High profile poker hand cheat sheets scandals to rock casinos. Beginner poker players studying the masters and other ingenious strategies.
You know the feeling. You’re relaxing with friends while playing some poker, and there’s always a “lucky” one that magically seems to get the best hands. Once they’ve had enough, they rake it in and call it a night.
While some might consider that the Universe is endowing them with an incredible gift for tipping randomness to their favour, you’re wiser: it’s nothing less than a professional cheater. And as such, it’s almost impossible to prove. You might think that this is possible in amateur poker and that it’s impossible to get away with it at a professional level. If that’s so, think again!
In fact, there are incredible poker scandals that even affected prominent figures such as Hollywood actors. But what about poker hand cheat sheets? Are there high-profile cases where they were involved? Let’s take a look at poker hand cheat sheets first.
Poker Hand Cheat Sheets: Useful Companions
First, there’s nothing wrong with poker hand cheat sheets, and they’re allowed in casinos. In fact, there are many official poker hand rankings with cheat sheet for beginners that can make your life easier.
These cheat sheets help you learn the game, the different hands, and more. Some offer suggestions such as “always fold” when getting a certain hand, explanations of the different stages of each round and other useful features.
The idea is to offer beginners an easy way to learn the game and be on par with the pros. You’ll likely dispense with them after a while since you’ll eventually have all that information in your head.
This means there are no top scandals with poker hand cheat sheets for two reasons. First, it’s a beginner’s tool, and it would be embarrassing that a pro player would use them and second, they’re not a cheating tool.
With that said, let’s look at some incredible scandals in poker history.
Poker Stable Cheating Scheme
This is quite bizarre to even put words into it, but we’ll try. Bryn Kenney, one of the biggest poker players in the world, was accused of running a cheating stable with poker horses. No, we’re not talking about magical animals who know how to play.
In case you didn’t know, “horses” in poker are people backed by someone else to play. For instance, somebody “invests” in poker players and pays buy-ins to the player for a cut of the potential prize.
Martin Zamani denounced the whole situation, and it goes like this: Kenney had a stable with poker horses that colluded together and had real-time assistance tools, allowing them to get an edge over their opponents.
Kenney claimed this was false, but evidence showed that there was at least some kind of collusion taking place.
No Skill? No Worries, Fleece Them With Tech
Mike Postle became a poker sensation after being on an incredible lucky streak in 2019 at Stones Live Poker. Poker enthusiasts even called him a poker “Messiah” because of his miraculous ability to read his opponents while using unconventional tactics.
However, some people got wiser. Either he had an incredible parapsychological ability to remotely view other people’s cards, or something else was going on. Yes, you guessed right. And what was going on was beyond spectacular.
The online community checked hours upon hours of his performance and how implausible his wins were. The verdict? He was getting hints from somebody who could check the RFID system to read cards for broadcasting.
He then had this information delivered to his phone and used a device on his baseball cap to transmit the info from the cell phone to his ears. 88 fellow players later sued him. Hopefully, he won enough to pay the bills!
Exploiting Player the White-Collar Way
This is the mother of all scandals, and it starts with a simple premise: why bother cheating at poker when you can simply scam every player and milk their money without breaking a sweat? That’s apparently what the CRO of the infamous FTX, Daniel Friedberg, had done in the past.
He was an executive at Excapsa, which was involved in an incredible scam with Ultimate Bet, an online poker platform. The story is worthy of a book, but to make it short, it involved the usage of software that allowed viewing the opponent’s hole cards.
While the scam went on, selected players were allowed this “God Mode”, with which the conspirators managed to exploit $50 million from players. One well-known affected was actor Ben Affleck, who apparently lost more than $1 million thanks to it.
As you can see from the examples above, cheat sheets are a child’s game when compared to pro scammers. So, don’t worry about it and take them with you next time you play, if you want to. And be on the lookout for real con men as well!
