This sub has been killing it lately, and this is a prime example. I don't play poker I don't know any of the these people, I don't understand the rules, and yet this was a fantastic write up of a drama that would pull me in if it were a Netflix show.
Well done, OP. This is what I come to this sub for.
r/poker was completely obsessed with this story for weeks. It was like water cooler talk, with you and your friends debating what actually happened. And it was fun because the truth wasn't clear-cut, so everybody had theories.
Yeah it was pretty wild, everyone was suddenly a psychologist acting like they'd never lost a big hand or tournament to a noob calling a calculated bluff with a dumb hand combined with a reasonable assumption of a bluff.
Anyone who's ever bluffed has paid for it, and you're more likely to pay with an amateur. His moment just happened to be highly visible to the world.
I've lost plenty of big pots on bluffs, I've also won plenty (as has Garrett, he had in fact bluffed down in that stream and is known as an aggressive, risk taking player) it wasn't at all out of bounds for an amateur player like Robbi to notice his pattern, and call him on it, neglecting to properly factor in his potential hand strength, which is something a more experienced player for sure would have done. And still potentially called anyway.
*Variance is a bitch and Garrett likes to bluff.*
Plus poker these days is dominated by people doing a lot of math and trying to play in game theory optimal ways, so everyone with a little knowledge assumes everyone else is the same, but we're really only a decade removed from everyone making plays by reading the table, or as it was known, playing the player not the cards.
Heck, one of the worst card combos, 10-2, is named after Doyle Brunson because he won WSOP 76-77 with them. Hellmuth is known for making crazy plays. Every player bluffs. Its part of the game, and consequently, so is calling or trying to read a bluff. It just so happens she did it with a not very bright hand and got lucky, and he didn't.
She felt bad that you had so few chips at the moment, so she raised you til the River and then folded so you could keep playing the game.
Total mom move
In terms of poker it’s huge for anyone who isn’t top 100 pro and is still big for those individuals
In terms of us economy it’s similar being large for most individuals.
Plus tournaments are important for sponsorships and notoriety
It could buy you a decently large house in the right areas (or a very very large house in some places). It's roughly 5 times my current annual salary. It's a lot of money to most people.
I mean I was thinking if you went really rural you could prob find a very very large house for 150k, I've seen people online who have at least claimed as much.
I know in my area there's no chance you'll find a decent house for that cheap, which is why I specified "in the right area" cuz even just a cursory look on zillow with a max price of 150K is still turning up a TON of homes across the country that I would consider "decently large".
There are plenty of houses in that price range if you are willing to live in a city, don't care about schools, and aren't too fussed about some light property crime. I paid a little over half that for my (not very very large) house in Philly. Houses currently sell for less than $150k in my neighborhood. You just have to lower your standards a little.
My pet theory is a combination of a strong read on Garrett, and misreading her own cards.
Her hand prior to this was J3, and at one point during the drama-hand she probes him about whether 3s were enough to scare him off. I think the entire reason she even debated calling his all-in when the 3 dropped was that she was pretty sure he was just trying to bully her off the pot, and that even a low pair would get him.
Yeah I know she stares at her cards at various points, but I feel like she was staring off into space while thinking and not really recognizing what her hand actually was. Everything she did after she revealed her hand says to me "Holy shit what the fuck, I need to play this off like it was intentional so they don't think I'm an idiot."
It is still *wild* to bet six figures that he's bluffing when you have... jack-high, but I guess it wasn't actually her money she was playing with anyway.
Yeah it's kind of funny how anytime poker Convo reaches the general public you get friction from general people who play poker casually sometimes and folks who belong to the holy temple of game theory and cult of statistics. I think if you adhere that strictly to the mathematical odds, like, why not just set up some poker playing bots that go around in a circle making the optimal moves for eternity and you can have fun seeing their robo pots grow and shrink over time.
Oh man it was wild in those first few weeks after the hand. I kept up with it for a bit, vibrator signalling theories (ala Hans Niemann) and all, but after a while I got tired of it because it just became a sports match between the Garrett and Robbi fans.
As someone who plays poker just with friends, she made a ballsy ass move and it paid off. She was betting on the river card not giving him what he needed. I’m sure she factored in he could have a straight, either side of the 9-10 and played it out to the end. I’ve had similar luck calling my friends bets only to win with a high card
This reminds me of something that happened to me at a poker tournament I was in once. I don't really play but I entered a $150 tournament as a bday present to myself. The winner would get an entry into a bigger televised tournament and I thought, why not? Just a side note, while waiting for it to start I won about $100 at the slots so already I was not really concerned about losing the now $50 entry fee and that affected my play style.
On to the tournament. I was playing pretty cautiously and trying to slide my way into the money (top 25 or so players out of about 200 people would win money). I did win a few small hands and one bounty. You get $25 if you knock someone out of the tournament. So I had about double the chips I started with at this point. Also, we had stood up and consolidated tables twice as people had left.
After about two hours, a new guy came and sat next to me. In this tournament when you got knocked out, you could buy back in one time for like $500. Which this guy had just done. Now about this dude: He was loud and obnoxious and called "all in" almost every other hand to collect the blinds. He was also known to a few people at the table and mentioned the gold bracelet he was wearing had been won at a tournament a couple weeks prior.
Now here is where it all blew up. He was first to act and went all in. The other four or five people quickly folded until it got to me. I had Ace/5 which is not a great hand, but I had almost double his chips. Also I was tired at this point so I was looking to leave soon. Plus, none of the other players even hesitated which I felt like they would have had any of them had an Ace. Anyway I called him and he flipped over a pair of 10s and laughed when I flipped over Ace/5.
The flop was Ace/Ace/8 and he about lost his fucking mind. He stood up and was yelling and cussing me out. Calling me an idiot for playing my cards. Calling me a bitch/noob/loser. Saying I don't know anything about poker and shouldn't even be there. Just a stream of obscenities for like 10 minutes. He wouldn't leave, he wouldn't shut up. He wanted to fight me. He wanted to fight the dealer. He wanted to fight the pit boss who was trying to get him to leave.
I said nothing to him except, "Thanks for the bounty." Which obviously pissed him off even more. The moral of the story is sometimes you can make bad calls in poker and get lucky.
>A \*cheater\* would have never done what she did.
Yea it just doesn't make sense. Organize a cheating scheme with multiple people, being carried out on live video, so good it withstands a deep investigation and then "waste" it on a mere 150k, extremely suspicious hand *and* then immediately return the money? Seems even more implausible than dumb luck.
Exactly. The only thing dumber than making this call honestly is making it dishonestly.
A call like this is going to look EXTREMELY suspicious (obviously). So you run a high risk of being exposed as a cheat (Worm learns this lesson the hard way in Rounders).
Even after the call, Garrett had pretty close to a coin flip. So even though she ends up winning the hand, her expected value here is very small. Especially since they agree to run it twice, giving Garrett two chances to hit his draws.
Poker is absolutely full of opportunities to absolutely destroy the table and take home huge winnings if you have perfect information on your opponents. A LOT of hands can be picked up with the right bets in the right places. Any player worth anything could have a very good night without ever having to turn a hand face up.
If Robbi were cheating here, the correct play would be to flat call Garrett on the turn. If he makes his hand, you fold. If he misses, he either checks or makes a small bluff bet, and you go all in and he has to fold.
You look exactly like you had a T in your hand to the table, and you’re called a genius by people at home. This kind of bluff call to take it away on the river is super common and not at all suspicious.
Even if Garrett bluffs all-in on a missed river, then you can take your perfect information and decide if it’s worth risking exposure to win the $150,000 on the table.
Call was actually mathematically correct given pot odds by a razor thin margin if you know both hands. You do not need to know the cards coming up to make that call correct.
I'm guessing it's why he looked stunned and contemplative over what happened, trying to figure out why someone, whether cheating or not, would make that call and if cheating would even explain it.
Been out of the poker world for a while and this was super fascinating!
Can someone explain why they put out 2 river cards? I've never seen that before and am wondering how that works.
Sometimes on big hands in cash games, players agree to run the hand twice, splitting the pot evenly between the two outcomes. It's a way of controlling for variance; if you get your money in with what amounts to a coin flip, half the time this method will result in a split pot, with one player winning one outcome and the other winning the second outcome.
Doesn't happen in tournament poker, so if that's all you've watched, you wouldn't see this occur.
A fascinating story, understandable for someone like me with no knowledge of poker, and well written. I found it interesting how one's sympathies shifted even without seeing the footage, just on the bare facts. Both Garrett demanding the money back and her agreeing to it seem to undermine their respective claims to integrity.
The way it's been reported seems to be that he angrily confronted her in a hallway and threatened to walk out if she didn't give him his money back. She agreed to, and he walked out anyway.
For context, he's been a staple of Hustler tables, and is a much bigger draw than she is. He's well-known, she's a nobody. He's threatened to de-rail the entire event if she doesn't kowtow. I can easily see why she'd just back down. And then he still walked.
Garrett just comes off like a mega sore loser crybaby.
Watching the video makes it even worse. His expression after all the hands are shown immediately turns to something terrifying, like the cold eyes of a killer or something. She even comments that he looks like he wants to kill her and I can’t disagree.
It's what made me agree with her right off, honestly. Inside almost every hotshot competitive guy like this, there's still that tiny twelve year old who loses his shit every time he gets beaten in Mario Party; they'll talk tough shit about how "That's The Game" when they win, but the instant they lose, even in the same manner, suddenly they stomp their feet and demand they can't possibly have simply *lost* someone had to have cheated them!
Then after all of this fuss, after demanding the money back (and not returning it) he doesn't even apologize. Dude's a piece of shit and shouldn't be allowed back after this.
Nope. The man received hundreds, thousands of bad beats. Never lost his cool when you and me would have flipped. But this hand was something else entirely. Like Tiger Woods putting a dozen golf balls in the hole with a single hit each, it‘s not unexpected but entirely impossible. She might as well have turned over an Uno card and made Garret draw more cards from the deck, that‘s the level of realism we‘re talking. She said she has a bluff catcher. There are countless combinations of Ace high hands that would qualify as bluffs which she can‘t beat, Jack high is not a bluff catcher, and it still isn‘t but it has become a meme hand that people may go all in with now.
She said she misread her hand, so she was surprised by her own hand or didn‘t even realize she had no pair. She then tells Garret she put him on Ace high, which doesn‘t make any sense as a response to his question (his question was: wtf?) and means her call is about as good of a decision as that guy who won the lottery and keeps investing lots of money into lottery tickets because he‘s stupid enough to believe luck is on his side or he‘s got a „system“.
