The incident, which he relayed on a poker podcast last year, showed Adelstein the darker side of poker and left him cautious. "At this point, I have so little faith in that." (Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times) “And then they paid me in six installments, once a month, for a six-month period.”Ī 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. “They offered me a deal where they would refund me my money in exchange for my silence,” he said. 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. 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.
Having lost all his money, Adelstein left. It’s a scenario that happens, “but quite rarely,” Adelstein said. 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. 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. When he was 26, he was invited to a home game where he bought in for $100,000.
HOLDING NUTS VS POKERTH PLUS
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.”Īdelstein says he has been cheated before. The drama has left Adelstein uncertain when he’ll return to the poker table. Lew, 37, denied the allegation, which she called "defamatory." 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. 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. 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.”Īdelstein, 36, hasn’t played poker since. The fallout for both sides has been severe, with Adelstein and Lew each facing bitter character attacks and questions about their motives. 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 production company behind "Hustler Casino Live" said it is investigating and has yet to turn up proof of cheating by Lew or anyone else.
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. 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 hundreds of thousands more as the clip went viral. 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.” 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.
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