“Test” Table Feature Can Be Used To Determine Whether A Card Has Been Misread.”
By Evert Caldwell
“Postle bluffed the graphics” joked Justin Kelly as Mike Postle took down a huge pot in a “live-streamed” poker game at Stones Gambling Hall against a crafty player who went by the screen name “T-BONE“, since identified as poker pro Trey Morris. While the hand was in progress, commentators Justin Kelley and Scott Moskowitz were notified in the booth that the graphics showing Postle had 8 high were wrong, and that he was actually holding “the nuts” (best possible hand).
Graphic errors were commonplace on the streams, although with the amount of hands that have aired it would probably be fairer to say that when they did occur they were magnified.
The Stones Live Poker show doesn’t actually air live, it’s streamed on a thirty minute delay. The commentators view the taped action at the same time as the audience. When players, who also watched themselves on the delay, began complaining that their hole cards were not always what they actually held, making it appear they made “donkey” plays, techs in the production room began alerting the booth ahead of time when they became aware a graphic error had occurred.
Before the tech relayed the information this night, Justin and Scott were marveling at a bluff T-BONE was attempting that seemed destined to succeed. The graphics were showing Postle, screen name “GET THERE POSTLE“, was holding a useless 8♦6♠ on a 3♣10♠7♠5♥J♥ board when he led out on the river for what appeared to be a $855 bluff.
With the pot now standing at over $2.4k, T-BONE, who also missed his draws with the 9♣6♣, started cutting out chips for a raise, creating hysteria in the booth. Kelly, further magnifying the brilliance of the anticipated play, stated “I am a T-BONE fangirl for life if this happens”. With 9 high, T-BONE puts in the raise to $2,400 and Scott and T-BONE’s new fangirl Justin, go wild !
But soon after, to their dismay, as Postle is tanking while facing the re-raise, they were given the ‘disappointing’ news that he actually held 9♠8♠ for the nut-straight. After a bit of posturing, presumably in hopes of inducing a call, Postle shipped all-in for $4.9k. T-BONE had to muck, and as he folds the graphics on the screen for GET THERE POSTLE change from 8♦6♠ to 9♠8♠. Postle profited around $3.2k in the hand.
Instead of what appeared to be two poker pros battling it out over a monster pot with no “made” hands, Postle had actually put in a re-raise on the turn with a huge hand, an open end straight flush draw, and hit paydirt when the J♥, landed on the river.
At the time, the hand which aired January 16, 2019, was chalked up as just another crazy hand at Stones. There were plenty of them. It wasn’t until over nine months later, when “whistleblower” Veronica Brill went public with her cheating allegations against Postle, that the hand returned to the spotlight.
The T-BONE hand was quickly pointed to as the “smoking gun” to a conspiracy.
On October 2, 2019 co-owner and producer of “Live at the Bike”, Ryan Feldman, was one of the first to sound alarms via Twitter calling the hand a “Huge red flag”. He also added, “This tells me someone working in the booth forced them to change the cards for some reason while producing the hand.”
Former pro player Doug Polk, who has since put out numerous videos on the scandal, also weighed in via Twitter : “This never dawned on me, but holy sh*t is it obvious now that I think about it. How did the guy know it was 98ss DURING the hand? No cards were tabled, and he had to know that AS IT HAPPENED. This might be the most damning piece of evidence yet.”
Feldman’s and Polk’s tweets further fueled conspiracy theories already running rampant on TwoPlusTwo poker forum and Twitter. This hand, the theorists concluded, proved Postle wasn’t acting alone, and someone in production, maybe even Stones itself – Was in on the jig !
To the “woke poker community” it was clear, the changing of the graphics was the smoking gun to a “cover up“.