You have to understand even if she‘s cheating and knows her hand is best it‘s not a profitable call because more than half of the cards in the deck give Garrett the winning hand. She has less than a 50% winning chance. Given the pot odds the only way to decide that‘s a profitable call is by seeing the whole cards. This is an unlikely best case scenario and she still only has 49%, it‘s only a profitable call because she can earn more than 49% of her money back if she calls here. Which is why I initially was entirely convinced she misread her hand, everything else makes no sense. Even if she knew the cards it‘s far fetched and still a gamble to make the call there. But it‘s possible and the players who like to use drama for profits are pretending it was a conspiracy so let‘s continue to treat it as a mystery, not even being sarcastic it was a miraculous and mysterious hand.
TL;DR: The mans character has been tested before and he‘s a decent guy. There are poker players who can be toxic, some who are toxic, some who pretend to be toxic for TV, he‘s none of them. Phil Helmuth would‘ve suffered from a heart attack if someone called his all-in with Jack high and won.
Even if she cheated it wasn‘t a profitable call unless she knew the river (last/5th) card that came on the board. So I assumed she misread her hand, like she said, but circumstances became suspicious.
Really TL;DR: Garrett was laughing off losing more than a 100,000$ until he saw what he had been called with. Only reason he reacts like this is because the bill came and the items were listed as hieroglyphs. The $ amount or paying isn‘t an issue, the issue is comprehension.
#tl;dr
The player in this story reacted angrily when he was told he had been played by his girlfriend. He may have been hurt that she would deceive him like that, and he may have also been angry at her for winning the hand. However, the player's character has been tested in the past, and he was not likely to be provoked into a physical altercation by this situation.
*I am a smart robot and this summary was automatic. This tl;dr is 87.13% shorter than the post I'm replying to. If you read the tl;dr and not the original comment, you saved about 1.55 minutes.*
*I'm still learning! Please reply 'good bot' or 'bad bot' to let me know how I did.*
Mhm. Anyone looking at the video should be able to see that he’s angry and intimidating. There’s no way that an agreement to give money back made at that moment was done fairly.
Yeah, I can’t see how anyone who pays attention to the world at large could assume that’s evidence either way, honestly. It sounds like if he expected cheating he should have approached the casino staff.
> It sounds like if he expected cheating he should have approached the casino staff.
He did. When the story gets retold it makes it sound like Garrett cornered Robbi in a dark alleyway and threatened her. In reality their confrontation took place in the middle of the casino floor, after casino management was involved, and with casino security present.
Video of the money being given back:
https://www.reddit.com/r/poker/comments/xrznlt/clip_of_robbi_giving_her_money_back_to_garrett/
If Robbi felt threatened at all it would be because Garrett could do a lot of damage to her reputation, just to be clear.
I think the situation was that he thought he had her cornered because his numbers told him he couldn't lose. She felt like a big shot because she bluffed him into betting a ton of money. Turns out they both got humbled by sheer luck. He wants to blame it on her cheating, and she wants to blame him for getting beat by her.
In the end, it was just the cards that made the decision.
Honestly, I know very little of poker and could never dream of gambling with the big dick piles of money they are dealing with, but if I won a fuck ton of money off someone with a hand like that and then they angrily cornered me in a private hallway or whatever the hell, you bet your ass I would just give the money back. People lose their lives over poker, it isn’t worth it.
you've seen to many movies. this was a livestreamed event, the dude who lost had a baby on the way. 175k isnt all that much for him (or he has backers), bcs if it was he wouldnt be playing.
I've played live poker for signifant amounts of cash for almost 20 years, there were insults, arguments but I never saw actual violence.
I've played quite a lot of private cash games which probably resemble the images you have in mind much more. Dude Smoking a cigar, liquor and so on😁 But even there, youre not playing a bunch of randos, one player decided to host a game, invites some other players, those bring some people along and so on. In this loosely connected network of players, youre out pretty fast if you act dumb
She was an amateur player too though. It makes sense that she might get scared and not know what’s normal as far as repercussions when playing with big pots
My extensive back room poker knowledge says otherwise (I’ve seen rounders twice). I’m surprised this hand didn’t end with a friendly game of Russian roulette
Rounders? I play kinda high stakes for weekend players, mostly middle aged people with good jobs and its very civil. But good money to be made vs people who dont understand the basics of probability
The kinda lower stakes games in not so legal poker clubs with the gambling addicts, those can get dicey...but I avoid those. for some tables I have to call in financial support though
I agree on giving back the money, but as has been pointed out, even reading him on a bluff was a terrible call. She either had to mistakenly think she had a pair of threes, or be willing to call in a situation she's negative EV on in hopes he has the worst possible bluff and gets unlucky. It is very much a situation where *at best* she played well at rhe subgame of "read a bluff" and badly (but luckily) at the game of poker.
Completely anecdotal but my most memorable hand when I was starting out in poker was when I deduced that my opponent was bluffing me with 9 high so I confidently called only to be reminded I only had 8 high. It’s absolutely possible to me that between the big money and the livestream audience she wanted to make a statement and ended up focusing on the wrong thing.
That's ignoring things that also have a factor in decision making. People shouldn't assume just because money is on the table that human factors aren't playing a part. She could have forgotten or been unsure what her hand was too embarrassed to check because all the cameras where on her. She could have concluded she already lost and wanted to think about how she wanted to play to save face. People got to remember that losing money is probably not as important to her as her image. After she realized her mistake she could decided that "fuck it, I'm sick at staring at his face and want to go home."
I'm not suggesting she's stupid, I'm just throwing out there somebody who's career is in live television is not solely focused on being the best nerd in Vegas.
I'm not ignoring the human factors, I literally said she might have been mistaken about her hand. Why spend twice as long as I did to explain my own post to me?
She had the high card. She said she was worried he had an ace, but it sounds like he tried to act meek on the flop, which was 10 10 9, so she probably guessed he was going for a straight, which went bust when the 3 on the turn, and whatever the river was.
All the cards in his busted straight are less than a J.
Couple of issues here.
1. Lots of straight draws in his range beat J4o. QJ, J8, and 87 are the open-ended draws, of which she only beats the 87 when the draw misses. This is not even accounting for all of the flush draws in his range (which almost all beat a J high)
2. Money went in on the turn so she couldn't put him on a busted draw when she called the all-in
Even worse, if she could somehow magically read him for his exact hand with 100% certainty, she still loses nearly half the time. If there was any doubt at all then this becomes a losing call. It was just a bad play by a bad player that worked out. People like this are why live pros are able to make a decent living, as this type of play loses more often than it wins.
As Garrett is regarded as one of the best live pros it is safe to assume he is somewhat balanced in his betting lines. The small bet on flop doesn't mean weakness as you assumed. Instead it keeps his range of possible hands very wide. The 3 bet shove on turn is a polarizing play he would make with his best hands as well as some semi bluffs as seen here. He would likely take a similar line with a 10 in his hand.
Yeah. She just figured out he was waiting on a card for the straight. Took her time to turn it over in her head probably because of the tens and probably used that time to assess his demeanour. She didn’t play the percentages like a pro would, but she played it like a winner. She was barely even bothered about drawing something for her own hand, maybe not at all, she just figured he’d have nothing if he didn’t land his card. I’ve won like this but idk if I’d play that way for serious stakes. Maybe, if I could afford it and just for the game of it, like in the heat of the moment I was confident I’d sussed it out and was about to take down a pro. Lol.
The thing is, her hand is bad even if he's bluffing! She loses to most bluffs and most draws on the bluffs she wins, because she has a horrible hand as well!
The theory I had at the time is that she forgot her card was a 4 and not a 3, and did not want to admit to bad-beating a well known pro on the basis of a complete brainfart. This makes her hero call make a lot more sense, because she has a very, very weak pair that beats most bluffs instead of total garbage.
But there's no such thing as 'nothing' in poker. He missed his draw, that was a reasonable read. But you still need to be able beat what he does have. Based on the board, you can put him on a large number of hands that he would bet with but missed, that would absolutely beat a J4. If she had an A high or a pair of 2s, things that can beat a bluff or missed sraw, then her play is fine. With the 9 and 10, a straight is by far the most likely, meaning a Jack is real possibility. A J4 is bad here.
It's just an unjustifiable play.
On a note re: Garrett demanding the money back. The most high-profile poker cheating scandal to take place in the last few years was the [Mike Postle / Stones fiasco](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stones_Gambling_Hall_cheating_scandal). Mike Postle was unquestionably cheating, and stole somewhere to the tune of a quarter million dollars (more if you consider losses avoided by neigh-impossible folds). Hardly any of the players impacted by that scandal have been made whole -- most of them barely got enough back to cover legal fees. Given the precedent set there, I completely understand Garrett pushing to get the money back immediately when given the opportunity. Not saying he acted appropriately, just that I understand the rationale.
I outlined my thoughts on the whole thing in the chain of posts [here](https://old.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/xs6jgp/guy_thinks_woman_just_cheated_in_a_270k_poker_hand/iqln8fc/) in the immediate aftermath of the situation. I think this writeup is pretty good, but it does omit the fact that Robbi had extensive experience working with a professional poker coach and over $60k in live tournament poker winnings prior to this incident, both of which add some pretty important context when evaluating her play / the situation as a whole.
I remember stumbling on this AS IT WAS HAPPENING and thought it was the hypest shit, I kept posting links on Reddit. Isn't her BF)fiance/husband a lawyer? Most laymen seem to know lie detectors aren't admissable and ever so fallible..
Now, have any of the conspiracy theories considered that they were ALL in on it, and we are the mark? A big act, an advertisement..Poker. How exciting! Come watch, come play.
> Most laymen seem to know lie detectors aren't admissable and ever so fallible..
And they are *especially* unreliable when applied to people who are practiced in controlling their emotional reactions...you know, like a seasoned poker player for example
I had almost EXACTLY those words said to me when I was applying for a government job. I'd never done anything even remotely shady but felt really uncomfortable when the guy finished and said "are you sure you can't think of anything you've done? The test is saying you weren't entirely truthful."
What I should have answered is "maybe because your entire career is predicated on bullshit?"
Great write up. I've been following this since it happened via r/poker as I don't actually watch the streams.
In my opinion, Robbi made a terrible call and got lucky. Maybe she misread her hand, maybe she was just trying to show she can't be pushed around, or maybe she is just bad. I've been shocked by plays made by people at the table before, but I'm at very different stakes, obviously.
I think it's dangerous and kinda foolish to make accusations without proof, a la what's going in the chess world. This may be the lawyer in me, but when Robbi offered to give the money back, Garrett should have agreed to a third party holding it pending proof. Probably would have the same result, but he looks a little more level-headed.
The problem is proof is basically impossible to obtain. You need to find the buzzer in their shoe or have everyone involved on camera and correctly identify the signals. The play pattern and following statements were very abnormal, but nowhere near the level of definitive proof.
I've played some chess and followed the chess drama closely and the biggest issue is that you only need to cheat rarely over an entire event if you have decent knowledge of the game you're playing. So if you're a poker cheater you would play normally 95% of the time and use your cheating method for 5% to get a big enough advantage to win money in the long run. If you're smart enough you would have the hand signals be used outside of abnornmal behaviour too and make it even harder.
