Matt Berkey was getting suspicious.
Berkey, a 42-year-old poker professional known for his presence at some of the games of cash The highest-stakes player in Las Vegas, he was playing in the poker room of a well-known casino over the summer. One of the players in the game, who was not particularly familiar to Berkey or other regulars at the table, but who was believed to be an amateur due to his style of play, was exhibiting strange behavior.
First of all, he was wearing headphones, something that is usually prohibited in these types of semi-private games, in which many players are friends.
“No one wears headphones during our games,” Berkey points out, “but the player in question was wearing them, so that’s kind of weird.”
The style of play raised some alarms
Texas Hold’em, the game being played, features two individual cards dealt to each player, plus five community cards dealt in stages in the center of the table. Players combine their own cards with community cards to form the best possible five-card poker hand. There are four rounds of betting: one before any community cards are dealt, another after the first three community cards are dealt at once, the part of the game known as “flop“, another after the fourth community letter (“turn“), and one more after the fifth and last community letter, the “river”.
Berkey noticed that, despite presenting himself as an amateur who was clearly the least skilled player at the table, the suspected player never seemed to lose in the game. river. When he was in a hand that got to that point, he always folded or showed the winning hand, one of the first red flags that experienced poker players have come to recognize in suspected cheating situations. Cheaters who know their opponents’ cards are believed to prefer to wait for all the community cards to be dealt before making big bets, allowing them to do so with perfect information about who has the best hand, which is often not the case. safe until that last letter.
“Play all river to perfection in an eight-hour sample is an anomaly that is not statistically possible, especially in a recreational player,” explains Berkey, “and when you start seeing things that don’t add up, like the least skilled player in the game never showing a losing hand, you start to get suspicious.”
The player also had his phone and headphone case placed around him, with the case on the felt and the phone on the railing that runs along the edge of the table. Although occasional phone use at poker tables is normal, that type of arrangement is unusual and is even something that many casinos have avoided for years. Berkey began to wonder if this game was falling victim to a new cheating system that had been talked about in high stakes circles for months: hidden cameras placed at the height of the feltwhich capture the front faces of the cards when they are dealt and transmit that information to an accomplice, who in turn relays it to the player at the table through a headset.
More suspicions
Berkey also noted that the player always seemed to sit in the seats directly to the left of the casino dealer, even over multiple days and sessions of play. This raised suspicions, as the rumored cheating method required the player to be in those seats to maximize camera visibility.
Berkey says he quietly alerted other regulars to his suspicions, and the game eventually broke down, but not before the player made huge profits: “Not just because of his skill level, but because of the stakes he was playing,” Berkey notes: “I was winning hundreds of thousands of dollars playing a game with a buy-in of $10,000.”
#Poker #Cheaters #Hidden #Cameras #Detect #Dealt #Cards