On October 6, 2019 T-BONE himself added another twist when he commented on TwoPlusTwo under the screen name 2cunning4yew. – “I’m 100% sure I saw a diamond when he mucked his hand mid air.” (image of post)
On January 3, 2020 he repeated the claim in an interview with Veronica Brill on her YouTube channel entitled “The hand that Stones Live Poker switched“
A couple days later, Andrew Milner of PokerGFX/VideoPokerTable.net was interviewed by PokerNews.com. He shared his expertise on the PokerGFX software and added his take on the T-BONE hand. His answers didn’t offer any alternative explanations to the story line. In fact, his comment that the changing of the graphics “quite literally blows my mind” seemed to add even more fuel to the ever-spreading conspiracy theory fire.
“There’s been a lot of speculation about the infamous hand where the hole card graphics change from 86o to 8s9s. I can confirm that once a change has been made to a graphic in real-time, there’s no way to change it before it pops out at the other end of the stream delay, so this quite literally blows my mind. I can’t think of any legitimate way anyone could have known the hole cards were wrong or what they really might have been at the point in time the change was made, so you have to wonder about the motivation behind the action. If the operator had stopped to think for more than five seconds, he would have realized that the change would be impossible to explain after the fact, so I suspect it was done in a moment of panic.” – Andrew Milner via PokerNews.com
Next on the case was high stakes pro Matt Berkey. Berkey played in one of the final streams aired at Stones, a $10/$25/$50 game billed as the biggest game to date on Stones Live. Besides playing professionally Berkey is also the owner of Solve For Why, described as a “Live Advanced Poker Training Academy.”
Once the story broke, and particularly the T-BONE hand re-surfaced, Berkey who is considered an expert in the field and owns RFID technology (used to train students at his academy) weighed in.
In a Tweet on October 1, 2019 referring to the graphics changing, he states “I own RFID Tech & let me tell you graphics almost NEVER misread a hand, you’d have to have misregistered a card, meaning it would consistently be wrong.”
* It is true that if a card is misregistered in the system, it would be consistently wrong. However, according to a source familiar with the production of the stream who wishes to remain anonymous, misregistered cards were not an issue at Stones. In fact, there were only a couple of instances ever during Stones Live broadcasts where a card was misregistered and the deck had to be changed, and that was early on. The many instances of RFID errors at Stones were “mainly due to cards passing over another player’s card reader, most often involving seats #1 and #9.”
On October 7, 2019 Berkey produced a video explaining how RFID technology works.
In the video, after a brief description of a basic setup, he goes on to explain how the signal from the motherboard collecting the data is sent to the server, which is done so through hard wire fiber optics, ethernet, or a basic usb cord. A fourth option is a wireless connection. After stating he doesn’t know for certain what type of setup Stones uses for their production he surmises, “I have a fear that they are actually just using wireless technology which would be the least secure of all the measures.” – Video of statement
Rounder Life Media has verified that the Stones production uses a usb cable from the “motherboard”, which transitions (connects) to a cat6 ethernet cable sending the data directly to the server. NO WIRELESS TECHNOLOGY IS USED.
Berkey finishes the video with a less than flattering review of the Stones Live production overall. Despite revealing he has no first hand knowledge, he declares the Stones setup is “quite insecure” and “almost everybody has access to go back to that control room. There is some footage of Mike Postle himself back there talking to Taylor the producer of the show about hands not reading or going over strategy of hands where he got cooled off.” Video of statements
No video of Postle in the control room discussing strategy has surfaced to date to our knowledge. If a video actually exists, it should be released.
The rhetoric and misinformation continually being pushed by trusted voices, mostly through social media platforms, has lead to emotional knee-jerk responses and a confirmation bias the likes of which has never before been seen in the industry.
Test” Feature Can Be Used To Determine Whether A Card Has Been Misread
In an incredible revelation related to the “T-BONE HAND”, Andrew Milner disclosed to Rounder Life Media that the graphics change at the end of the hand could have been the result of a GFX software feature which allows for a “test” option enabling technicians to review what the card readers are showing in real time.
Andrew Milner – “The diagnostic ‘Test” table feature you’re referring to shows the cards that the RFID reader has detected at a given point in time on each antenna installed in the table, and can be used by an operator to determine whether a card has been misread.”
