Did a Poker Pro Use RFID Tags To Cheat? (cnbc.com) 158
CNBC reports that a popular Twitch poker star has been accused of cheating:
Stones Gambling Hall in Sacramento, California says it will not livestream poker games pending an investigation into cheating allegations made against one of the game's players, Mike Postle... The original accusations were made by Veronica Brill, another poker player who has played with Postle on "Stones Live." Since then, others have come forward with similar complaints. Brill has no specific accusation of what Postle is doing and even admits that she can't be sure he is cheating. So why does she think he is cheating? His results are too good, according to Brill. She said (and several professional pokers players who talked to CNBC, agreed) no one could do as well as he has, for as long as he has, on these livestreamed games...
It's not just that Postle is winning, it's how he's winning, that is drawing suspicion. Poker commentator Joey Ingram, poker pro Matt Berkey, and others have spent hours reviewing hands Postle played and found several times where Postle made a fold or a call that wouldn't seem "right" but happened to work out in his favor. Berkey said Postle made plays no pro would ever make, and he did them often, and they worked. Poker is a game of incomplete information. Berkey said Postle played "as if he had perfect information."
Stones Gambling Hall said it has hired an independent investigator to look into the accusations. In a statement Stones Gambling Hall said: "We temporarily halted all broadcasts from Stones. We have also, as a result, halted the use of RFID playing cards." The RFID cards contain chips, that combined with readers in the poker table, transmit information about each player's hole cards, so that viewers can see the cards on the broadcast (which is on a 30-minute delay to protect game integrity). At this point, there is no specific allegation, no "smoking gun" as Berkey said. But many pros are pointing to those RFID cards and the hole card information, saying it's just not possible for Postle to play the way he does and win the way he does.
It's not just that Postle is winning, it's how he's winning, that is drawing suspicion. Poker commentator Joey Ingram, poker pro Matt Berkey, and others have spent hours reviewing hands Postle played and found several times where Postle made a fold or a call that wouldn't seem "right" but happened to work out in his favor. Berkey said Postle made plays no pro would ever make, and he did them often, and they worked. Poker is a game of incomplete information. Berkey said Postle played "as if he had perfect information."
Stones Gambling Hall said it has hired an independent investigator to look into the accusations. In a statement Stones Gambling Hall said: "We temporarily halted all broadcasts from Stones. We have also, as a result, halted the use of RFID playing cards." The RFID cards contain chips, that combined with readers in the poker table, transmit information about each player's hole cards, so that viewers can see the cards on the broadcast (which is on a 30-minute delay to protect game integrity). At this point, there is no specific allegation, no "smoking gun" as Berkey said. But many pros are pointing to those RFID cards and the hole card information, saying it's just not possible for Postle to play the way he does and win the way he does.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Trivial to test. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Trivial to test. (Score:5, Insightful)
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"Isn't the skill of a poker player his or her ability to discern what the opponent's cards are by reading the signs? "
The other player can't have a tell about the cards they don't see.
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I skimmed through one video where a guy was analyzing the hand footage and there was one hand where the accused had 8-8 and went 8's full at the turn (or flop). Opponent had 10-10 and river'ed a 10 to go 10's full. The accused option checked into 10-10 who bet (something like a pot-size bet or less) and the accused only called. I'm not the best poker player by any means, but I don't see how anyone would have checked called a full house on the river like that. There's no reason to suspect the opponent had th
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I skimmed through one video where a guy was analyzing the hand footage and there was one hand where the accused had 8-8 and went 8's full at the turn (or flop). Opponent had 10-10 and river'ed a 10 to go 10's full. The accused option checked into 10-10 who bet (something like a pot-size bet or less) and the accused only called. I'm not the best poker player by any means, but I don't see how anyone would have checked called a full house on the river like that. There's no reason to suspect the opponent had the over pair and went full at the river to beat the accused's full house. Max value play is to 3-bet raise (if not all in).
I didn't understand a single word you said. Can you translate that into a nice automobile metaphor?
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Two people at the table had a full house, which is almost always what they call "the nuts" - an unbeatable hand. The guy who got it earliest played the weakest... which is ok except what you'd normally do is make a big bet at the end to force everybody else to pay up to see your superior hand. In this case, the guy checked, which makes no sense. The only way you'd do something like that is if you're an idiot, or you knew your hand was beat, and it was extremely unlikely his full house would have been bea
Re: Trivial to test. (Score:4, Interesting)
It would be pretty stupid if he was "always" making the right call. Poker is a combination of luck (the cards you get dealt) and skill (bluffing, reading opponents, betting strategy, calculating the odds etc), if you get an edge in professional poker it will be a matter of percentages. The other question is whether he 'suddenly' got a ton better or if he always played that way.
