Poker fraud used X-ray tables, high-tech glasses and NBA players (opens in new tab)

“just play better poker” like that’s an easy thing to do in a game of chance and incomplete information, with variance having years or decades long tails. not to mention it’s an unsolved game, so “better” poker doesn’t even really have a set definition and depends on tons of variables. and they literally knew what hole cards were coming - that’s vastly more of an edge than playing “better poker” than someone.

Besides the fact they were often targeting pros - this was reported on and known by LA area pros for at least two years now. why the FBI decided to act now is weird to me. I can’t stress enough that in the pro scene this was common knowledge. years old podcast clips are coming up talking about it.

source: https://sports.yahoo.com/nba/breaking-news/article/professio...

I read a theory that the poker winnings were not the scam.

The scam was that the criminal element would HELP the NBA players cheat at poker, and then blackmail them with that info to change the outcomes of NBA games, which they were betting on, from which they could derive greater scale of winnings.

You don't want to extract more money per hand, you want to build up the fish (check the text message screenshots in the article) and then strike at the right point. The x rays remove the luck from those big hands.

> Once you’ve convinced a wealthy person to play at your underground poker table, you’ve already won - just play better poker than them, ultra wealthy fish don’t have time to learn to play perfect poker and you do.

You would be surprised at how good some very wealthy people are at poker. There is a lot of variance in the game and they don't want that. In fact what they want is _exactly_ wealthy people who are quite good at poker because they make big bets and you can reliably bust them out on _one hand_ if you set it up properly after playing a fair game all night. And the great thing about that is that they feel like the night overall was fair and fun, because it was. You just cheat them on one or two hands at the most.

People who are bad at poker can also be quite difficult to reliably take money from fairly because they play randomly and sometimes win huge pots out of complete luck. For one thing, they are near impossible to bluff out of hands, so you end up having to fold a lot more than normal because you can only play with strong hands against them. If you are interested in making a lot of money, you certainly want those strong hands more often than normal.

The trick isn't winning when the celebrity is at the table, it is in getting the celebrity to the table, then keepong the victim there.

It's not about winning mote on each hand. It's about keeping the target happy as money drains away. And that was their aim.

By controlling the whole game, they were able to psychologically manipulate the situation. The target was at tbe table with someone they respected. Saw others win and lose large amounts of money. Sometimes won themselves.

> just play better poker than them

That's a big "just".

They were using sports celebrities as the draw to the table, not expert poker players.

Cheating at poker also looks less threatening than playing against an expert, counterintuitively. Someone who cheats can pull out some big wins on some bets that look statistically bad. The target can see this and think the other party is playing poorly (betting on non-obvious hands) but simply getting lucky.

Contrast this with a shrewd expert poker player who will be easier to spot.

They want the target to think the celebrity sports figure is just getting lucky on bad bets, not that they're an expert poker shark who's going to take all of their money.

EDIT: Here's a 2 year old YouTube video from before all of this confirming this https://youtu.be/G-TKR5ca5jI?t=1790 (Skip to 29:50)

Having the cheating poker players look bad is a key part of the scam. It tricks the other players into coming back and betting big.

> Once you’ve convinced a wealthy person to play at your underground poker table, you’ve already won - just play better poker than them,

This is why in the book Molly's Game [0], the author mentions explicitly that she didn't want professionals in her game.

This b/c her game was seen as a game between "regular/amateur" players who just happened to be famous and/or have a lot of money. This was also DESPITE poker professionals both asking her to play AND offering to give her a stake of their winnings.

Granted, certain players (e.g. Tobey Maguire) were MUCH better than the other players but it seems that didn't matter as long as poker wasn't their primary source of income.

0 - https://amzn.to/4o05BFi

> just play better poker than them

You really don't understand the mind of fraudsters and criminals. The reason they do what they do is because they don't want to "just be better at X than Y" and spend the effort for that, they want to take the shortcut and they think they've found the best shortcut considering their situation.

Once you start to look at what people are doing with that perspective, things will start to make more sense.

