while playing live. They are very (too) lax about technology there.

[splonk]

This is also not uncommon. I've seen similar at Oaks, Bay 101, Wynn, Casino Arizona, Commerce, and probably others as well. I tend to believe that it shouldn't be allowed, if only for the pace of the game, but it's not unique to Stones.

[umvi]

Seriously, even a phone without internet seems like a massive opportunity to cheat. Simply create a custom app that allows you to input all available information via accelerometer input or volume button clicks which is fed to a poker engine and the then the app communicates the result of the engine's decision via vibration pulses.

Even IF you allow phones though, it seems insane not to make players play in an RF-shielded room so that radio signals can't enter or leave.

[ar_lan]

It sounds like your idea is just calculating odds - this is a slight advantage, but most pro's have learned to do this in their heads already. Poker math isn't very complicated.

[zone411]

I expected better from this site than multiple commenters spreading false info!

This is wrong. Making optimal decisions IS very complicated. Just a heads-up no-limit match between the two best players in the world is far from the Nash equalibrum (a game theory-optimal solution). In the 2017 Humans vs AI match, a bot destroyed very good humans by 14.7 big blinds per hand. This is without caring at all about what strategies others play. If you analyze other players and you find what mistakes they make, you can do better and it's even more complicated. And vs multiple players like here, it's more complicated again (optimal strategy can only be calculated assuming there is no collusion). A 6-person game was only finally beaten a few months ago! https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02156-9

Source: used to play poker (up to the main event WSOP and $5/10 level during the poker boom) and wrote a simple game-theory optimal solver for fun.

[cepth]

As an addendum to this very good comment, that Nature article had a couple of big asterisks.

* Bet sizes were restricted. E.g. humans and the the bot could only bet fixed bet sizes, like 1/4 pot, 1/2 pot, full pot etc. Creative bet sizing is one of the skills that distinguishes top pros.

* Stack sizes were reset after every hand. E.g. every player in the hand was given the same amount of chips at the start of every hand. How you performed previously in the session thus did not matter. Anyone who has played poker knows that this is highly unrealistic. Larger stack sizes convey an ability to bully smaller ones, and stack sizes greatly affect what range of hands you can reasonably play.

The point being, even a supercomputer running the most efficient heuristic based poker decision making programs has not yet been able to beat humans in a game that resembles what a real 6 or 9 person table would reflect.

---

Just as reference, on a four-year-old quad-core/8-thread Intel i7-based desktop with 32GB of RAM, to solve a SINGLE hand in PioSolver (the most popular poker solver) from flop through the river takes my machine about 7 minutes. The game tree alone takes up 4 GB of RAM, and in this scenario there are only two players, and each player is restricted to 3 bet sizes.

The idea that this kind of computation can be done on a phone is ludicrous.

[kevinwang]

Hmmm I could be wrong but I believe it's not true that humans could only bet fixed sizes. Instead, the AI was only pretrained with fixed sizes and had to do some kind of live search algorithm for any size outside of those values, which could be what you're referring to.

Stack sizes were reset to keep the research minimally scoped, taking stack sizes into account likely does not require a quantum leap in research.

This is getting pretty off topic, but the computation could be done online.

[cepth]

Yeah, seems like you're correct here.

I went back and re-read the pre-print here (https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~noamb/papers/19-Science-Superhuman.p...). On page 2:

> To reduce the complexity of forming a strategy, Pluribus only considers a few different bet sizes at any given decision point. The exact number of bets it consid-ers varies between one and 14 depending on the situation. Although Pluribus can limit itself to only betting one of a few different sizes between $100 and $10,000, when actually play-ing no-limit poker, the opponents are not constrained to those few options. What happens if an opponent bets $150 while Pluribus has only been trained to consider bets of $100 or $200? Generally, Pluribus will rely on its search algorithm, described in a later section, to compute a response in real time to such “off-tree” actions.

Good catch, and thanks for the correction.

Regarding the effect of stack sizes, I'm not certain on this, but my intuition is that there is some effect on perceived ranges of the other 5 players at the table if stack sizes vary. Since Facebook AI will not be releasing Pluribus code or pre-trained models/weights, we can't be certain, but things like stack-to-pot (SPR) ratio would seem to matter.

Of course, you could always make the argument that human players in a cash game can re-up/refill to the maximum buy-in whenever they're short, but that's another discussion altogether.

[Denzel]

Do you still have that GTO solver kicking around? How'd you build it?

[zone411]

I do! But it would take a few days to prepare it to make it a usable github repo. I'll try to get it sometime. It's written in C++.

[Denzel]

If you don’t mind, it’d be awesome if you could email it to me (in profile). We’re both engineers here, I don’t need anything super polished. :)

Just interested to see your approach as I’m in the middle of writing my own my own.

[leetcrew]

maybe this is just my ignorance showing, but really? people can just computer large factorials and binomial coefficients in their heads fast enough to participate in the game?

I had always thought that knowing the odds exactly just wasn't that useful because there was a lot of missing information and it was more important to read one's opponents.

[femto113]

It's usually not anywhere near that complicated. To use an example from the article he folded a QJ against a QT with 89J on the board with no flush possibilities. In this case there are not very many hands that can be beating him: the pocket pairs AA, KK, QQ, JJ, 99, 88, stuff that makes two pair like J9, J8, 98, and the straights QT and T7. Overall this is going to be close to the chance when holding 77 that your opponent has a higher pair, which most professional players will "just know" is about 3-4% because they memorize tables of such facts[1]. This means he should believe he's a pretty substantial favorite and why the fold was so unexpected.