Now the question is, how would he get the information, I'm assuming they monitor for bugs and earpieces, a wireless spectrum analyzer isn't expensive and pretty standard in modern casinos. RFID aren't readable at too great of a distance so he'd need a rather obvious and powerful antenna to read across a 7ft table. The easy thing to do would be to randomize the RFID before every round (RFID are read/write) and see if his luck changes.
Re: Trivial to test. (Score:4, Informative)
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Re: Trivial to test. (Score:2)
Given how much smoke is in most casinos, smoke signals wouldnâ(TM)t work.
And, as you noted, even if he has an accomplice, how is the info being sent to him? Perhaps, he has one or more sub-dermal implants receiving signals. RFID is powered by an external transmitter. Maybe, he is getting the info via a receiver implant? That implant could be powered by that same transmitter.
That being said, those signals donâ(TM)t penetrate deeply. So, it would have to be sub-dermal.
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Not important. It's a simple binary signal (keep playing or fold). There's a lot of ways to communicate that remotely if you're in a casino control room (eg. via a light, the direction a security camera is pointing, etc.)
Re: Trivial to test. (Score:2)
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The problem is that those same RFID chips are what they used to detect this anomaly to begin with, remember that the complaint is not that he is winning but how he is winning (aka how he reacts to other peoples hands without knowing their hands).
It says right in TFS what the RFID chips are actually used for, which is to help with the broadcasting of the game. Independent analysis using humans who are also experts in the game is what actually detected an anomaly in playing and raised suspicion.
How the hell did you come up with that theory of yours?
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Re:Trivial to test. (Score:4, Insightful)
No they did not. They didn't "detect" anything, they "suspected". Playing with non-id'd cards would definitely show any difference in his results.
Or better yet, play with cards with purposely incorrect RFID's.
When it turns out completely incorrect, then we'll see how great his poker face is.
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The problem is that those same RFID chips are what they used to detect this anomaly to begin with, remember that the complaint is not that he is winning but how he is winning (aka how he reacts to other peoples hands without knowing their hands).
Save each hand for analysis and start with a new deck, as well as change the decks back so any print anomalies he may know would not be present.
Re: Trivial to test. (Score:2)
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Use cards that aren't tagged with RFID chips, and see how he does.
-jcr
Exactly. And collect each players cards after each hand so you can compare what he did no versus how he played against similar hands in the past against the same players. Though, I suspect if he was cheating simply getting rid of RFID cards and an audience would be enough to throw him off his game; he also vilated the first rule of cheating, which is don't win too big too often.
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Or use different coding for each card set and replace them after each game.
But also review the system that reads the card to ensure that there aren't any "leaks".
Many cheaper RFID cards are also easily hacked, but later versions are more resilient.
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Properly programmed RFID chips are basically impossible to "hack". The MUPPET way to set up RFID is to use the serial number of the token as the identifier. The problem with this is twofold: (1) ANYONE can get the ID of the token simply by asking, it's a core part of the opening connection protocol. And (2) you can buy tokens online that don't have their ID number locked from the factory, so you can change it. Walk by
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What about a passive snooping or even a MiM attack? He could do one of those via his phone....
WCPGW (Score:5, Insightful)
So they setup poker games where the hidden cards literally broadcast which card they were?
Yeah, no chance that someone is taking advantage of the marked cards which are deliberately configured for remote exploitation! What could possibly go wrong....
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It's part of the display system for home viewers. And yes, it's very vulnerable to abuse.
TV Show did this... sorta (Score:4, Informative)
Can't remember which show it was.. MAYBE Las Vegas with Josh Duhamel... Anyway, the games were recorded for TV, and little cameras built into the table to see the cards instead of RFID, the idea being that nobody in the room could know, because the video recording was done from a van/truck trailer setup outside... So the guys in the truck could see the hole cards on their screens. Then they activated the cue lights on the cameras to signal the cheater when he should call/raise/fold.
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Yes, I was just going to post this. It was an episode of Las Vegas.
It's basically a certianty that he's cheating (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is that you need to be fairly competent at poker to understand he's cheating, so if this goes to court it'll be hard to convince a jury that doesnt consist of poker pros. Lots of wild theories are being made, trying to understand how he is cheating. The hub of the main Postle discussion is at the 2+2 forums which has quickly amassed over 4000 posts https://forumserver.twoplustwo... [twoplustwo.com]
Re:It's basically a certianty that he's cheating (Score:5, Informative)
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Here's the graph that suggests he is cheating [gyazo.com]
There's a lot of sigmas in that gap. If I was in the jury, it wouldn't be good for Mr lot's o' sigmas.
