Another story of cheating in live games has surfaced. It’s not a Mike Postle-type tale where someone with notoriety was exposed, but it does seem to hint at a much larger and more organized scheme.
Players use a micro-camera hidden somewhere on the table, send footage offsite, then feed card details to someone at the table. Once the information reaches their earpiece, this player can make correct decisions 100% of the time, in theory.
The news broke on Bart Hansen’s YouTube channel. Bart is a high-stakes cash game commentator known for voicing the Hustler Live Casino games, and the owner of Crush Live Poker. An anonymous Aria regular going by “Joe” blew the whistle, and we’re glad he did.
Let’s hear what Joe saw at the Aria in June.
“So, to provide a little bit of context, this was at the $5/$10 tables, or opting as $10/$20. These are some of the bigger games that are public during the WSOP. So these are $5,000 cap buy-ins, a relatively significant amount of money.
This one guy who we thought was very, very action, very much like a whale, would sit down usually pretty late at night, around 2 or 3 a.m. He would play a massive amount of hands. He'd be extremely talkative, very seemingly very action-oriented, and he would show down hands like offsuit and offsuit, just three-betting them and all this.
We would just think, “Oh, this is a great game, let's keep playing with him as much as possible.”
We didn't really suspect anything at first. For the first couple of games that we played with him, for the first week, we just thought he either had really good instincts or was just running really well.
He would essentially just be able to play a ton of hands and not really lose that often. He would bluff a lot, but somehow never bluff into the nuts. He would often know exactly where he stood if he had a marginal hand.
And then oftentimes, if you had a marginal hand, for example, if you had pocket sevens on a board that had a king, a queen, and other high cards, if you bet, he would just raise you and then you would basically never be able to call him unless you just had a really good read on him.”
Joe’s next move was to talk with other regs about what he’d been seeing.
“So eventually some of the other regulars there messaged me and we were talking outside of the game. We were like, “Yeah, it's just really interesting how he's able to bluff so often but he seems to win a lot.”
If you were around for the Mike Postle scandal, then everything you just heard sounds familiar. Playing a wide range of hands, always somehow able to make the right decisions; that was Postle in a nutshell.
Postle putting in a 5-bet with ace-high and a gutshot
One of Mike’s favorite ways to extract money was with absolutely perfect bluffs. Someone has an underpair, Mike has complete air, and he applies maximum pressure. The result was usually a fold, and Postle would grin and laugh. It was a lot less funny to the poker community after he was exposed.
It’s always been a leading theory that Mike had help, someone feeding him the cards from behind the scenes.
Reflecting on the Mike Postle scandal, Veronica talked about the internal help Mike needed to cheat, plus why law enforcement didn't prosecute Stones Casino.
“So we started talking, and one thing we started to realize was that every time he sat down, there would always be a second person who would also be at the table, and the two of them had never interacted.
They never gave any indication that they knew each other. But the second person had a mask on, was extremely quiet, and nitty. In fact, when we thought about it, we realized that this guy, when he was at the table, and we played with him for a week to two weeks, had never played a single hand. Even the nittiest person at some point is going to get aces or kings or queens.
He would just play no hands at all, but he always had his cap on the rail of the table. We didn't really think much of it at first. And then we realized that there was a very good chance that the two of them were working together.
To be honest, it was a pretty effective system, because the guy who would play no hands you would never suspect of cheating, because he's not playing any hands. Even if he is cheating, he's not making any money directly. So we're not suspecting him of cheating.
And then this other guy, who's much more action, much more of a whale, we obviously can suspect him of cheating because he's winning a lot. But he has nothing on the rail. He doesn't have any devices or anything that could indicate cheating. He does have his headphones in the entire time, but lots of people have their headphones in, like they're just listening to music or watching videos at the table. So it's not anything suspicious.
It was a very interesting setup where, because of how they split the responsibilities, we wouldn't suspect either of them of cheating.”
The next step was to tell the Aria casino staff, who actually acted on the information. That isn’t always what happens in these kinds of situations.
“We eventually realized that the two of them would always be at the table at the same time. So we went up to the casino floor and said, "Hey, we have a suspicion that these two people are potentially cheating. We've noticed it over the past couple of weeks. Obviously, we can't catch them red-handed, but if you could, could you just ask them to move the cap off the table? Make sure there's nothing on the rail."
So the floor came by and said, "Hey, you need to move the cap off." And he immediately got super defensive.
This guy had never talked at all. He was super quiet the whole time. And suddenly he got super defensive and said, "Oh, no, no, no. I'm not doing anything bad. There's nothing wrong. I'm not cheating or anything."
And then it was very interesting, because none of us had even mentioned anything about cheating. All we had said was just move your cap, and he got super defensive.
At one point he started talking to the other guy, his potential accomplice, and up until then, for like a week and a half, two weeks, he had never made any indication that they knew each other. They had pretended they didn't know each other.
All of a sudden they started talking to each other, and in Spanish too. So it became immediately clear that the two of them knew each other and that they had some sort of agreement going on. And then they pretty much immediately got up and left at the same time. So to us, even though that's not hard evidence, it made it even more clear, because at this point, if you're not guilty, you're not going to act this way.
You're not going to get super defensive. You're not going to start talking to someone else and then immediately leave.”
This looks pretty cut and dry for most of us, but in the legal world, everything is circumstantial. There is no smoking gun yet, and Aria could see that.
"What we realized was that after they had all left, after this incident where they all got up and left immediately, we talked to casino management and said, "Did you not find that suspicious? It's even more clear that they could be cheating."