[1] https://poker.stackexchange.com/questions/1203/pocket-pair-s...

[appleshore]

It is that complicated if you’re trying to factor accurate ranges, card removal and bet sizing. He’s obviously not doing this because he’s playing an exploitative style. In otherwords, he’s guessing perfectly based on his perceptions.

For the mathematically perfect, they spend hours studying solvers which takes considerable processing power to generate the trees. A human player can calculate aspects of it but they can really only memorize what the solver would do. And some high stakes online players are using custom software to augment their decisions.

Depending on the bet size, the solver could call the turn a % of times. And depending on blockers, unblockers and the bet sizing, the solver could advocate to call/raise/fold.

[newfangle]

Unless you are playing at the absolute elite levels you do not need to perfectly calculate your own range or another persons. But yes, the better you get the more complicated the math is.

[RaceWon]

> It's usually not anywhere near that complicated.

Top pros play millions of hands and if you truly have a knack you remember... everything.

[dyslexit]

"Read one's opponents" isn't about reading a person's soul sitting across from you. That whole aspect of poker of picking up tells plays a much smaller role than simply understanding what hands your opponent is likely to have in each possible specific situation or knowing your opponents playing tendencies, such as how frequently do they raise, call, fold, and in what cases would they do those actions. Tells can still be important but most experienced players will have learned to control their emotions to the point where it's far more reliable to rely on your understanding of the game than to rely on some psychological meaning behind someone splitting an Oreo cookie before making a decision.

As far as computing "large factorials and binomial coefficients in their heads", I don't know what makes you think that that's what poker math entails. It's nearly all just basic statistics.

[leetcrew]

> As far as computing "large factorials and binomial coefficients in their heads", I don't know what makes you think that that's what poker math entails. It's nearly all just basic statistics.

honestly I've never played much poker, but I remember doing lots of poker odds problems from my discrete math class in undergrad.

[nimih]

In practice,

a) most situations that come up in poker just aren't that complicated -- if you're good at mental math, you can compute the exact odds for the most common situations in your head with some practice

b) there are some simplifications/heuristics you can apply if you're willing to be off by a small margin of error -- e.g. "if you have x outs, you have approximately 2x% to hit one by the river for each card remaining" is accurate enough for most players in most situations

c) this math ends up being extremely useful in practice, because "reading" someone (which is usually just logically deducing reasonable possibilities for what is in their hand) is only useful if you can then use the information to determine whether it is profitable to make/call a bet, which requires knowing your likelihood of winning.

[soVeryTired]

Texas hold'em is straightforward to calculate odds for. There are 52 cards in the deck. Two are in your hand, and after the flop three are on the table, leaving 47 unknowns. That means if you have N outs (cards that will improve your hand), the chance of hitting one on the turn is N/47, which is about 2N per cent. Likewise the chance of hitting by the river is about 4N%.

The hard part is calculating the implied odds: there you need to play out scenarios of what your opponent might hold, and what cards would cause them to bet or call with a losing hand.

Tells are overrated in poker. It's all about implied odds and grinding it out.

[jcampbell1]

There are a total of 169 starting hands and at most half are relevant. Most people you can put on a range of 40 or fewer hands. All the math you need can be inferred from about 100 things you need to memorize, most of which are fairly intuitive.

[gameswithgo]

only recently have very powerful computers gotten better at poker than good humans. a phone probably can't do it yet. but a phone could be used as a way to do various kinds of digital spying or communicating with other people etc.

[wallace_f]

If it's an inside job, the phones are not even necessary. Body language could communicate the state of competitor's hands against his.

And because the stream is delayed, there is not even a need for hand states to be revealed by RFID. This info can be retroactively added with better techniques.

[manav]

A poker engine wouldn't really help you since it can't read players and intentions, also most decent players can calculate odds in their heads.

[Too]

There's a lot of focus on his phone. If this guy is really cheating it's probably way more sophisticated than that.

There are super tiny hidden in-ear earbuds that would easily go unnoticed unless someone really looks for it. https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/E~0AAOSwqABbH4mT/s-l640.jpg Or vibrating devices hidden anywhere else on the body. This paired with some information from the RFID stream, either through some insider or by hacking the Wifi.

As you say there are also lots of other items brought in and worn by the players, looking at the video i see people wearing hats, shades, bags and bulky clothes where you could easily hide all kinds of equipment.

[gameswithgo]

having phones near the table is so dumb. chess has already dealt with similar challenges, people should have known. maybe they did!

[paggle]

Poker is a very slow and boring game and with people's attention spans these days it's going to be hard to ban phones outright. Maybe only at the highest stakes tables.

[anonymfus]

But apparently people watch streams of other people playing poker. How is this not considered an unsporting behaviour as it clearly disrespects the audience?

[crazypyro]

I've heard several theories that it was an cyber security failure.

Using phones at poker tables, especially ones without RFID systems, isn't really a risk.

[anoncareer0212]

It's a massive risk - it's the only external source of information he has at the table, without it, cyber security failures mean nothing

[dmix]

This could easily have been an inside-job situation with Postle knowing someone on the tech team who feeds him the information and the split earnings.

The fact RFID is observable wouldn't make much difference then.

[gameswithgo]

how do you figure out if the phone has an rfid system?

[dragonwriter]

Poker tables with or without RFID systems, I think, is the issue.

[elwell]

It's very common to use your phone at a poker table at casinos.