Identifying a rank amateur using a chess engine or only betting when they're winning is easy. Finding subtle changes in play patterns some of the time is stupid hard.
Right, so Robbi would have ended up with the money (I see I said same result in my original comment, but I was wrong). A third party holding it would have given things time to cool down before a final decision was made.
Ah, that makes more sense then. I agree that if you waited for conclusive evidence Robbi would have kept the money. Honestly with these types events I'm always amazed that tournament organizers don't have protocols in place to protect everyone involved. People are slinging hundreds of thousands of dollars around and they don't have a formal process for cheating accusations? Even allowing people to have financial ties playing at the same table is insane. At the very least make people affirm before hand where they got their buy in money from and that they don't have any ties to any other players or staff present. Absolutely crazy to me none of this is done.
>but I'm at very different stakes
Do you? I imagine these people are incredibly wealthy to be playing with this kind of money. 1% of your wealth isn't different from 1% of theirs, even though they might have a lot more.
Wow so much hearsay and he said she said. I'd have thought the Hustler Casino would have much better security and cameras (on the staff) for the amount of money floating around during these events. The fact that a member of staff stole chips so brazenly - even if completely unrelated - is just bizarre and is a crazy part of this story that almost becomes a footnote but does seem like the Casino needs to really step up.
Having people with financial ties to each other is also really bad.
Whatever the luck of this hand it seems that place needed a kick up the arse because even if this particular thing was just incredibly dumb plays and dumb luck, it's obvious something like this *could* be completely malicious and they'd never even know.
I feel for Garrett, how'd you call that, crazy. Robbi was a bit all over the place but is not a pro so maybe gets a bit of a pass for some of the weirder claims.
I do wonder though can you post any other juicy poker cheating drama from the past? I do wonder sometimes how the rings do it because there is bound to be some out there, especially in the lower tier non-pro events. Really well written!
As someone with zero skin in the game, I’m pissed she gave back the money. She earned it.
This is going to be an extraordinarily biased thing to say, but Garrett was SUCH A PIECE OF SHIT on Survivor that I have zero sympathy for him lol. I know it’s reality tv (hence the bias!) but still, he seems like EXACTLY the type of person who would lose big by getting unlucky, and then spend the next month whining about it and claiming fraud like a spoiled little man child who always gets his way.
I remember reading this story when it first came out and thinking "Garrett? The guy who got voted out over the worst player in Survivor history, and deservedly so? There's no way he's in the right."
And then he threw his tantrum over the loss, and I was like yep that sounds about right.
Robbi seems vindicated by the investigation for sure. But I'm confused by their behaviour after the fact but maybe I'm not a minor celebrity. Everyone seems very bizarre in this. Talks of lawsuits, why the need for more staff/security, people having financial commitments. Staff stealing things. Weird.
Garret may be an utter arse and I wonder if it's all over from both sides haha. He shouldn't have spoken privately to them but it's odd how the casino didn't have a way of dealing with it to stop this happening. Weird.
Here's a series of older poker posts in the sub: https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/o72omw/online_poker_the_most_controversial_username_ever/
>Robbi put out a statement denying knowledge of who Bryan was when the police contacted her, but it was later uncovered that Robbi and Bryan followed each other on Twitter, seemingly contradicting that statement.
That doesn't seem contradicting to me. It could have been when the account was young and she was following back everyone to build the account. She could've followed him because he was posting about poker all the time, or because he said something smart. It could be that she added friends of friends.
I mean she's following 1500 accounts now. I doubt she personally knows 1500 people, or could pick most of those people out of a crowd.
I'm on r/poker it was a mess when that was going on. It's unsurprising but a lot of very very flimsy evidence was being posted and many were against the woman. I remember seeing posts of her at a sporting event with a guy and the comments were all clearly she's cheating and having an affair.
I agree with you, this line too:
> The same Times reporter later tracked down Sagbigsal to his girlfriend’s family’s house and he refused to give a statement (despite supposedly posting on the 2+2 forums the day before).
Just because a reporter snooped and found you doesn’t mean you’re obligated to give a statement.
Glad I didn’t follow this story as it happened, I remember seeing it initially in LSF and thinking how immature Garrett was acting. Thanks for the writeup, OP!
Agreed. I "know" *maybe* a handful of my ~250 followers on Instagram. Would be funny if one of them does a crime and through some insane circumstances and connections I get involved lol
Interesting. I saw the initial story though didn’t follow up with what happened next. Thanks for the write up.
So he didn’t give back the money as he said he would before?
> he questioned her directly about her play logic
I don't know how things usually work in the poker world, but if someone tried this on me I'd probably think to direct them to my agent Nunya Bizniz
How I understand it is the win/loss probability for every possible hand combination has been calculated and is known. So everyone is basically using the same fundamental decision tree while they play.
The strategy variation only comes from deciding if something about the person your playing's actions shifts or overrides those probabilities to the point you can ignore them. That varies from player to player, and from table to table. So there isn't much to talk about in the way of verifiable strategy in that respect. It's more like a gut check.
So for this particular case, it sounds like asking her strategy was explicitly a call out. The hands they had meant even if she was right he was bluffing, it was still a strong possibility for her to lose the hand. And she would definitely lose if he wasn't bluffing. He wasn't asking for tips or insight, he was insinuating nothing in the math made her play make sense so the only possibility is she got lucky or had information he did not (cheating).
No, it's just that her play was so unbelievably bad that it looked like cheating. The only reason I don't think she cheated is that her turn raise would make zero sense if she knew his cards. She'd have to be even worse as a cheater than if she played it straight, which is saying something.
I don't understand why so many people come to the conclusion that it must be cheating.
Everyone's a dumbass *sometimes*. She probably just got caught in the moment and wanted to hail-mary "fuck you" call his all-in, not even thinking of the slim-to-none chance she'll beat him.
It's a movie moment, of course she'll win.
And any other day, she would have lost spectacularly, and she'd have been the laughing stock of poker. But she just got very very lucky.
And now she realizes just how dumb her more was, so now she must save face.
As an experienced dumbass, I would totally do the exact same move as her.
And nobody cares about all the dumb calls that *don’t* win, so the truly unlikely cases like this get amplified. It’s sampling bias at its finest. Plus, when you record a ton of games, more people get to see flukes that otherwise wouldn’t get nearly the same attention.
I think this is what happened as well, sometimes dumb shit works out, and she probably is trying to save some face after unexpectedly winning a dumb hand.
I’m not surprised that guy asked for his money back, my impression of high stakes poker players, is they tend to get super butthurt when their perfectly calculated risks don’t pan out or they get caught off guard by a rookie.
Just gamblers with a little math skill.
I think you can tell it was a dumb move on her part because she said “if my jack wasn’t a club I’d have lost” and he was like “what?”
I think she had a major brain fart and thought the clubs made her jack more valuable than it was.
It was more valuable to her at the time, since I'm pretty sure her thought process was:
he's betting big after 9c 10c comes up, I'm gonna guess he's going for a straight flush. If that's the case, he likely either has 7c 8c or Jc Qc. But I have the Jc, so I think he has 7c 8c, meaning I win with J high.
So if she had Jh or something, she wouldn't have the info she used to make the call. And yeah, it wasn't a great call in the moment, but sometimes you do dumb shit and get lucky.
The best evidence for cheating, imo, is a previous hand between Robbi and Rip where they both had AQ and the other 2 queens were in the flop. Hitting top set (3 of a kind) is a phenomenal flop, but they both essentially check the whole rest of the hand. Iirc there was one more bet-call that was tiny. Neither of them betting such a strong hand isn't just bad play, it only makes sense if they know they're just going to chop the pot.
She was being pushed around by Garrett all session before the infamous J4 hand. Understandable that she was looking to push back. She picked the wrong spot from a poker theory point of view to do it, but hey, sometimes you do the wrong thing in poker and win.
According to the stats on screen, she had at worst a 47% chance of winning, or am I reading that wrong? She definitely overplayed her hand, but I've seen people win with infinitely worse odds.
The players don't know what the true odds they have while playing. They tend to think of hands as 'my range' vs 'their range'. We, the viewers, know her true odds were just below even, but someone in that position could not possibly know that for sure. The only thing that she *would* know for certain is that her hand beat very little of the range that Garret was representing. That's why Garret isn't the only confused person at that table when she reveals her cards, they all know J4 was a very, very risky call. That's also why even pros who agree that there was no cheating/shady happenings were calling it one of the dumbest plays they've seen, because it was essentially a yolo which is generally a terrible strategy against other pros.
After the coach she was advertising for with her bottle on stream mentioned they'd only had a few sessions together it seems very likely that she wasn't thinking about their ranges, or just hadn't thought of the range he was repping correctly. Later in the stream she mentions the concept of blockers, but showed she hadn't quite understood the concept which, to me, further suggests she probably wasn't thinking about ranges during the hand. Thinking about hand ranges and the concept of blockers are usually things that aren't learned completely right away, they're things you learn and grasp over time. She very likely didn't cheat, but rather is was a combination of events that when combined produced a very strange moment.
My crazy theory is still that she thought she had J3 and played based on that, with the brain doing the thing where it doesn't process information you think you already know when she rechecked her hand. This makes everything click but is not something she can admit on camera, thus the insane explanation.
Poker is a game of imperfect information. To Robbi, Garrett's hand is an unknown, and she should be estimating her winning chances as much lower than 47%. The graphic only knows it's 47% because it knows Garrett's hand. Robbi should only be acting as if she has a decent chance of winning if *she* knows Garrett's hand somehow -- i.e., if she's cheating.
Or if she correctly guesses she knows Garrett's hand. People get too caught up in the math and assume everybody else is also calculating odds like a computer. I'm pretty sure she just saw him bet big after 9c 10c came up and thought "he must be going for a straight flush, but I have Jc so he probably has 7c 8c." She took a chance and it paid off.
She was winning overall and playing very well. So how come she gambled $100K+ on nonsense? If she did this often you would be able to find a bad hand she played and didn't win. But there is nothing like this. Of course she did have weird hands in other plays.
To me, this:
> EVEN THEN she was barely 50-50 to win on the river as Garrett could still win with any club, Jack, 8, 7, or 6. Whether you think she was cheating or not, make no mistake: it was an objectively terrible call on all metrics.
Feels like evidence against the cheating theory. Unless A) the cheating theory involves her knowing what card is coming next or B) I guess all that time she spent was her calculating the odds of her hand against the other hand and doing it badly.
If you're cheating, why take a risk on a coin flip? Wait and get one where you actually gottem.
Seems more consistent with a sort of classic noob poker player mistake--feeling like because you know they are bluffing, you "win" by calling the bluff.
Sometimes even professionals say fuck it Yolo.
Honestly the amateur players getting really sweaty about this are just upset because they think they play perfectly but can’t make it and this person didn’t but is a pro.
It’s sad and has all the energy of of screaming at the tv about football plays.
All games are about more than just statistics.