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Re:It's basically a certianty that he's cheating (Score:5, Informative)
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Two possibilities:
1. He's an alien that can read minds
2. He has an embedded chip behind his ear that indicates winning hands of the RFID chips
Run his ass through an MRI right after a winning game
How certain? (Score:2)
The problem is that you need to be fairly competent at poker to understand he's cheating
No you don't. All you need to do is look at situations where the odds are against him doing the right thing but yet he does do the right thing and then calculate those odds for the jury (that part is just a maths problem). If you have enough of these then you should have odds so vanishingly small it is "beyond a reasonable doubt". If you do the complex probability calculation for the jury the results should be easy to explain.
The other argument you will have to overcome is that poker players always argu
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That may be true but I find it interesting that we've convicted people of murder based on scene-of-crime DNA evidence that had much lower statistical odds. This isn't like finding a match among living humans, this is like finding a match among all humans who ever lived or will live in the next few million years.
Basically he either read the RFID signal or had a time machine.
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It gets worse for him. If he gets into court, it's not a criminal case, but a civil one (people trying to get back his illegitimate winnings). There the standard is not 'beyond reasonable doubt, but 'preponderance of the evidence'. Ouch.
Hope I never get you on a jury (Score:2)
Not saying he did or didn't cheat but
1. There isn't any evidence of a method he would have employed to cheat
2. There are no witnesses of actual cheating.
The only argument is he got really lucky.
By that logic everyone who wins a lottery cheats.
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By that logic everyone who wins a lottery cheats.
No, because anyone can win a lottery once.
But if over the course of a year if you won the weekly lottery 50 out of 52 weeks, you wouldn't be lucky, you'd be cheating.
How you're cheating would need to be determined, but consistently defying the laws of statistics over and over again is sure sign of cheating.
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I'm a casual player who only plays with family & friends and when you can see the example hands it starts to look pretty off, pretty quick. The big clue is his really loose play only happens when the hole cards are right for his hand. I play pretty loose but his play is far beyond spooking opponents.
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"peers" meant "the other lords of the realm".
this was in contrast being tried by the king himself.
The notion that such a right applied to us commoners comes *much* later . . .
Also, fwiw, an impeachment is, roughly, a trial by the full jury of his peers, but instigated by Commons rather than a prosecutor. (or in the US, by the House before the Senate).
finally, impeachment is an exception to the usual US constitutional bar against bills of attainder; it is a very specific type of bill of attainder.
hawk
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The moment you know he's throwing away a pair of kings that still sounds like obvious cheating to me. If I was a cheating man I'd try to not let it affect my "positive" play at all, the strong hands I get I have to play like I would anyway. Maybe you could selectively slow play your hand to limit the pot size and hope an ace or straight/flush draw gives you an excuse to back down, but otherwise I'd have to eat the loss. My main game would be trying to steal extra pots when the opponent also doesn't have muc
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So, to build a better cheat: why not build an automated system that actually feeds him bogus information some percentage of the time, to let him fully maximize his play, but keep the winnings statistically in check?
Just sayin'.
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...The problem is that you need to be fairly competent at poker to understand he's cheating...
Its not hard to see he is cheating. I will quote this part of the article I read, cause it makes the most logical sense, no need to worry about finding anything, the evidence is simply human behavior:
[quote]Postle doesn’t play in other non streamed live games at Stones, or anywhere else in the Sacramento area, and hasn’t been known to play in any sizable no-limit games anywhere in a long time, and that he always picks up his chips and leaves as soon as the livestream ends. I don’t real
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You probably just need a statistician expert witness and a poker player expert witness.
Statistics (Score:2)
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Isn't it possible that among the thousands and thousands of poker players Postle was simply very lucky (while not playing like a pro)? Since the other players lost (money) it is understandable how angry and spiteful they can be.
Or even more plausible, he is extraordinarily talented when it comes to reading "tells"
Re:Statistics (Score:4, Insightful)
Or even more plausible, he is extraordinarily talented when it comes to reading "tells"
If that is the case, he should be equally talented in games without RFID tags on the cards.
He isn't.
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Isn't it possible that among the thousands and thousands of poker players Postle was simply very lucky
No. The odds of him winning the way he has by luck is infinitesimal.
This isn't "one in a thousand" luck. It is "one in a hundred quadrillion" luck.