Wealthy people aren't dumb - they don't join games where the odds are tilted against them. In these high-stake private games they can usually demand and set the rules like shallow stacks (100BB), enforced straddles, raising stakes after a loss, button games etc. that remove the GTO / poker element and make the game more gambly.

Boring pros who play these games straight up and don't "give action" don't get invited back.

This is how you can have some of the best poker players like Tom Dwan get absolutely wiped out while playing against whales in Macau

If you want to see a more recent example of this - the amateur whale Monarch recently took on one of the best cash game heads up players Bjorn Lee. I won't spoil the result because it's highly entertaining and demonstrates how the game works at these stakes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCd7giB9s5U

The self made ultra rich are quite smart on average.

I doubt the same is true of these Cosa Nostra and NBA guys.

You don't need to play better poker. You can just have multiple people on the same team at the same table and communicating, vastly increasing your odds of your team having the best hand.

My understanding is that collusion is rampant in poker.

If you get introduced to a 'friendly' game of 5 players there's a good chance that these guys are signalling to each other and basically folding to whoever's got the best hand. You can't win against that. Even if you have 2 new players showing up at a table existing players could worry about collusion.

If you don't have the fancy trappings those guys did it is almost impossible to catch people colluding in poker.

I think it's revealing of how diminished the la costa nostra is. This is such trivial work and, yet, this was a multi-family operation.

Sometimes the wealthy person is the shark, and you're the fish...

In Molly's Game, Tobey Maguire was the celebrity shark. (In the movie he was played by Michael Cera). He could easily have been a professional poker player, but he makes way more from acting and he prefers the easy play in private games.

No need to learn; just hire players who are better than the fish and split the profits??? Once it is your shuffler, I could cobble together a Raspberry Pi to light a slightly different wavelength LED when it dealt them two pictures and would need to concentrate to lose enough to get all their money.

It seems like so much work for relatively so little payoff. There’s a lesson here for non criminals also.

They were also targeting pros, not merely wealthy players: https://x.com/OnlyFriends_Pod/status/1981379130190156129?s=4...

But you are already breaking the law running an underground poker game.

Most criminals have a specific type of cleverness, but not intelligence. If they were smart people, they wouldn't do the crimes in the first place.

I dealt with a low-tech breach at one of the hospitals I worked for. The criminal worked in HIM, and used paper and pencil to note specific info about specific types of patients. Since they worked in HIM, it was expected for them to view many medical records in a day and no app detects paper/pencil, so quite clever so far.

Ultimately, they used this info to file false tax returns to steal the refunds.

The problem? They filed 881 false tax returns annnnnnd used the same address for all of them. DOH.

They were busted/arrested and off to jail they went.

Clever, right until the end, then abysmally stupid.

> don't have time to learn to play perfect poker

Probably don't have time to play so many hands with you that the better player is statistically guaranteed to win, either.

Organized crime groups are rarely interested in "the long game". They work on the assumption that the party will end sooner than anticipated. Each game must be total victory.

Many shuffle machines read all the cards, do the shuffle in software, then sort the cards accordingly. Here's a guy on Wired showing how to rig a poker game:

https://youtu.be/JQ20ilE5DtA

There's a device that can scan the _sides_ of specially marked cards and tell you the complete deck order.

For the shuffling machine there is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQ20ilE5DtA

There are _so many_ ways to cheat at poker that you should basically never play a private game outside of close friends.

If you wanted to spend a year or so practicing, you can learn how to do false shuffles and cuts, bottom deals, cold stack a deck etc...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3Mu7jocdew This guy was a professional card cheat for decades before going honest.

As someone who knows a bunch of card tricks myself, I have learned to resist the temptation to do an impromptu 'ambitious card' routine just because a deck of cards and an audience is in front of me before a poker game.

The rigged card-shuffling machine method is documented in this recent video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQ20ilE5DtA

The card-shuffling machine is an obvious vulnerability.

But I'm provisionally calling BS on the "X-ray table." Based on (admittedly limited) experience with X-ray imaging, I don't believe that X-rays can read ink on playing cards. It would have to be a backscatter machine, which is even less discriminatory than a transmissive machine. Would need to see some evidence that this is possible.