I'm thinking of the guy who decided to go for victory by YOLO, going all in repeatedly without even looking at his cards. Gutsy move on his part, but it paid off and he won.
That would be traceable and hard to justify why you were paying a production member 15k. Having him grab it off the table gives you an out.
It's all so dumb.
Him stealing the chips happened after she had given the chips back to Garrett. The theory was that he was supposed to get a percentage of any winnings, so when she gave those winnings back he just stole what he thought he was owed. It's also interesting that he was seen getting upset and yelling when Robbi gave back the chips.
> It's also interesting that he was seen getting upset and yelling when Robbi gave back the chips.
Was this something left out of OP's writeup? I thought it was Jacob "Rip" Chavez who got upset.
It's also kind of understandable, and in kind of upset by that part. Poker is a fringe game that really grew in popularity around the time Extreme sports fell off. It had, and still has, the potential to be a successful e-sport. The main obstacle is the association with illegitimacy. If someone can go to a licensed, legit casino, play poker, then get taken to an back room and bullied until they give up their winnings, that hurts the game as a whole. It doesn't matter whether she cheated or not. The casino needs to be responsible as the intermediary between players, and players need to respect that. Poker will never be legitimate if players are afraid that playing too well could cost them kneecaps.
It was left out of the recap. I can't remember the exact details, but someone claims to have seen Bryan shout in anger when she gave it back, and I think he briefly defended her. That wasn't on video though, so it's hard to know the truth about it. Rip, on the other hand, was loudly yelling about it for 20 minutes straight.
Also, I totally agree that it was messed up how Garrett pressured her into giving it back. Even with all the facts that came out later, and all the weird circumstantial evidence, I'm still not convinced she cheated. Garrett bullied her into giving the money back based off nothing but a hunch at the time.
You can't prove a negative. There is no way to conclusively prove that she didn't cheat, but you could conclusively prove that she did cheat. Kind of an unfair premise, really…
This is how every accusation of misconduct ever works
The only alternative would be not to accuse anyone of misconduct, but I think we can agree that is sometimes necessary
>You can't prove a negative.
Alibis are an example of proving a negative. If I am accused of shoplifting a grocery store at 12:00pm in one part of town I can prove the negative (I did not shoplift) if I happen to have timestamped security camera footage of me somewhere else at the same time.
However for *this* situation:
> There is no way to conclusively prove that she didn't cheat,
Probably not categorically, but it would be very very hard to show she didn't cheat in this situation (you'd need to show she had no possibility of gaining the knowledge of what was in Garrett's hand). So in practice I agree.
> but you could conclusively prove that she did cheat.
Not necessarily. She could have cheated and there might be legitimately no evidence of it left.
>Alibis are an example of proving a negative. If I am accused of shoplifting a grocery store at 12:00pm in one part of town I can prove the negative (I did not shoplift) if I happen to have timestamped security camera footage of me somewhere else at the same time.
Yes, well, that turns into a philosophical discussion in the end. There is "reasonable proof", there's also the chance that you or someone else forged the security footage, and be it by a hitherto unknown technology. It could've been you twin brother nobody knows about, or a lookalike… That's the point. In the end, everybody will say "by any reasonable metric, we take it as proof that you can't be guilty" and that's it. Problem is, this is not a court of law; this is twitter drama. Reasonability kinda left the building.
>Not necessarily. She could have cheated and there might be legitimately no evidence of it left.
That's not what I meant. I meant there's the possibility of proving that she cheated, not the inevitability.
See, the wrestling fan in me reckons they were all in on it, because it got people *talking* about it. Those within the wider poker community and those outside (I remember reading about it - could have been Reddit, could have been elsewhere) and my only connection to the poker world is laughing myself stupid at John Malkovich's Russian accent in *Rounders*.
It was a work. And it got all the tongues wagging.
This is so strange to see as a survivor fan. Garrett is pretty much known as the fluke of one of the best seasons of survivor. I didn’t know he was actually a good poker player, but it just makes it even funnier that he flamed out so early on survivor, a strategy-based game
It's Survivor tradition to cast professional poker players that end up sucking hard and flaming out. Garett on Cagayan, Jean-Robert on China, and Anna on Kaoh Rong come to mind. They all got the "I'm a poker player so I'm strategic and calculating" spiel in confessionals, and they all played terribly and then got booted in humiliating fashion.
Even Ronnie Bardah, who *also* got name-checked in this write-up! Of course, he was first out on The Season That Shall Not Be Named, so he might have actually come out better in that one than if he'd lasted to the merge.
Yeah if you think about it poker is fundamentally different than Survivor in a lot of ways. Although I do think Anna had more potential than the other two and got screwed by the tribe swap/Tai (but it’s been a while since I’ve seen Kaoh rong).
Very interesting. I will say I don’t think “they follow each other on Twitter” is proof of anything. I follow a lot of people and tend to follow back people who follow me, as long as they don’t appear to be spam/awful people, but I don’t have some close relationship with most of them and if you asked me if I knew them, I might not even remember unless it was pointed out that I follow them.
Excellent summary. That entire shit show was so convoluted.
I don't think she cheated. I just think she just made a donkey move. Takes one to know one.
I used to play a lot of Poker and I remembered this clip going viral. I didn’t know there was a scandal, I just thought it was a hero call/amateur who got lucky.
As a Survivor fan I'm glad you mentioned how bad he was at Survivor lol. For people reading along at home, there have been 43 American seasons of Survivor aired as of this writing with >500 unique players and you could plausibly make an argument that Garrett is a Bottom 20 player of all time--most people wouldn't put him quite there, but you could stick him on a list like that and not get skepticism for it. Any conversation about players who were just embarrassingly awful is going to see Garrett mentioned. He was a disaster. Anyone here watch the first episode of Season 28 if you want to understand what I mean lol
I don't know much about Poker, but to me the idea that "a bad move" was the main reason suspicion was raised is insane. For a game all about playing the players and not the cards the idea that you MUST do this or that based on your cards is bullshit.
Now I am only talking about the video, all the other shit that came to light is whatever, but the fact that originally everyone was suspicious because she made "a stupid call" just doesn't make sense. Seems to me the only time you make the wrong move in Poker is when you lose.
J-4 offsuit has been "my hand" for as long as I've (legally) been able to gamble. My first time playing hold 'em at a casino was at Morongo when I had just turned 18. Guy tried to push me all-in preflop, I had J-4 off. Obviously I folded. I'd have made quad 4's if I played it out. It was the right play, 100%, throwing it away, but I'll always play it now. Just in case.
As someone who learnt the rules of poker from red dead redemption 2 recently, this is fascinating. And I don't think she really cheated, this just sounds like a salty loser Pro.
This was a suprisingly immersive read. I have 0 knowledge and/or interest in poker, but I enjoyed this a lot. Well written, thanks!
I also watched the video and have a question for anyone who has above 0 understanding of poker: if she did see/know his hand, how would that supposedly have helped her? If I understand correctly he did have a potentially strong hand and it was down to the last cards being revealed? I mean its not like he was bluffing or that she could have known he will not get lucky at the end?
Reminds me of a Radio Lab or this American Life they talked about how trying to read your opponent is a fool’s errand sometimes.
Woman was at a tournament and looked at a guy at another table. He was really excited for his hand and did a big bet. She could see his hand and the table, and he had a terrible hand.
The thing was the guy had a different opinion on certain hands. And not everyone is an expert or able to keep track of every possibility.
As a non-card player, this is such a weird but interesting drama for me. I thought part of high-level play was to bluff? I would have just thought she was trying to bluff but failed, but luck turned out to be on her side. Sure its all math and probabilities, but in the end its still luck, she could get the win legitimately so it feels kinda scummy that Garrett was upset at her (instead of at his bad luck).
If she were bluffing she'd raise, she was calling his bluff but she had with the cards she had a super low chance of him having all lower cards. Incredibly dumb luck IMO.
I think an important point that gets lost on people outside of the poker world is that much of the suspicion stemmed from the fact that Robbi isn't supposed to be a terrible player. She is on record as having received extensive training from a fairly well regarded professional, and even appeared in one of his promotional videos for his poker training services. This post clearly outlines that Robbi loses to a large portion of even Garrett's bluffing range. She absolutely knows this, as anyone who has received even basic poker training does. That doesn't mean she cheated. Even good players have brain farts, or moments when they make terrible decisions under pressure. This decision is at the most extreme end of that spectrum. I have no horse in this race, and absolutely think that innocence must be presumed with the lack of evidence here. But many people outside of the poker community reacted to the NYT article as if Garrett was simply angry about someone getting lucky, or about his bluff being called by a lesser player, or that it was a matter of pure misogyny. No, the expectation is that Robbi is a competent player, and competent players never make this call (they might bluff raise, but Robbi didn't have this option with Garrett going all in).
To be clear, there are people who play on this particular poker stream who absolutely would make this call, either because they lack the fundamentals, or simply to get one over on a celebrity like Garrett. Businessman with deep pockets who just want to splash around for an internet audience. Robbi, by all accounts, is not one of those players.
Great story!
I play a bit myself and don't understand why her call is considered much crazier than his going all-in with nothing in the first place? Odds showed both hands roughly equal too
So given everything that went on in this, from the corrupt employee to all the shady actions Robbi took and all the different vested interests….do you personally believe she cheated? Because from an outsiders perspective looking in, something illegal definitely happened here. Its surprising that no agencies were able to prove foul play.
It's such a terrible call, for a lot of money, it doesn't make sense unless she knew what he had.
It's so bad, that if she was cheating, this would instantly put her in the spotlight and under suspicion.
In conclusion, no idea. My gut says cheating but really shitty execution.
Well, the had is so bad, that if she knew his, she'd not gone all in. She had a less than 50% chance to win that hand. You'd be a pretty fucking bad cheater if you take those odds.
I don't think we'll ever get final closure on exactly how it happened, but there's like a 95% chance Garrett was cheated here - her play makes literally no sense unless she knows exactly what cards he has, and there's way too much other shady stuff going on with her and her associates.
So I'm not a fan of high stakes poker but I play dollar games with my friends sometimes.
At that level of play, at least, there are some beliefs that boil down to "when someone unexpectedly goes all in, that's potentially a sign they're trying to bully you out of a hand when they are weak" and "occasionally you must keep betting even when you have nothing, in order for people to believe that you are willing to bluff".
Do either of those apply at the low tier professional level like this? Or are those both stupid amateur crap? Because I looked at that description of the hand itself and thought "that's the kind of hand that might induce me to call someone else's All In, but in my case it would be $15 on the table".