Nobody is ever that lucky. Ergo, he is cheating.
The only question is how he is doing it. Most likely he is in cahoots with the TV film crew who see the RFID data in real time. But it is also possible that he has his own concealed RFID reader.
Re: Statistics (Score:2)
No, it isn't. That kind of luck gets you royal flushes in three consecutive hands. He may certainly be doing something where the odds are long, but they're nowhere near that long.
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It is "one in a hundred quadrillion" luck.
No, it isn't. That kind of luck gets you royal flushes in three consecutive hands. He may certainly be doing something where the odds are long, but they're nowhere near that long.
The graph a few posts up indicates he's > 10 sigma from the mean. That's longer than the stated quadrillions^-1.
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What are VPIP and BB/100?
Yeah, I could use an internet search engine, but I trust you to provide a simpler and more pertinent explanation.
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VPIP stands for Voluntarily Put $ In Pot.
BB/100 refers to the number of Big Blinds won per 100 hands.
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His luck is well beyond 3 royal flushes in a row odds. His luck is more like the pieces of a broken glass that was sitting on the floor suddenly jumping up onto the counter and assembling themselves into a glass again.
The chance that we live in a universe where his luck occurred, is easily dismissed, in the same way that we can easily dismiss claims of broken glasses reassembling themselves.
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But it is also possible that he has his own concealed RFID reader.
The "cahoots" thing is probably it, not an RFID reader. The only thing he needs is to get is the signal to fold or call so this is literally just two bits of information that must be transmitted to him somehow - maybe only one if he can guess which by the context (I imagine as an expert poker player, he can). If anything in the room he can see can be rigged to give some sort of visual cue that would do it. Or some device on his body that can be activated by IR or ultraviolet, or an ultrasonic pulse, or a m
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I said it on another post already, but I saw a show where this was the basic plot. The cheaters used the TV/recording truck outside to watch/record the game to isolate them from the crowd, but used the cue lights on the camera to communicate.
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If it is truly livestreamed, then all he needs is communication with almost anyone outside who can see the livestream.
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Ignore my parent comment. I see that there is a 30 minute delay, so it isn't livestreamed at all.
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Re: Statistics (Score:2)
Possible, yes, But so unlikely that it's almost certain he cheated. Someone posted a graph showing where he is compared to the people he's playing against, and he's not even in the same vicinity.
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Nope. Too much statistical evidence to the contrary.
Quoth W.C. Fields (Score:5, Funny)
Q: "Is this a game of chance?"
A:: "Not the way I play it."
oR... (Score:4, Funny)
He could just be psychic, clairvoyant, telepathic etc
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He could just be psychic, clairvoyant, telepathic etc
Don't be silly he is blessed by God and has an angel on his shoulder telling him the hole cards.
Or he sold his soul to the devil and there is a devil of his shoulder telling him.
Or maybe its an invisible ghost who can move about the room.
The government is beaming it into his brain with N-rays.
Aliens. I'm not saying its aliens, but its aliens.
Leprachauns.
This is fun. I could do this all night.
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or time traveler!
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Dowsing rod in his pants?
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Nope. In that case he could have made far more money and far less publicly.
Luck is a super power (Score:2)
What Is The Optimal Cheating Strategy? (Score:2)
Clearly playing like you can read everyone's down cards for an extended period is a bad idea. The poker world are record keeping and stat geeks (even if not all players are) know what kind of play exists in the real world. There are records of lots of tournaments. So someone playing far, far better than anyone in recorded history is going to stand out. It's not like no one is going to notice. And they will know your record of play up to now. Yes, they will figure you are cheating, and they will definitely b
They aren't watching you lose, which matters (Score:4, Insightful)
> People are not watching how much you make winning, they are watching how you win
With 8 players at a table, each player will win about 12% of the time and lose about 87% of the time.
It's been said that in poker you can't control how much you win, you have absolute control of how much you lose. And you spend most of your time losing. Especially in a cash games as opposed to a tournament, your goal is to lose less than you win.
The thing about psychology is, people aren't paying close attention to how you lose, what you do when you fold. They are watching the wins carefully. So an optimal strategy is probably to fold a little more often than you would if you weren't cheating. You wouldn't go all-in with 3-6 off suit, you'd fold borderline hands when your opponent has you beat.
A similar idea is lottery tickets - lottery officials examine winning tickets carefully. Nobody examines losing tickets. So to cheat at lottery tickets, the guy at the guess station uses to be able to scratch 500 tickets and keep the winners. Then use the appropriate machine to re-apply the gray scratch-off covering to the losing tickets and sell them. The winning tickets are perfectly legitimate. It's the losing tickets (in the trash can) that have been tampered with.