If nothing else, the sheer size and bulk of such a machine renders the concept incredible. If I could build something like that, I wouldn't use it to cheat at cards, I'd sell it to the TSA!

Maybe it doesn't return rigged orders, but records the order of the output deck with high speed cameras.

Slight of hand? You put the deck to be sorted at the "in" side, the machine shuffles it, then it ejects a different rigged deck.

This is likely one part of a larger operation including blackmail opportunities, as others have mentioned.

However, don't overlook the value of $7 million in cash and cryptocurrency. For an organized crime operation that's a lot more valuable than $7 million in revenue from an actual business subject to taxes, business records, and bank tracking. This was an easy way to get millions of hard to trace dollars into accounts they could use.

as others have speculated, the real money was probably in blackmail and rigged sports betting.

That was my first thought, especially because they could get similar results with a marked deck. To me, this leads more credibility to it being part of a bigger operation.

Well it’s kind of an annuity. A million a year ain’t nothing for a small operation.

But yeah they surely make much more selling fentanyl.

These guys are competitors. They crave it. Gambling is a way they scratch that itch.

I think what happens is that many of these professional athletes grow up in communities and circumstances where it's just normal and expected to be "hustling," getting away with things, and avoiding the law. Wrong, but maybe understandable under those circumstances (poverty primarily).

But then you take that person out of the "hood," and give him a $1M/yr sports contract, and the mentality doesn't necessarily go away. It's still about the hustle. They might not stop to consider that they don't NEED to hustle anymore. And they're probably also surrounded now by grifters/"friends"/family who do still need/want to hustle, and essentially using these guys.

It is sad.

Looks like near-IR of some sort but media calls everything x-ray since it's what people know. X-Rays would go through cards anyway. But you'd get nice pictures of peoples hands though, and cataracts after a night of play.

edit: now I think of it: if the cloth is thin enough you don't even need near-IR. Old fashioned IR camera's (those without any fancy filter) from the '00 showed though some relatively thin opaque synthetic material with a tiny IR source so ...

The table didn’t actually use X-rays. They’re using X-ray to mean it could be seen through with special cameras, perhaps IR sensitive.

I don't think it's literally "X-Rays". A couple years ago I saw an infrared transparent table being demonstrated as a product prototype by a distributor of magic props at a conference for professional magicians. I played with it a while because I thought it was quite remarkable and had never seen anything like it. The top surface was a half-inch thick hard black plastic which appeared completely opaque. It was perfectly convincing as it even had faux wood grain texturing on the surface. It looked for all the world like a table you'd see at IKEA or Target. I put my phone's flashlight on full brightness under it pointing up and couldn't see any light coming through, even shading the spot with my hand.

The table had a bunch of IR emitters pointed up built into the supports holding the table surface but they were at least two feet away and well-obscured into the table leg design by more normal-seeming smooth plastic I associate with being IR-transparent. Of course, if you suspect the use of IR, it's quite easy to detect with your camera phone. There was a camera hidden into the middle of the table supports looking up which transmitted the image wirelessly to a monitor nearby. My own face-down playing cards were visible on the camera plain as day, so it doesn't require special cards.

Interestingly, the magic distributor showing it wasn't giving out any info on who made it, what it cost or when it might be available. They just said they were "showing it to gauge interest" and might carry it at some point in the future. They're a large, long-time, reputable distributor of other people's products so I don't think they were involved in creating it. It hasn't made an appearance at subsequent conventions, so they must have decided it wouldn't be popular with magicians - which makes perfect sense. It would have been expensive and pretty technically involved for a limited-use magic prop. Good magicians have a many easier and cheaper ways to learn the identity of hidden cards :-). But the fact such a thick, textured, optically opaque surface could be IR transparent was pretty nifty.

As a former magician I was surprised to read the gang was using 'reader' cards (backs marked with ink visible to special glasses). No one uses those anymore as there are so many better ways to do the same thing. Seems like this gang was just into various tech toys and kind of lazy. In reality, once you control the environment, cards and have confederates in the game - cheating to win is trivial without any tech if you know what you're doing.