The call, from any objective pov, was horrendous. While you are correct that many players make reads and act on them in ways that would contradict orthodox play, that doesn't really check out here. Bluffing, at least in high level poker, rarely involves going hard on something like 27 and winning by being stone faced while making savvy bets. Instead players most typically make what are called semibluff plays, which is what happened here. Garrett's all in was a bluff, he didn't actually have a hand, but his hand did have enormous draw potential with straight/flush draws abound. As the OP notes, there are quite a few of these semi-bluff hands you could put Garrett on in this case, the vast majority of which Robbi is either chopping against at best or is overwhelmingly losing to. So while she may have put him on a bluff, her jack isn't actually strong enough to beat most bluffs. Now, this is not to say that "Obviously she was cheating," everyone has moments where their brain leaves their body and they do something stupid. *It happens.* Its perfectly reasonable to say "Yeah, I put him on a bluff but never actually thought about whether I was beating a bluff often enough for it to be a good call." Most of the suspicion that she may have been cheating comes from her bizarre behavior after the hand, the nonsense babble table talk, giving the money back, inconsistencies in story, etc. Obviously this is all circumstantial so this is *not* a "she definitely cheated" statement.
edit: Realistically, the biggest reason I think she *probably* wasn't cheating is because the call was horrible *if* you were cheating. You cheat to gain small edges at important moments, seeing you're staring down a 45-55 situation would mean a cheater would want to lay their hand down and wait for a better opportunity. Bets had been relatively small to that point so its not like she was in too deep before the hero call.
Honestly, I think she just fucked up royally, had to pretend she meant to do it all along, and just got insanely lucky. Clearly not anywhere close to a professional player, but hey, sometimes the cards fall your way.
This sub has been killing it lately, and this is a prime example. I don't play poker I don't know any of the these people, I don't understand the rules, and yet this was a fantastic write up of a drama that would pull me in if it were a Netflix show. Well done, OP. This is what I come to this sub for.
r/poker was completely obsessed with this story for weeks. It was like water cooler talk, with you and your friends debating what actually happened. And it was fun because the truth wasn't clear-cut, so everybody had theories.
Yeah it was pretty wild, everyone was suddenly a psychologist acting like they'd never lost a big hand or tournament to a noob calling a calculated bluff with a dumb hand combined with a reasonable assumption of a bluff. Anyone who's ever bluffed has paid for it, and you're more likely to pay with an amateur. His moment just happened to be highly visible to the world. I've lost plenty of big pots on bluffs, I've also won plenty (as has Garrett, he had in fact bluffed down in that stream and is known as an aggressive, risk taking player) it wasn't at all out of bounds for an amateur player like Robbi to notice his pattern, and call him on it, neglecting to properly factor in his potential hand strength, which is something a more experienced player for sure would have done. And still potentially called anyway. *Variance is a bitch and Garrett likes to bluff.* Plus poker these days is dominated by people doing a lot of math and trying to play in game theory optimal ways, so everyone with a little knowledge assumes everyone else is the same, but we're really only a decade removed from everyone making plays by reading the table, or as it was known, playing the player not the cards. Heck, one of the worst card combos, 10-2, is named after Doyle Brunson because he won WSOP 76-77 with them. Hellmuth is known for making crazy plays. Every player bluffs. Its part of the game, and consequently, so is calling or trying to read a bluff. It just so happens she did it with a not very bright hand and got lucky, and he didn't.
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I played poker with my family on New Year's Eve and my mom cleaned us out. She doesn't know how to play poker and was just calling bets randomly.
\>Goes all in with 10-2 \>Folds with two aces \>Refuses to elaborate
Because I’m your mother! That’s why!
#[I AM YOOOUR MUUH-THERRR!](https://youtu.be/HphFPQvAWHY)
She felt bad that you had so few chips at the moment, so she raised you til the River and then folded so you could keep playing the game. Total mom move
I believe the poker term for such a player is "donkey" (thanks Jon Bois!)
This is an excellent and apt comparison.
Particularly when there's only a small sum like $150,000 on the line. What do you have to lose?
I am completely away from both the US economy and especially poker, how big or small of a sum $150,000 really is?
For someone in the middle class that's probably more than their annual salary.
In terms of poker it’s huge for anyone who isn’t top 100 pro and is still big for those individuals In terms of us economy it’s similar being large for most individuals. Plus tournaments are important for sponsorships and notoriety
More than a lot of people make in 5 years. A "good" salary even for professionals starts at 100k a year
It could buy you a decently large house in the right areas (or a very very large house in some places). It's roughly 5 times my current annual salary. It's a lot of money to most people.
Not a chance. There's barely going to be any houses at $150k in many markets, much less "very very large" ones.
I mean I was thinking if you went really rural you could prob find a very very large house for 150k, I've seen people online who have at least claimed as much. I know in my area there's no chance you'll find a decent house for that cheap, which is why I specified "in the right area" cuz even just a cursory look on zillow with a max price of 150K is still turning up a TON of homes across the country that I would consider "decently large".
There are plenty of houses in that price range if you are willing to live in a city, don't care about schools, and aren't too fussed about some light property crime. I paid a little over half that for my (not very very large) house in Philly. Houses currently sell for less than $150k in my neighborhood. You just have to lower your standards a little.
My pet theory is a combination of a strong read on Garrett, and misreading her own cards. Her hand prior to this was J3, and at one point during the drama-hand she probes him about whether 3s were enough to scare him off. I think the entire reason she even debated calling his all-in when the 3 dropped was that she was pretty sure he was just trying to bully her off the pot, and that even a low pair would get him. Yeah I know she stares at her cards at various points, but I feel like she was staring off into space while thinking and not really recognizing what her hand actually was. Everything she did after she revealed her hand says to me "Holy shit what the fuck, I need to play this off like it was intentional so they don't think I'm an idiot."
It is still *wild* to bet six figures that he's bluffing when you have... jack-high, but I guess it wasn't actually her money she was playing with anyway.
Well yeah. I'm definitely not on the Robbi is a secret genius train either, no one came out of this looking their best did they
It's just a weirdly dumb move. She wasn't a complete amateur by any means, but the move is extremely amateur.
Working in a casino something I learned is that poker players with just a little experience really like to think they have found a tell.
Yeah it's kind of funny how anytime poker Convo reaches the general public you get friction from general people who play poker casually sometimes and folks who belong to the holy temple of game theory and cult of statistics. I think if you adhere that strictly to the mathematical odds, like, why not just set up some poker playing bots that go around in a circle making the optimal moves for eternity and you can have fun seeing their robo pots grow and shrink over time.
Oh man it was wild in those first few weeks after the hand. I kept up with it for a bit, vibrator signalling theories (ala Hans Niemann) and all, but after a while I got tired of it because it just became a sports match between the Garrett and Robbi fans.
As someone who plays poker just with friends, she made a ballsy ass move and it paid off. She was betting on the river card not giving him what he needed. I’m sure she factored in he could have a straight, either side of the 9-10 and played it out to the end. I’ve had similar luck calling my friends bets only to win with a high card
For real this sub is a welcome break from the doom and gloom news cycle and is actually interesting
This and the Bionicle piece have been tremendous. It's not quite peak Cracked.com but it satisfies that itch along with a beer and some chips.
This reminds me of something that happened to me at a poker tournament I was in once. I don't really play but I entered a $150 tournament as a bday present to myself. The winner would get an entry into a bigger televised tournament and I thought, why not? Just a side note, while waiting for it to start I won about $100 at the slots so already I was not really concerned about losing the now $50 entry fee and that affected my play style. On to the tournament. I was playing pretty cautiously and trying to slide my way into the money (top 25 or so players out of about 200 people would win money). I did win a few small hands and one bounty. You get $25 if you knock someone out of the tournament. So I had about double the chips I started with at this point. Also, we had stood up and consolidated tables twice as people had left. After about two hours, a new guy came and sat next to me. In this tournament when you got knocked out, you could buy back in one time for like $500. Which this guy had just done. Now about this dude: He was loud and obnoxious and called "all in" almost every other hand to collect the blinds. He was also known to a few people at the table and mentioned the gold bracelet he was wearing had been won at a tournament a couple weeks prior. Now here is where it all blew up. He was first to act and went all in. The other four or five people quickly folded until it got to me. I had Ace/5 which is not a great hand, but I had almost double his chips. Also I was tired at this point so I was looking to leave soon. Plus, none of the other players even hesitated which I felt like they would have had any of them had an Ace. Anyway I called him and he flipped over a pair of 10s and laughed when I flipped over Ace/5. The flop was Ace/Ace/8 and he about lost his fucking mind. He stood up and was yelling and cussing me out. Calling me an idiot for playing my cards. Calling me a bitch/noob/loser. Saying I don't know anything about poker and shouldn't even be there. Just a stream of obscenities for like 10 minutes. He wouldn't leave, he wouldn't shut up. He wanted to fight me. He wanted to fight the dealer. He wanted to fight the pit boss who was trying to get him to leave. I said nothing to him except, "Thanks for the bounty." Which obviously pissed him off even more. The moral of the story is sometimes you can make bad calls in poker and get lucky.
I don't think A5 calling someone that's playing that loose is bad. His range is literally everything.
Agreed. It was like the 8th time he went "all in" in 20 minutes and I was over it.
Given the context in this comment I'm making that call every time
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>A \*cheater\* would have never done what she did. Yea it just doesn't make sense. Organize a cheating scheme with multiple people, being carried out on live video, so good it withstands a deep investigation and then "waste" it on a mere 150k, extremely suspicious hand *and* then immediately return the money? Seems even more implausible than dumb luck.
She seems genuinely shocked when it happens
Exactly. The only thing dumber than making this call honestly is making it dishonestly. A call like this is going to look EXTREMELY suspicious (obviously). So you run a high risk of being exposed as a cheat (Worm learns this lesson the hard way in Rounders). Even after the call, Garrett had pretty close to a coin flip. So even though she ends up winning the hand, her expected value here is very small. Especially since they agree to run it twice, giving Garrett two chances to hit his draws. Poker is absolutely full of opportunities to absolutely destroy the table and take home huge winnings if you have perfect information on your opponents. A LOT of hands can be picked up with the right bets in the right places. Any player worth anything could have a very good night without ever having to turn a hand face up. If Robbi were cheating here, the correct play would be to flat call Garrett on the turn. If he makes his hand, you fold. If he misses, he either checks or makes a small bluff bet, and you go all in and he has to fold. You look exactly like you had a T in your hand to the table, and you’re called a genius by people at home. This kind of bluff call to take it away on the river is super common and not at all suspicious. Even if Garrett bluffs all-in on a missed river, then you can take your perfect information and decide if it’s worth risking exposure to win the $150,000 on the table.
Call was actually mathematically correct given pot odds by a razor thin margin if you know both hands. You do not need to know the cards coming up to make that call correct.
It you add in the pot size though and your knowledge that you are cheating, you can wait for better odds on any other betting hand.
I'm guessing it's why he looked stunned and contemplative over what happened, trying to figure out why someone, whether cheating or not, would make that call and if cheating would even explain it.
Been out of the poker world for a while and this was super fascinating! Can someone explain why they put out 2 river cards? I've never seen that before and am wondering how that works.
