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...
At the table statistics matter between pros, but if you are not aware of your flaws, you might as well play with your cards face up.
Some pitchers even said they would deliberately perform a "tell" that opponents had identified then throw a different pitch.
So really crafty legspinners sometimes try to develop two versions of the googly: one with a deliberate tell and one without a tell.
Here’s an example of probably the greatest legspin bowler of all time doing exactly this, although with a different ball (a “flipper” or topspin ball) not a googly https://youtu.be/DlyG5wnW7I0?si=O463NAdV6NAAB3cG
Normally I'd agree, but this administration is known for pushing to release public distractions whenever they can.
It takes time to build a case. Some laws need people working together and a one time event testing a new table and accidentally having lots of cash in the bags as well as so-called famous people showing up can simply happen by chance.
It is complicated.
I don't like the private (illegal) scene because it's killed action in casinos and games I used to love playing in. The risk to me of breaking the law, being robbed/scammed, or worse is not worth it to play in these games and I wish they'd go away.
Even the mafia angle - the NY families must have fallen a long way if they're resorting to high profile but ultimately petty scams like this. This seems like PR for the FBI and nothing more, like I said up thread this has been common knowledge for years.
I spent a fun few hours a couple years back deep diving into what has become of the old-school "Goodfellas"-style mob these days. Looking into both media reports as well as posts by 'mob fans' - niche forums of those who obsessively follow mob and mob adjacent activities via open-source intel methods - I got the sense the traditional Italian mob families have indeed shrunk to a smaller, sadder version of what they once were due to being eclipsed by new, different kinds of organized crime.
Guys who are known "made men" getting out of prison after doing 10-15 and then ending up doing relatively nickel and dime crimes like daylight armed robbery of a jewelry store themselves for lack of enough income. 25 years ago guys like that wouldn't normally do that stuff themselves. Others have even sunk to basically LARPing being old-school mobsters on social media.
It seems there are two key drivers behind the decline: the real money in organized crime has shifted to new kinds of activities which scale better and can grow much larger. That's attracted new competitors. Some are smarter, some more brutal and some which are both. There's also an aspect that these new, bigger opportunities are far more complex, long-term and can also require successfully operating legitimate businesses as one necessary component. I guess it's not surprising. Even illicit industries undergo accelerating change over time. The old crime families still exist and can certainly still be dangerous - they're just no longer the top of the criminal food chain in terms of earnings.
The presence of petty scams does not indicate they have stopped their large scale operations. The Mafia has always done scams like this; it's basically the bush leagues to train for the really big stuff.
Things like: "Hey I'm organizing a trip to Vegas. $1000 / head. Great hotel, meals paid, etc. etc."
Then the organizer has the great misfortune of being "robbed" of all the money he collected by a masked assailant.
Maybe the higher level guys were were brighter, but I kind of doubt it.
The political prosecution vendettas are dumb but here in LA they are disrupting “Armenian” crime rings
Once you're cheating and colluding you are in danger of going to jail, and it's not clear that more cheating makes it more likely to be caught.
Car analogy--I never had to take my 1976 Olds Cutlass in because the key fob got out of sync or because the touchscreen got fried or the electronic power steering module shorted or... or .. or
More points of failure = more failure.
you just need to beat the table, you don't need to become an over-average pro.
that decades long tail you mentioned is for pros chasing profitability in tournaments -- it's a much shorter tail when you're playing fish in setups.
being better at poker than the guy at the table who is good at making money isn't a big leap, it's what sharks and hustlers have been aiming at for hundreds of years.
Or like, say you're against a "fish" that goes all in preflop with exactly J7 offsuit and nothing else, no matter how big his stack is, because that's their lucky hand or something. You're not playing as profitably as possible if you lack that knowledge, and if you somehow have that knowledge, there are tons of hands you play there that you normally never would and would appear to others without that information as playing "bad."