Next podcast sponsor fad: lead-lined underwear. PbUndies

Nothing like a night of high profile illegal poker while getting blasted with radiation. /s

i wonder if we're not conflating xray with terahertz radiation perhaps? the former being used by a company called corrections one that produces a horrifying whole-body X-Ray of a prisoner to detect contraband (certainly not healthy.)

Terahertz radiation is used in airports with (arguable) safety and efficacy. the resolution is sufficient to read protest statements written under a passengers shirt in metallic ink. I wonder if it could read cards should they be specially crafted similarly.

Collusion in live casinos is a real thing for sure, but it's not exactly easy to pull off.

1) Most card rooms these days are 8 or 9 players, so your team would need to be at least 3, maybe 4 to really swing the odds in your favor.

2) You need a subtle but effective way to signal to your team the relative strength of your hand. Think baseball signals, but way more low key. "If I touch my watch, I have an Ace" etc. You'll probably want to mix these up across the hours or days of play.

3) Seats typically do open one at a time, and you want to trickle in your team to avoid suspicion. Higher stakes games, like $5-10, where there are thousands of dollars in front of most players are your goal, and good news is that these are typically more rare so there may be only one table running. Your teammates will have to wait it out, but once at the table, they can stay for hours.

4) You'll never know exactly what your targets are holding, but knowing that your teammates folded a flush draw for example can help you narrow your opponents cards to a smaller range of possibilities. You'll want to position your teammates around the table to create "squeeze" situations where two of the team can trap a target in between.

It takes some creative subtlety, but it can be very hard to impossible to detect collusion in live games.

A few issues:

* The casino takes a rake, so you lose money every hand, but you only win when the fish bets and loses. You’re also expected to tip the dealer

* Everything is on camera and dealers remember players, so there will be a lot of witnesses and evidence

* Seats often open one at a time, so you’d potentially lose money at other tables waiting to play together. Or, you all show up at once and ask to start a new table together, which would get suspicious.

* If you don’t know the fish’s cards, there’s still a chance you lose and lose big

Wouldn't this be discovered and get you banned by the casino?

Mafia nowadays is used as a synonym for organized crime so Cosa Nostra makes it clear it means the original Mafia.

Cosa Nostra is a well defined organization operating in Sicily, that term isn’t used for other Mafias around Italy or other Sicilian criminal organizations. Among its past leaders you can find Bernardo Provenzano and Matteo Messina Denaro.

La Cosa Nostra is the umbrella term for the American Mafia, as opposed to the Sicilian Mafia (Costa Nostra)

The term was coined by the FBI specifically to make that geographic distinction.

Sorry to be completely off-topic, but: I'm really reluctant to click on anything with these 'share IDs' and usually remove them from any link I share with anyone. I don't want to make it even easier for the platforms to build networks of associated accounts.

Former players being hired as head coaches without much other coaching experience is fairly common in the NBA.

This plus a lot of the soft greed. The insistence on a foul-centric game that leads to over 50% longer games, the ridiculous lack of investment on its own broadcast infra, the refusal to shorten the season (which is the longest in pro sports, longer than baseball's season, despite being less than half the games), and the consultant-driven management decisions - I have so much contempt for Adam Silver for making me hate the game I love most.

Everything Silver did grew revenue fourfold. By every metric, he’s a good commissioner. And yet I don’t know a single person in real life who actually likes the NBA. People I talk to find the NBA anywhere from inaccessible to an outright turnoff, due to load management (and player pay), tanking, a glacial pace of play, and so on. And so the only way I can engage the game is by listening to podcasts about it. Podcasts that now belch gambling ads at me constantly.

This interview with a former Turkish NBA player who protested things happening in China with simple statements on his shoes convinced me the NBA has no morals whatsoever.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/3LUPh7waoWtydoiwjEgP16?si=-...

It's been like that forever. Makes it very hard to take the NBA seriously.

NBA stopped being an interesting sports entertainment product to me by the year 2004. It has generated a handful of interesting narratives since, but not really enough to keep me engaged in the face of its enshitification.

Yessss. "Earlier" or "Other Discussions" are good ways of framing it. 'Dupe' isn't apt. Thank you.