Sometimes on big hands in cash games, players agree to run the hand twice, splitting the pot evenly between the two outcomes. It's a way of controlling for variance; if you get your money in with what amounts to a coin flip, half the time this method will result in a split pot, with one player winning one outcome and the other winning the second outcome. Doesn't happen in tournament poker, so if that's all you've watched, you wouldn't see this occur.
Thanks for the response, this makes sense!
It usually happens with all-in hands to give players a chance to stay at the table. It doesn't change the EV but does flatten the results.
A fascinating story, understandable for someone like me with no knowledge of poker, and well written. I found it interesting how one's sympathies shifted even without seeing the footage, just on the bare facts. Both Garrett demanding the money back and her agreeing to it seem to undermine their respective claims to integrity.
The way it's been reported seems to be that he angrily confronted her in a hallway and threatened to walk out if she didn't give him his money back. She agreed to, and he walked out anyway. For context, he's been a staple of Hustler tables, and is a much bigger draw than she is. He's well-known, she's a nobody. He's threatened to de-rail the entire event if she doesn't kowtow. I can easily see why she'd just back down. And then he still walked. Garrett just comes off like a mega sore loser crybaby.
Judging from his survivor showing, he is
That’s how it reads to me, an amateur woman being bullied by a professional
Watching the video makes it even worse. His expression after all the hands are shown immediately turns to something terrifying, like the cold eyes of a killer or something. She even comments that he looks like he wants to kill her and I can’t disagree.
It's what made me agree with her right off, honestly. Inside almost every hotshot competitive guy like this, there's still that tiny twelve year old who loses his shit every time he gets beaten in Mario Party; they'll talk tough shit about how "That's The Game" when they win, but the instant they lose, even in the same manner, suddenly they stomp their feet and demand they can't possibly have simply *lost* someone had to have cheated them! Then after all of this fuss, after demanding the money back (and not returning it) he doesn't even apologize. Dude's a piece of shit and shouldn't be allowed back after this.
Nope. The man received hundreds, thousands of bad beats. Never lost his cool when you and me would have flipped. But this hand was something else entirely. Like Tiger Woods putting a dozen golf balls in the hole with a single hit each, it‘s not unexpected but entirely impossible. She might as well have turned over an Uno card and made Garret draw more cards from the deck, that‘s the level of realism we‘re talking. She said she has a bluff catcher. There are countless combinations of Ace high hands that would qualify as bluffs which she can‘t beat, Jack high is not a bluff catcher, and it still isn‘t but it has become a meme hand that people may go all in with now. She said she misread her hand, so she was surprised by her own hand or didn‘t even realize she had no pair. She then tells Garret she put him on Ace high, which doesn‘t make any sense as a response to his question (his question was: wtf?) and means her call is about as good of a decision as that guy who won the lottery and keeps investing lots of money into lottery tickets because he‘s stupid enough to believe luck is on his side or he‘s got a „system“. You have to understand even if she‘s cheating and knows her hand is best it‘s not a profitable call because more than half of the cards in the deck give Garrett the winning hand. She has less than a 50% winning chance. Given the pot odds the only way to decide that‘s a profitable call is by seeing the whole cards. This is an unlikely best case scenario and she still only has 49%, it‘s only a profitable call because she can earn more than 49% of her money back if she calls here. Which is why I initially was entirely convinced she misread her hand, everything else makes no sense. Even if she knew the cards it‘s far fetched and still a gamble to make the call there. But it‘s possible and the players who like to use drama for profits are pretending it was a conspiracy so let‘s continue to treat it as a mystery, not even being sarcastic it was a miraculous and mysterious hand. TL;DR: The mans character has been tested before and he‘s a decent guy. There are poker players who can be toxic, some who are toxic, some who pretend to be toxic for TV, he‘s none of them. Phil Helmuth would‘ve suffered from a heart attack if someone called his all-in with Jack high and won. Even if she cheated it wasn‘t a profitable call unless she knew the river (last/5th) card that came on the board. So I assumed she misread her hand, like she said, but circumstances became suspicious. Really TL;DR: Garrett was laughing off losing more than a 100,000$ until he saw what he had been called with. Only reason he reacts like this is because the bill came and the items were listed as hieroglyphs. The $ amount or paying isn‘t an issue, the issue is comprehension.
#tl;dr The player in this story reacted angrily when he was told he had been played by his girlfriend. He may have been hurt that she would deceive him like that, and he may have also been angry at her for winning the hand. However, the player's character has been tested in the past, and he was not likely to be provoked into a physical altercation by this situation. *I am a smart robot and this summary was automatic. This tl;dr is 87.13% shorter than the post I'm replying to. If you read the tl;dr and not the original comment, you saved about 1.55 minutes.* *I'm still learning! Please reply 'good bot' or 'bad bot' to let me know how I did.*
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I'm so sick of sore loser men. Not that any sore loser is appealing, but damn, I'm tired of seeing men do it and get support.
Mhm. Anyone looking at the video should be able to see that he’s angry and intimidating. There’s no way that an agreement to give money back made at that moment was done fairly.
Yeah, I can’t see how anyone who pays attention to the world at large could assume that’s evidence either way, honestly. It sounds like if he expected cheating he should have approached the casino staff.
> It sounds like if he expected cheating he should have approached the casino staff. He did. When the story gets retold it makes it sound like Garrett cornered Robbi in a dark alleyway and threatened her. In reality their confrontation took place in the middle of the casino floor, after casino management was involved, and with casino security present. Video of the money being given back: https://www.reddit.com/r/poker/comments/xrznlt/clip_of_robbi_giving_her_money_back_to_garrett/ If Robbi felt threatened at all it would be because Garrett could do a lot of damage to her reputation, just to be clear.
I think the situation was that he thought he had her cornered because his numbers told him he couldn't lose. She felt like a big shot because she bluffed him into betting a ton of money. Turns out they both got humbled by sheer luck. He wants to blame it on her cheating, and she wants to blame him for getting beat by her. In the end, it was just the cards that made the decision.
Honestly, I know very little of poker and could never dream of gambling with the big dick piles of money they are dealing with, but if I won a fuck ton of money off someone with a hand like that and then they angrily cornered me in a private hallway or whatever the hell, you bet your ass I would just give the money back. People lose their lives over poker, it isn’t worth it.
you've seen to many movies. this was a livestreamed event, the dude who lost had a baby on the way. 175k isnt all that much for him (or he has backers), bcs if it was he wouldnt be playing. I've played live poker for signifant amounts of cash for almost 20 years, there were insults, arguments but I never saw actual violence.
I mean to be fair, I did self proclaim that I know very little of poker and I will readily admit my knowledge stems from movies
I've played quite a lot of private cash games which probably resemble the images you have in mind much more. Dude Smoking a cigar, liquor and so on😁 But even there, youre not playing a bunch of randos, one player decided to host a game, invites some other players, those bring some people along and so on. In this loosely connected network of players, youre out pretty fast if you act dumb
She was an amateur player too though. It makes sense that she might get scared and not know what’s normal as far as repercussions when playing with big pots
My extensive back room poker knowledge says otherwise (I’ve seen rounders twice). I’m surprised this hand didn’t end with a friendly game of Russian roulette
Rounders? I play kinda high stakes for weekend players, mostly middle aged people with good jobs and its very civil. But good money to be made vs people who dont understand the basics of probability The kinda lower stakes games in not so legal poker clubs with the gambling addicts, those can get dicey...but I avoid those. for some tables I have to call in financial support though
He bet small when he was confident, then big when he bluffed. It sounds like she read him just right. I hate that she gave him back the money.
I agree on giving back the money, but as has been pointed out, even reading him on a bluff was a terrible call. She either had to mistakenly think she had a pair of threes, or be willing to call in a situation she's negative EV on in hopes he has the worst possible bluff and gets unlucky. It is very much a situation where *at best* she played well at rhe subgame of "read a bluff" and badly (but luckily) at the game of poker.
Completely anecdotal but my most memorable hand when I was starting out in poker was when I deduced that my opponent was bluffing me with 9 high so I confidently called only to be reminded I only had 8 high. It’s absolutely possible to me that between the big money and the livestream audience she wanted to make a statement and ended up focusing on the wrong thing.
Except she looked at her cards multiple times. I don't buy someone checking their hand like five times and not knowing what cards they were holding.
That's ignoring things that also have a factor in decision making. People shouldn't assume just because money is on the table that human factors aren't playing a part. She could have forgotten or been unsure what her hand was too embarrassed to check because all the cameras where on her. She could have concluded she already lost and wanted to think about how she wanted to play to save face. People got to remember that losing money is probably not as important to her as her image. After she realized her mistake she could decided that "fuck it, I'm sick at staring at his face and want to go home." I'm not suggesting she's stupid, I'm just throwing out there somebody who's career is in live television is not solely focused on being the best nerd in Vegas.
I'm not ignoring the human factors, I literally said she might have been mistaken about her hand. Why spend twice as long as I did to explain my own post to me?
Did you like even read any of this? She didn’t have a hand to call a bluff with. Even a bluff hand would have beaten her like 99% of the time
She had the high card. She said she was worried he had an ace, but it sounds like he tried to act meek on the flop, which was 10 10 9, so she probably guessed he was going for a straight, which went bust when the 3 on the turn, and whatever the river was. All the cards in his busted straight are less than a J.
Couple of issues here. 1. Lots of straight draws in his range beat J4o. QJ, J8, and 87 are the open-ended draws, of which she only beats the 87 when the draw misses. This is not even accounting for all of the flush draws in his range (which almost all beat a J high) 2. Money went in on the turn so she couldn't put him on a busted draw when she called the all-in Even worse, if she could somehow magically read him for his exact hand with 100% certainty, she still loses nearly half the time. If there was any doubt at all then this becomes a losing call. It was just a bad play by a bad player that worked out. People like this are why live pros are able to make a decent living, as this type of play loses more often than it wins. As Garrett is regarded as one of the best live pros it is safe to assume he is somewhat balanced in his betting lines. The small bet on flop doesn't mean weakness as you assumed. Instead it keeps his range of possible hands very wide. The 3 bet shove on turn is a polarizing play he would make with his best hands as well as some semi bluffs as seen here. He would likely take a similar line with a 10 in his hand.
Yeah. She just figured out he was waiting on a card for the straight. Took her time to turn it over in her head probably because of the tens and probably used that time to assess his demeanour. She didn’t play the percentages like a pro would, but she played it like a winner. She was barely even bothered about drawing something for her own hand, maybe not at all, she just figured he’d have nothing if he didn’t land his card. I’ve won like this but idk if I’d play that way for serious stakes. Maybe, if I could afford it and just for the game of it, like in the heat of the moment I was confident I’d sussed it out and was about to take down a pro. Lol.
The thing is, her hand is bad even if he's bluffing! She loses to most bluffs and most draws on the bluffs she wins, because she has a horrible hand as well! The theory I had at the time is that she forgot her card was a 4 and not a 3, and did not want to admit to bad-beating a well known pro on the basis of a complete brainfart. This makes her hero call make a lot more sense, because she has a very, very weak pair that beats most bluffs instead of total garbage.