It's a deeply complex game people try to trivialize. I've been studying for about 20 years and every year that goes by I think I know less than I did the year before. And I'm just talking no limit hold'em right now - there are tons of variants that all have their own areas of study, and that's not even to get into weird live game areas of theory like tells and stuff (which is not as important as people tend to think).
A lot of rich people know more about poker than middle-income scrubs. You don't want to find out the fish you're chasing was a shark all along. The point here is to turn a game a chance into a profit center, suggesting they just do it legitimately missed the point and assumes the scammers themselves have the time or talent to become good enough to reliably fleece people legitimately. It also means you have to vet the people you invite, rather than confidently turning out the pockets of scrubs and capable players alike.
They are not the best poker players in the world. Best poker players have the misfortune of not being invited to "fun" millionaire games
If you have enough of an edge, the variance is really not that big. The only reason to have high-tech cheating when you already have a table full of fish - is if the people running the scheme are not very good at poker
Someone didn't pay a bribe on time?
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.
There is also the very strong possibility that they are colluding with the online betting platforms in some way. Coupled with the fact that any difference-maker athlete is getting a huge salary, and blackmail/extortion becomes your best option to getting one on your side.
However, if you assume they were feeding the information to the platforms...
Second, the FBI is targeting real world Mafia members, who will typically be the bookies taking action from others. If they know in advance, through blackmail or collusion that an NBA player or coach will throw a game, they can exploit this versus their entire betting pool for massive wins against the suckers placing bets with them.
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.
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.
I remember as a kid, I'd play battleship with my siblings. I was really good at it, they were not. They hated when it was obvious that I let them win but also hated when I beat them badly so I found a way to make the game go longer. Often we'd play on a glass table and I'd "drop" a piece so I could peek under the table and see where their pieces were. I could get a hit and then miss many follow up shots to slowly destroy their ship and give them more time to find and destroy mine. They'd gloat over their hard-fought win but I'd just smile and beat them for real next round. I could have done this without peeking but I wanted to make sure I didn't accidentally play too well.
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.
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.
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.
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:
I doubt the same is true of these Cosa Nostra and NBA guys.
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.
Just stick everything in the S&P 500?
Yeah but that's friends of the emperor, not organized crime (although granted, the distinction between these two groups is getting smaller by the day).
Organized crime? That money is literally everywhere. Restaurants, real estate, cars, the stock markets... the only place you'll rarely spot it is, ironically, gambling, way too many chances of getting caught on a paper trail. A lot of it is also invested in art pieces stored in one tax haven/freeport or another, really easy to launder money or evade taxes.
Honestly this is the first “advanced” mafia scheme I’ve heard of in a while.
Last time I heard about a mafia crime it was a very sloppy hit that sounded more like what you hear from teenagers in Chicago shooting at each other.
Though tbf it could easily have always been like that and I’m just blinded my media bias about a group of people I’ve never known form a time I’ve never known.
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.
Definitely a lot of work but that seems like a half decent payday to me.
The article says "A cut OF THE PROFITS went to those who helped in the plot," implying that the $7m wasn't truly profit but actually revenue? The writing is unclear to me. I'm not sure if this is before paying out to 30+ people over several years, or after, but article implies before, that it's how much was taken from victims. That I think makes the difference on whether or not it was a decent payday. The profit would be how much supposedly went to fund their other operations, which the article does allege some went to.
Same reason there are people out there who shoplift even though they don’t need what they’re grabbing. The thrill of the act.
And that they just didn't want to operate it at a loss.
Just extorting Chauncey Billips seems like a better ROI than the whole caper if you’ve got some hold on him.
The poker game itself in high-roller situations could be a million plus per night depending on the stakes.
Then there's the whole "you owe the Mafia" angle with NBA players and coaches. It's a pretty clear line to the Mafia making tens of millions of dollars on rigged NBA games.
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.
If they were smart people, they wouldn't do the crimes in the first place.
There are tons of smart people committing crimes. The levels of Intelligence, success, luck, greed, and morals can co-exist in every possible combination within one human.
Probably don't have time to play so many hands with you that the better player is statistically guaranteed to win, either.