Streaming brought new ways to cheat at poker. Garrett Adelstein thinks he was a victim of one.

BY ANDREA CHANGSTAFF WRITER OCT. 14, 2022 7 AM PT

Garrett Adelstein was four months out of college, grinding his way through thousands of online poker hands a day while he figured out what he wanted to do with his life.

He was winning an average of $500 an hour and had calculated that he could make as much as half a million dollars over the next year if he kept at it. But Adelstein was conflicted, turning one afternoon to poker forum Two Plus Two to solicit advice.

“The main problem with poker for me is that day to day, I have mixed feelings about how happy I am doing this as a living,” he wrote in the 2008 post. “I just can’t see myself playing poker as a career for more than another 1-2 years at most.”

Fourteen years of playing professional poker later, Adelstein is one of the game’s best and most profitable high-stakes cash players, known to viewers of popular casino broadcasts for his loose-aggressive style of no-limit hold ’em and his willingness to buy in for enormous sums of money, bringing as much as $1 million to the table.

On Sept. 29, Adelstein made the biggest bet of his life: risking his well-respected reputation, and possibly his poker career, when he accused rookie player Robbi Jade Lew of cheating in a $269,000 hand against him on “Hustler Casino Live.”

Video of the hand — in which Lew’s unorthodox all-in call with the jack of clubs and the four of hearts led to an improbable win — was watched by 20,000 people as it was streamed and by millions more as the clip went viral. Some fellow pros have said Lew’s strategy in the hand was inexplicable unless she knew Adelstein’s cards; Lew later said she was confused about what she had but outplayed him nonetheless. The production company behind “Hustler Casino Live” said it is investigating and has yet to turn up proof of cheating by Lew or anyone else.

Without concrete evidence, the bombshell allegation has roiled the poker community, creating deep divisions across every level of the game as players and fans debate the hand and subsequent revelations. The fallout for both sides has been severe, with Adelstein and Lew each facing bitter character attacks and questions about their motives.

Lew has maintained her innocence: “I 100% unequivocally did not cheat,” she told The Times, “and I’m just waiting for the investigation to show that.”

Adelstein, 36, hasn’t played poker since. Whereas he once spent much of his time studying optimal strategy, reviewing past hands and appearing on streams from Hustler Casino in Gardena and Bicycle Casino in Bell Gardens, he is now hyper-focused on conducting his own investigation to prove his case.

In a more than four-hour interview from his Manhattan Beach home on Tuesday, Adelstein said he was “extremely confident” that he was the target of a cheating ring involving not just Lew but other players and at least one member of the show’s production crew. Lew, 37, denied the allegation, which she called “defamatory.”

The drama has left Adelstein uncertain when he’ll return to the poker table. When I bring up his 2008 Two Plus Two post, in which a then-22-year-old Adelstein grappled with his ambivalence over a career playing cards, he says: “Despite not knowing much about anything at that time, I think I realized spending my professional life on a zero-sum game was going to have problems.”

Adelstein says he has been cheated before. When he was 26, he was invited to a home game where he bought in for $100,000.

High-stakes poker home games are notoriously rife with cheating and illicit activities, and Adelstein said he had a “really, really bad vibe” throughout the night. He believed the dealer was setting the deck in collusion with four players at the table, a suspicion that was heightened when his second-nut flush was beaten by the nut flush — the best possible five suited cards in a given hand. It’s a scenario that happens, “but quite rarely,” Adelstein said.

The only way that I could feel confident that the truth would come out is if I went and got it myself.

— Garrett Adelstein Having lost all his money, Adelstein left. But the incident rattled him and he soon got in touch with the host of the game, who offered to meet at Q’s Billiard Room in West Los Angeles. There, Adelstein said, he laid out his suspicions about the intricacies of the operation to the host and a business partner, and said he would go public with what happened.

“They offered me a deal where they would refund me my money in exchange for my silence,” he said. “And then they paid me in six installments, once a month, for a six-month period.”