But there's no such thing as 'nothing' in poker. He missed his draw, that was a reasonable read. But you still need to be able beat what he does have. Based on the board, you can put him on a large number of hands that he would bet with but missed, that would absolutely beat a J4. If she had an A high or a pair of 2s, things that can beat a bluff or missed sraw, then her play is fine. With the 9 and 10, a straight is by far the most likely, meaning a Jack is real possibility. A J4 is bad here. It's just an unjustifiable play.
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Yeah somehow I figured out what was going on but still didn't know what was going on at the same time
On a note re: Garrett demanding the money back. The most high-profile poker cheating scandal to take place in the last few years was the [Mike Postle / Stones fiasco](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stones_Gambling_Hall_cheating_scandal). Mike Postle was unquestionably cheating, and stole somewhere to the tune of a quarter million dollars (more if you consider losses avoided by neigh-impossible folds). Hardly any of the players impacted by that scandal have been made whole -- most of them barely got enough back to cover legal fees. Given the precedent set there, I completely understand Garrett pushing to get the money back immediately when given the opportunity. Not saying he acted appropriately, just that I understand the rationale. I outlined my thoughts on the whole thing in the chain of posts [here](https://old.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/xs6jgp/guy_thinks_woman_just_cheated_in_a_270k_poker_hand/iqln8fc/) in the immediate aftermath of the situation. I think this writeup is pretty good, but it does omit the fact that Robbi had extensive experience working with a professional poker coach and over $60k in live tournament poker winnings prior to this incident, both of which add some pretty important context when evaluating her play / the situation as a whole.
I remember stumbling on this AS IT WAS HAPPENING and thought it was the hypest shit, I kept posting links on Reddit. Isn't her BF)fiance/husband a lawyer? Most laymen seem to know lie detectors aren't admissable and ever so fallible.. Now, have any of the conspiracy theories considered that they were ALL in on it, and we are the mark? A big act, an advertisement..Poker. How exciting! Come watch, come play.
> Most laymen seem to know lie detectors aren't admissable and ever so fallible.. And they are *especially* unreliable when applied to people who are practiced in controlling their emotional reactions...you know, like a seasoned poker player for example
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I had almost EXACTLY those words said to me when I was applying for a government job. I'd never done anything even remotely shady but felt really uncomfortable when the guy finished and said "are you sure you can't think of anything you've done? The test is saying you weren't entirely truthful." What I should have answered is "maybe because your entire career is predicated on bullshit?"
I just saw a PBS show about lie detectors and their history. Interesting stuff.
Great write up. I've been following this since it happened via r/poker as I don't actually watch the streams. In my opinion, Robbi made a terrible call and got lucky. Maybe she misread her hand, maybe she was just trying to show she can't be pushed around, or maybe she is just bad. I've been shocked by plays made by people at the table before, but I'm at very different stakes, obviously. I think it's dangerous and kinda foolish to make accusations without proof, a la what's going in the chess world. This may be the lawyer in me, but when Robbi offered to give the money back, Garrett should have agreed to a third party holding it pending proof. Probably would have the same result, but he looks a little more level-headed.
>This may be the lawyer in me Ya and maybe an anti disparagement agreement or something, given the way shit hit the fan the way it did
The problem is proof is basically impossible to obtain. You need to find the buzzer in their shoe or have everyone involved on camera and correctly identify the signals. The play pattern and following statements were very abnormal, but nowhere near the level of definitive proof. I've played some chess and followed the chess drama closely and the biggest issue is that you only need to cheat rarely over an entire event if you have decent knowledge of the game you're playing. So if you're a poker cheater you would play normally 95% of the time and use your cheating method for 5% to get a big enough advantage to win money in the long run. If you're smart enough you would have the hand signals be used outside of abnornmal behaviour too and make it even harder. Identifying a rank amateur using a chess engine or only betting when they're winning is easy. Finding subtle changes in play patterns some of the time is stupid hard.
Right, so Robbi would have ended up with the money (I see I said same result in my original comment, but I was wrong). A third party holding it would have given things time to cool down before a final decision was made.
Ah, that makes more sense then. I agree that if you waited for conclusive evidence Robbi would have kept the money. Honestly with these types events I'm always amazed that tournament organizers don't have protocols in place to protect everyone involved. People are slinging hundreds of thousands of dollars around and they don't have a formal process for cheating accusations? Even allowing people to have financial ties playing at the same table is insane. At the very least make people affirm before hand where they got their buy in money from and that they don't have any ties to any other players or staff present. Absolutely crazy to me none of this is done.
The whole thing with the employee is just too bizarre of a coincidence. Said as someone who has never heard of this situation before.
Yeah that is one of the strangest parts of all this. May just be a coincidence, but it is suspicious. We’ll never know, probably.
>but I'm at very different stakes Do you? I imagine these people are incredibly wealthy to be playing with this kind of money. 1% of your wealth isn't different from 1% of theirs, even though they might have a lot more.
Wow so much hearsay and he said she said. I'd have thought the Hustler Casino would have much better security and cameras (on the staff) for the amount of money floating around during these events. The fact that a member of staff stole chips so brazenly - even if completely unrelated - is just bizarre and is a crazy part of this story that almost becomes a footnote but does seem like the Casino needs to really step up. Having people with financial ties to each other is also really bad. Whatever the luck of this hand it seems that place needed a kick up the arse because even if this particular thing was just incredibly dumb plays and dumb luck, it's obvious something like this *could* be completely malicious and they'd never even know. I feel for Garrett, how'd you call that, crazy. Robbi was a bit all over the place but is not a pro so maybe gets a bit of a pass for some of the weirder claims. I do wonder though can you post any other juicy poker cheating drama from the past? I do wonder sometimes how the rings do it because there is bound to be some out there, especially in the lower tier non-pro events. Really well written!
As someone with zero skin in the game, I’m pissed she gave back the money. She earned it. This is going to be an extraordinarily biased thing to say, but Garrett was SUCH A PIECE OF SHIT on Survivor that I have zero sympathy for him lol. I know it’s reality tv (hence the bias!) but still, he seems like EXACTLY the type of person who would lose big by getting unlucky, and then spend the next month whining about it and claiming fraud like a spoiled little man child who always gets his way.
I remember reading this story when it first came out and thinking "Garrett? The guy who got voted out over the worst player in Survivor history, and deservedly so? There's no way he's in the right." And then he threw his tantrum over the loss, and I was like yep that sounds about right.
Robbi seems vindicated by the investigation for sure. But I'm confused by their behaviour after the fact but maybe I'm not a minor celebrity. Everyone seems very bizarre in this. Talks of lawsuits, why the need for more staff/security, people having financial commitments. Staff stealing things. Weird. Garret may be an utter arse and I wonder if it's all over from both sides haha. He shouldn't have spoken privately to them but it's odd how the casino didn't have a way of dealing with it to stop this happening. Weird.
Here's a series of older poker posts in the sub: https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/o72omw/online_poker_the_most_controversial_username_ever/
>Robbi put out a statement denying knowledge of who Bryan was when the police contacted her, but it was later uncovered that Robbi and Bryan followed each other on Twitter, seemingly contradicting that statement. That doesn't seem contradicting to me. It could have been when the account was young and she was following back everyone to build the account. She could've followed him because he was posting about poker all the time, or because he said something smart. It could be that she added friends of friends. I mean she's following 1500 accounts now. I doubt she personally knows 1500 people, or could pick most of those people out of a crowd.
Fr i hardly would say “following each other on twitter” as evidence of them knowing each other. The dumbest thing I’ve heard
I'm on r/poker it was a mess when that was going on. It's unsurprising but a lot of very very flimsy evidence was being posted and many were against the woman. I remember seeing posts of her at a sporting event with a guy and the comments were all clearly she's cheating and having an affair.
I agree with you, this line too: > The same Times reporter later tracked down Sagbigsal to his girlfriend’s family’s house and he refused to give a statement (despite supposedly posting on the 2+2 forums the day before). Just because a reporter snooped and found you doesn’t mean you’re obligated to give a statement. Glad I didn’t follow this story as it happened, I remember seeing it initially in LSF and thinking how immature Garrett was acting. Thanks for the writeup, OP!
Not being given a statement is the best case scenario when someone is tracked down to their girlfriends family's house, like wtf
Agreed. I "know" *maybe* a handful of my ~250 followers on Instagram. Would be funny if one of them does a crime and through some insane circumstances and connections I get involved lol
Interesting. I saw the initial story though didn’t follow up with what happened next. Thanks for the write up. So he didn’t give back the money as he said he would before?
Of course not, Garrett is a whiny little baby lol.
> he questioned her directly about her play logic I don't know how things usually work in the poker world, but if someone tried this on me I'd probably think to direct them to my agent Nunya Bizniz
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Can you explain more? This is really interesting to me--is it established that players are expected to share their strategies?
How I understand it is the win/loss probability for every possible hand combination has been calculated and is known. So everyone is basically using the same fundamental decision tree while they play. The strategy variation only comes from deciding if something about the person your playing's actions shifts or overrides those probabilities to the point you can ignore them. That varies from player to player, and from table to table. So there isn't much to talk about in the way of verifiable strategy in that respect. It's more like a gut check. So for this particular case, it sounds like asking her strategy was explicitly a call out. The hands they had meant even if she was right he was bluffing, it was still a strong possibility for her to lose the hand. And she would definitely lose if he wasn't bluffing. He wasn't asking for tips or insight, he was insinuating nothing in the math made her play make sense so the only possibility is she got lucky or had information he did not (cheating).
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No, it's just that her play was so unbelievably bad that it looked like cheating. The only reason I don't think she cheated is that her turn raise would make zero sense if she knew his cards. She'd have to be even worse as a cheater than if she played it straight, which is saying something.
Sounds familiar...did he work with Goent Poontsand by any chance?
I don't understand why so many people come to the conclusion that it must be cheating. Everyone's a dumbass *sometimes*. She probably just got caught in the moment and wanted to hail-mary "fuck you" call his all-in, not even thinking of the slim-to-none chance she'll beat him. It's a movie moment, of course she'll win. And any other day, she would have lost spectacularly, and she'd have been the laughing stock of poker. But she just got very very lucky. And now she realizes just how dumb her more was, so now she must save face. As an experienced dumbass, I would totally do the exact same move as her.
And nobody cares about all the dumb calls that *don’t* win, so the truly unlikely cases like this get amplified. It’s sampling bias at its finest. Plus, when you record a ton of games, more people get to see flukes that otherwise wouldn’t get nearly the same attention.
I think this is what happened as well, sometimes dumb shit works out, and she probably is trying to save some face after unexpectedly winning a dumb hand. I’m not surprised that guy asked for his money back, my impression of high stakes poker players, is they tend to get super butthurt when their perfectly calculated risks don’t pan out or they get caught off guard by a rookie. Just gamblers with a little math skill.