Now, they do colorful printing on top of the scratch-off cover instead of having it gray like it used to be. So the same cheat now requires re-applying the scratch-off coating AND reprinting it. That makes it harder / more expensive.
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Thank you (Score:2)
Thank you.
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It comes down to greed in this case. A non-detectable cheating strategy would probably have netted much, much less money. Somebody else posted that it was just 250k, that is not a lot already.
RFID compromised? (Score:2)
It's entirely possible that a game with RFID cards to be compromised without the use of the video commentary. Having a duplicate set of RFID readers could give a cheater all the information. This could be detected if the RFID cards were to also disclose how many transmissions they make, how many RFID readers, or the identity of the RFID readers they're handshaking with.
RFID cards could be programmed to encrypt such identification information with internally generated time-dependent keys, and only disgorge t
Re: RFID compromised? (Score:2)
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One main issue with the RFID cards is that the identity code of each card isn't protected, just the data on the card can be protected.
There are several issues with RFID cards as can be seen here: https://securitywing.com/top-1... [securitywing.com]
So the use of RFID technology on poker cards is inviting for abuse. But that would only work if the abuser is good at memorizing or have technical devices to facilitate even a database of cards that can be maintained while the cards are encountered. Card counting is a known method i
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A passive reader that listens to the exchange between the card and the real reader is quite enough. RFID pumps out quite a bit of power, as the ID tag is powered by the reader as well.
RFID is a pretty bad idea (Score:2)
Remember that listening to the cards responding can potentially be done over quite a bit of distance and entirely passively. If you can identify the different readers, either from time patterns or from reader IDs (I too lazy to look up whether the Reader transmits an ID), you can get which card is which, potentially from quite a bit of distance away (to be used by an ally in cheating) or from next to the card and reader by the cheater himself. Also, the video may not be as secure as thought in the 30 minute
Re:the more money, the more corruption .. (Score:5, Insightful)
Hate to burst your bubble, but society had always been greedy, one can even argue humans were even greedier before civilization started, when the often only interactions two different nomad tribes (often with different languages) would have were when they beat up and plunder each other.
And cheating in exams by the Elites were already documented as early as during Chinese Imperial Exams of Han Dynasty two thousand years ago and is quite rampant.
There are lots of reasons to be gloomy about current system but neither romanticizing the past and blaming people that are better off than yourself will bring fruitful solutions.
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Indeed. For example, the "Tragedy of the commons" if from 1833.
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I want you to have a stranger write something random on a piece of paper without you looking, then I want you to have him destroy that piece of paper without you looking.
Now, populate the screen display with what was on that paper.
You can't?
No shit.
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I don't think they need any real-time information to be able to get the job done
There are any number of possible solutions, including that they could print a discrete barcode on the face of each card and the dealer could run them over a sensor in the table to sense the values of cards dealt in order, then match that with the recipients of the cards retrospectively. It should be relatively easy to secure a sensor that has an in-built 25 minute delay and can only transmit information
you mentioned hole card ca
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I don't think they need any real-time information to be able to get the job done
There are any number of possible solutions, including that they could print a discrete barcode on the face of each card and the dealer could run them over a sensor in the table to sense the values of cards dealt in order, then match that with the recipients of the cards retrospectively. It should be relatively easy to secure a sensor that has an in-built 25 minute delay and can only transmit information
you mentioned hole card cameras yourself, just use cameras that have an in-built 25 minute delay and mix them into the feed 5 minutes before it goes to air
I'm not saying don;t colect the information, just don't collect it in a way that anyone can be privy to it until it is too late
If someone is tapping the feed then they'd still get that information.
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Probably some things in there that radiate like hell, including the original RFID readers, which must do so in order to work. Shielding in cameras, etc is only so they do not disturb other equipment. If you intentionally listen, you can get a lot.
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Wait wtf.. they let him have a cell phone in a tournament?! Wtf? Or even 'stuff'?
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everyone has a cellphone in those games, its a joke really
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Indeed. They seem to have nobody conversant with technical ID security there.
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They allow him to have a cell-phone? WTF?
May also be a passive listener to the RFID reader in the table and some flaw in the encryption used (or even absence of it). Building a passive listener into a phone would not be that hard. I could probably do it. In an extreme case, he could even be carrying an RFID proxy that inserts itself into the communication.
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What king of virtue signalling scum are _you_? This is about a technical security problem, not about your messed up view of morals.