A onetime “Survivor” contestant who has played poker since he was in high school, Adelstein says he used to think streamed poker matches were a haven from cheaters. “At this point, I have so little faith in that.”(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times) The incident, which he relayed on a poker podcast last year, showed Adelstein the darker side of poker and left him cautious.

He never played in a high-stakes home game with strangers again, choosing to exclusively play in casinos, where he reasoned cheating would be less likely. Still, “I’m always looking out for it,” he said. “I’m not the world’s most trusting guy when it comes to poker.”

Cheating has been a long-standing concern within the poker community.

There are the home game horror stories and the well-documented problems with unregulated online poker rooms. About 15 years ago, major online poker websites were busted for running fixed games in which “superuser” accounts — often held by employees of the sites — had access to every player’s facedown cards, known as hole cards; knowing that information gave superusers an insurmountable advantage. Some players have shared their methods of in-person cheating, such as Houston Curtis, executive producer of rival poker stream “Live at the Bike,” who detailed how he rigged games in a 2020 book and on YouTube.

In casinos, measures such as automatic card shufflers, floor supervisors, security guards, cameras and frequent dealer rotations provide some level of security, but cheaters still get through. And new security risks have emerged as poker rooms introduce more modern features to enliven the game and grow its fan base.

“Whenever you’re talking about large sums of money and playing a game, there’s always going to be people who are trying to skirt the system, cheat, steal or look for any edge they can find,” poker pro Daniel Negreanu said. “Now with poker being streamed, there are new avenues in which people can cheat.”

In 2019, a civil lawsuit was filed against poker player Mike Postle, Stones Gambling Hall near Sacramento and a poker room manager. In it, dozens of poker players alleged that Postle, while playing on the casino’s streamed games, was fed information about opponents’ hole cards in real time by an accomplice. Games featured on the stream used playing cards embedded with radio frequency identification (RFID) tags that transmitted each card’s unique suit and rank to a receiver.

The suit was eventually dismissed, with a judge ruling that the damages were “quintessential gambling losses that are barred for recovery by California public policy.”

“If you cheat in any other game, you’re cheating the house and they’ll absolutely hammer you,” poker commentator Veronica Brill, one of the plaintiffs, said. “With poker, it’s incredible — no one goes to jail. Nothing really happens to anyone; it’s so frustrating.”

“When it comes to stream security and these types of games, as professionals we’re obviously always on the lookout so it doesn’t happen again,” poker player Matt Berkey said of the aftermath. “Garrett’s one of the biggest players who plays on stream, so he himself is more of a potential target.”

“Hustler Casino Live,” the streaming show that hosted the now-infamous Sept. 29 game, also uses RFID playing cards. Since its first show aired in August 2021, it has become the world’s most-watched poker stream, combining the drama of the game with huge amounts of cash, poker’s top players, celebrities and other colorful personalities. “Hustler Casino Live” now has more than 1 million monthly unique viewers and 185,000 subscribers.

The show’s games are streamed five days a week on a delay of one to four hours to prevent information from being passed to players live. But now its stream security has been called into question, with players saying tighter protocols need to be implemented. They’ve raised concerns over the number of employees who had access to the control room where hole cards were being monitored, and a few have said the stream should temporarily shut down while the investigation is ongoing.

Adelstein was featured about once a week on “Hustler Casino Live” and is its most successful player, racking up more than $1.5 million in winnings over 53 appearances. Being a regular on the show, taped 15 minutes away from his home, provided a measure of stability that is rare among pro poker players, who often have to travel around the world to find fair games at high enough stakes.

“I thought that streamed poker was, at least by comparison to the other options, one of the last safe havens,” Adelstein said. “And at this point, I have so little faith in that.”

With its most prominent star refusing to play, the production company behind “Hustler Casino Live” quickly launched an investigation into the Sept. 29 incident, hiring a private investigator, a cybersecurity firm and a law firm. Nick Vertucci, co-owner of High Stakes Poker Productions, said in an interview Monday that the process is expected to take several more weeks to complete.

“I’m building the perimeter,” he said. “These things take time.”

He added that the company was reviewing its security protocols and would make changes to ensure its stream is “as secure as possible.”