This is a common fallacy. Criminals often turn to crime because they're not very good at honest endeavors. Having failed to succeed on a fair playing field (hard), they victimize the weak and take advantage of others' naivety and trust (easy).

Almost nothing about crime is indicative of an intelligent mind that could be put to good use. It's a lot of lowlife midwits who are bitter they have no chance to compete or associate with real players.

All these comments assume that 30 million is _all_ the mob has made with these machines, and that the tech must be very expensive.

Usually when they pull out the big piles of drugs for the TVs, I assume that's the tip of the iceberg. So why is it that here, with four families involved, we think the only money they've made is what's been shown to us?

Also, x-ray tables, rigged card shufflers, and funny glasses don't necessarily sound like they're the most expensive things in the world.

So my guess is...

Combined with these fellas other hustles this was probably a nice chunk of change to bring in for a relatively low amount of work post initial set up. I mean, you're sitting around playing rigged poker with a bunch of millionaires and basketball players or whatever. Probably having some drinks, I'd imagine there's pretty ladies around, cigars, cocaine. Whatever.

Sounds more relaxing than extorting deli owners block by block like all those movies about the 70s show.

And the best part? The people you're robbing are probably much less likely to resort to violence as recourse.

Poker is a great game. There are so many aspects to it where you can go down a rabbit hole of strategy to improve your game - there's math, making decisions with incomplete information, deduction, reading people, all kinds of non-verbal communication, etc. Although there's chance involved, it is undoubtedly a skill game. The gambling is one of the unfortunate aspects, but it just doesn't play the same without some money involved. You can get around that a little bit with house games where everyone throws in $20 or small buy-in sit and go games at a casino.

Another game that's worth checking out if some of this sounds interesting but you really don't like gambling is "Blood on the Clocktower". It's a social logic and deduction party game. There's chance, bluffing, incomplete information, trying to figure out what other players have, etc. It's completely different, but it can scratch some of the same itches and it's a blast to play. My friends and I play it with our kids.

"the only victory condition is that you take money from other people" is also why I cannot be interested in day trading or cryptocurrency speculation, and will likely die penniless.

As a former poker pro: I hated gambling, I just was willing to do it when I had an edge and at poker I had an edge. I almost never gambled at anything else unless I was getting an edge from promotions. Still don’t.

There’s a approximately a 45% chance of losing money on any given day, even for the best players, but it decreases over a big sample. It’s definitely a marathon, not a sprint. That’s true of most things worth doing though.

It’s not lying when it’s part of the game, and kinda silly to view it that way. Is it lying by omission to not tell your chess opponent your strategy?

You are stuck sitting at a table, that’s true. But you choose when you’re there and the only rules really are basic civility so I never found that part difficult.

Money is the scoreboard. Everyone who sits down knows that. I’d argue it’s a lot less bad than how most tech companies make money these days. I’m not selling anyone’s data without them knowing about or understanding it. I’m just taking money from a guy who is trying to take my money. We both voluntarily put the money up to be taken and can stop doing so at any point.

It entirely depends on the vibes, the company, and the game, in my opinion.

At one job, we used it as a social time, 6 to 15 people from work (had to run two tables for those big nights) got together Saturday night, bbq'd some food, maybe watched a game on tv if there was a good one, and played a friendly game. Had a few drinks and enjoyed the company, while cards were played in the background.

Mildly competitive, but it was a flat $40 buy in with no more money allowed so the stakes were never incredibly high.

At another company, one guy in particular was the driver to get games going and he always wanted the stakes too high (for my taste) with lots of money moving around. I only went to two of those, wasn't my style.

With that mindset literally anything is unfun. Do you enjoy anything in particular that does not produce value? If so, you're also very likely losing something, stuck somewhere, etc.

Playing poker on a more than casual basis seems like work. But, then again so does something like Farmville. Gotta keep grinding.

Texas hold 'em is quite fun for casuals under these conditions:

The amount of money involved is small compared to the incomes of those playing, where most players have the expectation that they won't get money back and that is fine for the enjoyment they get out of the game, and the pot isn't big enough to be worth cheating about. Everyone puts in the same amount of money. You play texas hold 'em no limit with escalating blinds starting with a pretty big stack of chips, just like a real tournament. When people are out, they can't buy back in. You play until everyone is out, and the Top N players get some money back.