He adds, “However, in this context a misread can only occur where cards physically present on the table have been transposed between players (for example if a card passed over multiple antennas during the deal, or if the internal antenna cabling in the table has been configured incorrectly). It’s not possible for a card to be incorrectly reported as another random card that isn’t actually on the table. Since all of the other players cards are accounted for in this hand (and none of them are the card in question), this claim isn’t plausible.”
However, when other seemingly similar instances were pointed to (where player’s cards were changed to cards not present on the table), he clarified that the cards would not have to be present in another player’s hand, if the player’s cards “were initially entered manually in error”.
In this scenario, “Yes, it is possible for an operator to change any card at any time during a hand.”
In a video released on rounderlife.com (below) it appears the first card to Postle in the T-BONE hand passes over the card reader of seat #1. Responding to the video Milner said “It’s possible there was another unrelated misread.”
Card Dealt To Mike Postle Appears To Pass Over Seat #1’s Card Reader
If a card reading error occurred from Postle’s first card passing over seat #1’s reader, it is quite possible his cards “were initially entered manually in error,” opening the door to the possibility he held the 9♠8♠, or another combination such as the 9♠8♦.
When asked for his thoughts on the likely scenario of what occurred in the hand Milner concludes “I’m happy to provide some context by describing the capabilities and limitations of the RFID system itself, but I’m really not in a position to speculate on who did what (or why)”
While the revelation that it’s possible techs used the “test” feature and changed the cards accordingly, it doesn’t exonerate Postle or even explain what actually occurred during the hand. It does make it clear however that what has been stated as fact is not fact at all, but pure speculation.
With the information available at this point we (public) don’t know what hand Postle held. We don’t know for sure if the “test” table feature option was even used, and if it was, whether the proper cards were inserted correctly in the end.
All we know for certain is that multiple scenarios are still plausible, one of them being that neither Stones Gambling Hall nor its employees were guilty of cheating anyone, negligence, looking the other way, or taking part in a cover-up, all of which have been alleged.
In fact, there may be no better example (in the gaming industry) of how hysteria and a rush to judgement fueled primarily by a social media mob run amuck, has negatively affected individuals and an organization as it has in this case, based on little more than a hunch.
Stones Gambling Hall, which is by all accounts exactly what it claims to be on its website, “an unqualified success by every measure, both for the organization and the community of Citrus Heights,” at this point, has been attacked by a band of wannabe justice warriors most of whom appear to have no knowledge or interest in actual facts.
When the final hand is played in this high stakes drama, don’t be surprised when you see Stones Gambling Hall and all of its employee’s reputations restored and many of those who rushed to judgement “hit the muck”.
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Continuing Coverage of Our Investigation
New Numbers Cast Doubt On Postlegate
Rounder Report : Breakdown Of Mike Postle July 20, 2019 Stream At Stones
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Even When Gump And John S. Get It Right, They’re Wrong
Mike Postle Re-loads Twice In A Session He Plays With Bart Hanson : No Mention Of Non-Reported Add-ons In Interview With Win Rate Graph Creator John S.
I Told Mike Postle To “Make Some Money With The Moneymaker, From The Moneymaker”
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Mike Postle Asks Court To Dismiss Complaint
Reporter’s Errors Lead To Misreported Facts In Postlegate
Unearthed Evidence Exposes Major Error In Lawsuit Allegations
New Revelations Deflate “Postlegate” Narrative
Mike Postle Not Making All The right Moves Video
Statistics In ‘Postlegate” Completely Fabricated
In 2007 Rounder Magazine recognized Mike Postle as an elite pro and provided him with merchandise to promote the Rounder brand. No other considerations have been provided. Mr. Postle has never had ownership rights, nor has he ever been employed by Rounder. Rounder Life Media is not in a position to determine Mike Postle's guilt or innocence. This will be determined by the official investigation(s) being conducted, or through a court of law, not speculation. We will continue to pursue all relevant facts related to this case and report such, whether they support or disprove the charges.