Casino management basically said, well, we didn't catch them cheating. There's no hard evidence. We can't actually ban them. So at that point, as a group of regulars, we decided to kind of take matters into our own hands.
There was a group chat of a bunch of other people who play there pretty regularly. I'm only there for the summer, but I have a friend who's in these group chats, and he started passing along information to others like, “Watch out for these two people specifically. They've been cheating at the Aria $5/$10. Just be aware of that.”
A few days later, I'm sitting down at the $5/$10 table again, and I noticed that the accomplice has sat down, but not the guy who's playing a lot of hands. And so I'm already on edge.
Lo and behold, about 15 minutes later, the whale, his buddy, sits down. And immediately I go, "All right, well, it was nice playing with you all. I am leaving." And I didn't give a reason why, because I didn't feel like I needed to explain myself, but I decided to immediately rack up and leave.
And interestingly enough, another person at the table who's a regular noticed that, and he basically confronts the whale face to face and says, "Hey, I've heard some rumors about you. I've heard that you're pretty good at figuring out cards and what people have." This is right in front of everyone. He says it right in front of everyone.
And he gets super defensive and says, "I have no idea what you're talking about. I don't know what you're saying." And the regular goes, "Well, it doesn't matter. I think you're cheating." And he turns to the two people next to him and says, "By the way, just be careful of him. I'm pretty sure he cheats. I'm going to leave. You guys can do what you want."
So he gets up and leaves. The other two people start going, "Well, this feels weird. I'm going to get up and leave." And one other person who's more of a recreational player just visiting decides that this feels very weird, where four people are all leaving at once, and he leaves as well. And immediately, essentially, the entire table breaks, and the only people left are him and his accomplice.”
If there were photos of the cheater’s expressions at this moment, as all of the marks walked off, they would have been priceless.
“We did get more evidence. Apparently he had told some other people that he had been banned from the Wynn and the Venetian as well. As far as I know, the only one I know of for sure was the guy who was whaling it up.
He claims that he was banned from the Wynn because he got into some disagreement with the floor, like a physical altercation.
At the time we didn't think much of it, but now that I think about it some more, I think it's much more likely that he probably got banned from the Wynn for potentially cheating and just didn't want to tell us the real reason.”
And that, is where Joe’s story ends. From our perspective, it’s as clear as cheating gets without having hard evidence.
That’s the thing with these situations; the hard evidence may never come at all. It’s exactly what happened in Mike Postle’s case. Strong assertions, tons and tons of circumstantial evidence, a statistical anomaly, but no hard evidence.
But when something looks as suspicious as this, and has all of the telltale signs, we have to make a judgment call.
The method is somewhat clear: A device (the hat) shoots low-angle video of the cards as they are dealt, relaying them to a viewer nearby. They probably park outside the casino, maybe inside a van.
The whale wearing headphones wouldn’t be a red flag, but combined with everything else in this story, it is very suspicious. It’s the perfect way to communicate card information. No Casino style leg-tapping device needed here.
The great thing about online poker is that nobody can look at your cards, and nobody controls the shuffling. 100% random outcomes, as the game should be.
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We’ve Always Known the Solution to Stop This Kind of Cheating
Micro-cameras are advanced, but fairly easy to beat. The community has known this for years, which means casinos know about it as well.
Bart Hansen points this out in the video.
“You could deal the cards face down. You could just not have the cards lifted, deal them out of a shoe, which is what they do in blackjack, which I think is what they do in Monaco anyway, even for poker. I've never played there, but not physically lifting the cards [would work], if this became a widespread thing as technology moves along.”
He’s completely right.
The main way to disrupt this cheating method is to deal cards flat against the table (the European-slide or Euro-slide), never giving any glimpse of the faces. But this dealing style isn’t being adopted yet in the United States, at least not in a widespread way.
But the slide-deal is becoming the standard for several organizations. The EPT announced that it would be expected by 2025. Most major operators in Asia reportedly use the slide deal. The Tournament Directions Association also announced in their live-streamed 2026 Summit that they’d be training dealers to slide deal going forward.
At the same summit, representatives of South Point Casino and Venetian Casino voiced their support of adopting the slide. This will take some time, but it’s a step in the right direction.
You can bet it’s going to take longer to be adopted at your local cash games, where dealers are paid less and pressured more to deal quickly. Some operators might see this as choose game integrity over hands-per-hour, the slide is actually not very slow when done correctly.
With the slide deal, the cards go quickly from the deck to the felt, and remain flat on the table until reaching the player
But during the 2026 TDA Summit, one of the panelists involved with the Asia Poker Tour commented about just how easy it is to adopt this dealing style:
“It does not take as long as you think it does to teach dealers to slide deal. I'm saying if that's holding you back, you don't think your dealers can learn to slide deal. We taught 200 dealers how to slide deal in basically a day and it can be done. And, it it eliminates this problem entirely.”
The secondary protection measure is to ban devices and items from being on the table. If only chips and cards were allowed on the felt, it’s difficult to imagine a way around this for the cheaters. They need to get their cameras on the table somehow.
However, banning items from the table does take away some of the atmosphere for recreational players. It could make the games feel more serious, and more like a competition than a fun hobby. Ideally, casinos switch to slide dealing, and the issue ends there.
We’ll keep you posted. For now, it does seem like the professionals running tournaments (and select casinos) are aware of this cheating method, and aren’t waiting for it to become a major problem that hurts their bottom line.
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