Lots of fun games involve lying, but you can play all night long and never tell a single lie and still win. Your only necessary verbs in a game of poker are "Call, raise, fold". Everything else is optional. If you bet big on a hand, you aren't saying anything about what is in your hand, lie or not. All the interpretation of what that means is in your opponents head. Lots of very good poker players don't talk about the hands at all.

My family quite commonly plays Texas Hold 'em for _no money at all_, everyone just gets a stack of chips.

You don't have to lie to win at poker, you just have to bluff sometimes.

The game is similar to chess when played at a moderate to high level.

> - high likelihood you lose money

When I play games like this, I don't bet more than I can afford to lose - and paying $20 to sit at a table with friends playing poker is actually cheaper than going out to a bar with them.

> - the point of the game is to lie to friends and strangers

Are there any games with hidden information that you find interesting? Or any competitive games at all? Things like Werewolf, or Go Fish, or Settlers of Catan? For that matter, even in a game without hidden information, like chess, you're still trying to outwit your opponents.

> - you're stuck sitting at a table and following rules for hours

I mean, you can leave if you're not having fun.

> - the only victory condition is that you take money from other people

But you also spend time with friends.

I'll share my experience. Playing a small pot poker game every now and then can be fun between friends. I've had a few groups of guys I'd go play poker with from time to time throughout the years.

The buy in would be something kind of low for everyone playing, like $20. No repeat buy-ins. So the loss if you didn't win wasn't much, and the payout wasn't exactly life changing but like take your spouse out to a nice date night with the winnings kind of thing. I'd often spend $20 or so doing some other kind of event with friends from time to time anyways, so its not like its some large amount being spent on entertainment. Paying for a batting cage for the evening or go-karts or renting a karaoke booth is also a 100% chance of losing money, should we also never do these things?

There's lots of deception to be played in tons of card games and board games, I don't know why poker would be held as something odd. Any game where you're holding a secret hand pretty much involves some amount of hidden motivations. One might also bluff in Catan or deceive their opponents in their strategy, should we also avoid playing that game? I'll try and hide my routes from everyone else when I'm playing ticket to ride, is that bad?

I'm stuck sitting at a table and following rules for hours. Like any other board or card game. People are stuck sitting at a table and following rules for hours playing tabletop role-playing games as well. To me, it was a chance to catch up with these friends, which at that point in time in our lives catching up at the poker game was kind of the big quarterly check-in with each other. I loved spending the time with these friends, sitting around the table and sharing life with each other, often also partaking in meals and drinks.

The victory condition is winning the pot, yes. Which, as mentioned, for at least in my games wasn't exactly some life changing amount of money one was taking from friends. We all went in knowing we'd probably be out the $20 in the end, and in the end the winner would have a small amount of money as a little bonus. And as mentioned, most of us would use it to take our significant others out on a date the next night.

I honestly don't see it as any different from spending a night playing any other board game or roleplaying game with friends, other than with a small bit of money involved as well. Obviously, other people go way harder with this gambling, which quickly just becomes an addition to the high of winning.

Poker is so much fun with friends. It's not about winning, it's about hanging out and being a little competitive. It's a great way to hang out in real life for a few hours in today's online world.

Different strokes. (It doesn't appeal to me at all either fwiw, but I'm sure what I do for fun doesn't appeal to plenty of people)

I hate casino games but I enjoy poker. I don't play often anymore but I used to play online a lot, multi tabling.

There's something very satisfying about making thousands of decisions that have a positive expected value and seeing the math win throughout the variance, resulting in a proven edge.

Like anything in life, it's fun to get good at something and at some point it's beyond the math and theory, it feels like the cards become transparent at times, you just have a gut feeling that this hand, this person is trying to bluff. It can be based on what you know about them or just how fast they clicked or their bet size, but this guy wants you to fold so you'll call with almost nothing and still win.

But overall as a profession fuck poker, you don't contribute anything to the world.

You don’t just get to beat and be handed currency from people; you get to keep their money (now it is your money!)

It’s fun?

Would you pay for an experience somewhere and then call it a loss because your bank balance is now lower?

It’s not lying, it’s a game and everyone knows the rules.

Cant the victory condition be… having fun? Why so transactional

Everyone at the table agrees to those conditions.

I mean, one could write something like "I cannot imagine why people actually like ski resorts"

- 100% likelihood you lose money

- the point of the game is fly down a mountain and not hit any trees (about 45 more deaths per year than poker in the US)

- you're stuck sitting in a lift or a line and following rules for hours

- there are no victory conditions

  > - high likelihood you lose money

Loss aversion is a cognitive bias that has to be worked on like any other. Poker might be a good method to address it.

This is honestly an odd take. For most people the money is in exchange for having fun (there are pros and likely addicts though for which the money is the goal). I play in fantasy sports leagues and I pay into them. I don’t even care about winning the pot - I enjoy the game. The victory condition is having fun. Winning money is a bonus.

The point of the game isn’t to lie to friends. Is this how you see the point of chess or sports in general? Or any game where revealing your strategy would diminish your chances of winning?

I don’t think your comment is very HN typical, but it does indicate some other qualities you may have - not bad or good, but not typical.

Right so what are the downsides?

Why do people smoke?

Reason is rarely our motive.

I don't consider poker gambling (that would be something like craps which I also find fun). It is a skill you can build and not necessarily lose money. I also don't consider it lying when everyone at the table agrees to how the game is played. Playing 'good' poker requires folding a lot and it can get boring sitting at a table.

Poker is a lot like business distilled down. The player is managing resources and deciding where to use them while dealing with incomplete information.

because it's very fun

You got many answers already, but a couple more points:

Poker doesn't require lying or table talk. Bluffing is rule-legal strategic deception expressed through betting. More like a feint in sports than cheating.

If "sitting at a table following rules" is the issue, that's true of most games. And formats vary: many are short and cash games are leave-anytime.

I dislike all gambling except poker. Anything that is purely chance and not within my control at all (roulette, sports betting) is dull and stressful. The odds are always against you. Poker has a big element of chance of course, but it’s really a game of skill. It hits a sweet spot of mathematics and social engineering that lights up a lot of neurons in a very engaging way.

When it comes to lying, in the real world I tend to be hypermoral and honest to a fault. It’s fun to have a game structure where dishonesty and aggression are acceptable.

Bon Nano = Good Text Editor

No idea why people are disagreeing with this, you are not from NY and you do not know the history here. You do not do big business in NY with out the mob.

https://www.gao.gov/products/t-osi-88-7

https://www.amny.com/news/the-mob-is-making-a-comeback-in-co...

And...

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/donald-trump-crimin...

"One of the key figures involved in these deals has been the Russian-born, mob-linked businessman Felix Sater, who plead guilty to racketeering for his role in a $40 million stock fraud scheme involving the Genovese and Bonanno crime families49 and was convicted of stabbing a man in the face with a broken margarita glass in New York."

"Despite their long association, Trump has repeatedly denied knowing about Sater’s criminal past, notwithstanding the fact that Sater widely represented himself as a Trump associate in business deals."

> Now, people play poker, and cheat, and they want the government to police their poker games and make sure they're fair.

No, if you personally run a poker game in your house and cheat your friends the government doesn’t care. The FBI isn’t going to be interested.

If you join the mafia and run an organized crime ring that operates poker games as a business which systematically defrauds people for large amounts of money and funnels the proceeds to organized crime through money laundering operations, the FBI will be interested.

If you look at this story and only see “some people cheated at a poker game” you’re missing the real story. This was a full on organized crime business operation

The poker games were run by the mafia, who pulled in a lot of cash by luring and cheating suckers. I want the FBI to stop scams that funnel money to criminal organizations.

If there's a business that's being run fraudulently then I want them to be held accountable for that.

"previously people could cheat, now they can't" ?? how is that bad.

you're right, they should outlaw gambling as a business because it's inherently predatory, rigged ("the house always wins" isn't just a cute phrase) and has addiction issues that disproportionately impact the poor