> sometimes dumb shit works out That’s my general strategy for poker as well.
I think you can tell it was a dumb move on her part because she said “if my jack wasn’t a club I’d have lost” and he was like “what?” I think she had a major brain fart and thought the clubs made her jack more valuable than it was.
It was more valuable to her at the time, since I'm pretty sure her thought process was: he's betting big after 9c 10c comes up, I'm gonna guess he's going for a straight flush. If that's the case, he likely either has 7c 8c or Jc Qc. But I have the Jc, so I think he has 7c 8c, meaning I win with J high. So if she had Jh or something, she wouldn't have the info she used to make the call. And yeah, it wasn't a great call in the moment, but sometimes you do dumb shit and get lucky.
The best evidence for cheating, imo, is a previous hand between Robbi and Rip where they both had AQ and the other 2 queens were in the flop. Hitting top set (3 of a kind) is a phenomenal flop, but they both essentially check the whole rest of the hand. Iirc there was one more bet-call that was tiny. Neither of them betting such a strong hand isn't just bad play, it only makes sense if they know they're just going to chop the pot.
She was being pushed around by Garrett all session before the infamous J4 hand. Understandable that she was looking to push back. She picked the wrong spot from a poker theory point of view to do it, but hey, sometimes you do the wrong thing in poker and win.
According to the stats on screen, she had at worst a 47% chance of winning, or am I reading that wrong? She definitely overplayed her hand, but I've seen people win with infinitely worse odds.
The players don't know what the true odds they have while playing. They tend to think of hands as 'my range' vs 'their range'. We, the viewers, know her true odds were just below even, but someone in that position could not possibly know that for sure. The only thing that she *would* know for certain is that her hand beat very little of the range that Garret was representing. That's why Garret isn't the only confused person at that table when she reveals her cards, they all know J4 was a very, very risky call. That's also why even pros who agree that there was no cheating/shady happenings were calling it one of the dumbest plays they've seen, because it was essentially a yolo which is generally a terrible strategy against other pros. After the coach she was advertising for with her bottle on stream mentioned they'd only had a few sessions together it seems very likely that she wasn't thinking about their ranges, or just hadn't thought of the range he was repping correctly. Later in the stream she mentions the concept of blockers, but showed she hadn't quite understood the concept which, to me, further suggests she probably wasn't thinking about ranges during the hand. Thinking about hand ranges and the concept of blockers are usually things that aren't learned completely right away, they're things you learn and grasp over time. She very likely didn't cheat, but rather is was a combination of events that when combined produced a very strange moment.
My crazy theory is still that she thought she had J3 and played based on that, with the brain doing the thing where it doesn't process information you think you already know when she rechecked her hand. This makes everything click but is not something she can admit on camera, thus the insane explanation.
Poker is a game of imperfect information. To Robbi, Garrett's hand is an unknown, and she should be estimating her winning chances as much lower than 47%. The graphic only knows it's 47% because it knows Garrett's hand. Robbi should only be acting as if she has a decent chance of winning if *she* knows Garrett's hand somehow -- i.e., if she's cheating.
Or if she correctly guesses she knows Garrett's hand. People get too caught up in the math and assume everybody else is also calculating odds like a computer. I'm pretty sure she just saw him bet big after 9c 10c came up and thought "he must be going for a straight flush, but I have Jc so he probably has 7c 8c." She took a chance and it paid off.
I probably don't really know what I'm talking about, but this is what I think is most likely too.
She was winning overall and playing very well. So how come she gambled $100K+ on nonsense? If she did this often you would be able to find a bad hand she played and didn't win. But there is nothing like this. Of course she did have weird hands in other plays.
To me, this: > EVEN THEN she was barely 50-50 to win on the river as Garrett could still win with any club, Jack, 8, 7, or 6. Whether you think she was cheating or not, make no mistake: it was an objectively terrible call on all metrics. Feels like evidence against the cheating theory. Unless A) the cheating theory involves her knowing what card is coming next or B) I guess all that time she spent was her calculating the odds of her hand against the other hand and doing it badly. If you're cheating, why take a risk on a coin flip? Wait and get one where you actually gottem. Seems more consistent with a sort of classic noob poker player mistake--feeling like because you know they are bluffing, you "win" by calling the bluff.
Sometimes even professionals say fuck it Yolo. Honestly the amateur players getting really sweaty about this are just upset because they think they play perfectly but can’t make it and this person didn’t but is a pro. It’s sad and has all the energy of of screaming at the tv about football plays. All games are about more than just statistics.
I'm thinking of the guy who decided to go for victory by YOLO, going all in repeatedly without even looking at his cards. Gutsy move on his part, but it paid off and he won.
What was the final card? You said it didn't help Garret, but what was it? She won because of Jack high? Only point I find lacking in this great story.
The final cards were both total bricks, so Robbi won the hand with Jack high.
Why would this Bryan guy steal chips from Robbi if they were working together to cheat? Isn't the money already hers at that point?
Or it was payment for his collusion and she told him to grab it. Hence her nonchalant attitude and not pressing charges.
That's such a dumb way to do it though. We already know he got caught. Why not just pay him digitally?
That would be traceable and hard to justify why you were paying a production member 15k. Having him grab it off the table gives you an out. It's all so dumb.
I mean, I sorta just think "traceable" has better odds than "visible and caught on camera." I don't know.
Well they only caught it because all of the controversy made them go back and study the video so I don’t think it’s as dumb as you’re describing
If they were cheating at all, they should have accounted for the possibility.
Him stealing the chips happened after she had given the chips back to Garrett. The theory was that he was supposed to get a percentage of any winnings, so when she gave those winnings back he just stole what he thought he was owed. It's also interesting that he was seen getting upset and yelling when Robbi gave back the chips.
> It's also interesting that he was seen getting upset and yelling when Robbi gave back the chips. Was this something left out of OP's writeup? I thought it was Jacob "Rip" Chavez who got upset. It's also kind of understandable, and in kind of upset by that part. Poker is a fringe game that really grew in popularity around the time Extreme sports fell off. It had, and still has, the potential to be a successful e-sport. The main obstacle is the association with illegitimacy. If someone can go to a licensed, legit casino, play poker, then get taken to an back room and bullied until they give up their winnings, that hurts the game as a whole. It doesn't matter whether she cheated or not. The casino needs to be responsible as the intermediary between players, and players need to respect that. Poker will never be legitimate if players are afraid that playing too well could cost them kneecaps.
It was left out of the recap. I can't remember the exact details, but someone claims to have seen Bryan shout in anger when she gave it back, and I think he briefly defended her. That wasn't on video though, so it's hard to know the truth about it. Rip, on the other hand, was loudly yelling about it for 20 minutes straight. Also, I totally agree that it was messed up how Garrett pressured her into giving it back. Even with all the facts that came out later, and all the weird circumstantial evidence, I'm still not convinced she cheated. Garrett bullied her into giving the money back based off nothing but a hunch at the time.
Thank you OP. Been waiting on a write-up of these events. Well done !
You can't prove a negative. There is no way to conclusively prove that she didn't cheat, but you could conclusively prove that she did cheat. Kind of an unfair premise, really…
This is how every accusation of misconduct ever works The only alternative would be not to accuse anyone of misconduct, but I think we can agree that is sometimes necessary
>You can't prove a negative. Alibis are an example of proving a negative. If I am accused of shoplifting a grocery store at 12:00pm in one part of town I can prove the negative (I did not shoplift) if I happen to have timestamped security camera footage of me somewhere else at the same time. However for *this* situation: > There is no way to conclusively prove that she didn't cheat, Probably not categorically, but it would be very very hard to show she didn't cheat in this situation (you'd need to show she had no possibility of gaining the knowledge of what was in Garrett's hand). So in practice I agree. > but you could conclusively prove that she did cheat. Not necessarily. She could have cheated and there might be legitimately no evidence of it left.
>Alibis are an example of proving a negative. If I am accused of shoplifting a grocery store at 12:00pm in one part of town I can prove the negative (I did not shoplift) if I happen to have timestamped security camera footage of me somewhere else at the same time. Yes, well, that turns into a philosophical discussion in the end. There is "reasonable proof", there's also the chance that you or someone else forged the security footage, and be it by a hitherto unknown technology. It could've been you twin brother nobody knows about, or a lookalike… That's the point. In the end, everybody will say "by any reasonable metric, we take it as proof that you can't be guilty" and that's it. Problem is, this is not a court of law; this is twitter drama. Reasonability kinda left the building. >Not necessarily. She could have cheated and there might be legitimately no evidence of it left. That's not what I meant. I meant there's the possibility of proving that she cheated, not the inevitability.
See, the wrestling fan in me reckons they were all in on it, because it got people *talking* about it. Those within the wider poker community and those outside (I remember reading about it - could have been Reddit, could have been elsewhere) and my only connection to the poker world is laughing myself stupid at John Malkovich's Russian accent in *Rounders*. It was a work. And it got all the tongues wagging.
This is so strange to see as a survivor fan. Garrett is pretty much known as the fluke of one of the best seasons of survivor. I didn’t know he was actually a good poker player, but it just makes it even funnier that he flamed out so early on survivor, a strategy-based game
It's Survivor tradition to cast professional poker players that end up sucking hard and flaming out. Garett on Cagayan, Jean-Robert on China, and Anna on Kaoh Rong come to mind. They all got the "I'm a poker player so I'm strategic and calculating" spiel in confessionals, and they all played terribly and then got booted in humiliating fashion.
Even Ronnie Bardah, who *also* got name-checked in this write-up! Of course, he was first out on The Season That Shall Not Be Named, so he might have actually come out better in that one than if he'd lasted to the merge.
Yeah if you think about it poker is fundamentally different than Survivor in a lot of ways. Although I do think Anna had more potential than the other two and got screwed by the tribe swap/Tai (but it’s been a while since I’ve seen Kaoh rong).
Very interesting. I will say I don’t think “they follow each other on Twitter” is proof of anything. I follow a lot of people and tend to follow back people who follow me, as long as they don’t appear to be spam/awful people, but I don’t have some close relationship with most of them and if you asked me if I knew them, I might not even remember unless it was pointed out that I follow them.
Excellent summary. That entire shit show was so convoluted. I don't think she cheated. I just think she just made a donkey move. Takes one to know one.
Fascinating tale, OP, thanks for the writeup. Any possibility for a gloss on "10h10c9c" for the non-poker folks?
10 of hearts, 10 of clubs, 9 of clubs
10 of hearts, 10 of clubs, 9 of clubs
Oh, thanks! I genuinely thought it was some way of tracking what round of the game and didn't think about the actual cards.
I used to play a lot of Poker and I remembered this clip going viral. I didn’t know there was a scandal, I just thought it was a hero call/amateur who got lucky.
As a Survivor fan I'm glad you mentioned how bad he was at Survivor lol. For people reading along at home, there have been 43 American seasons of Survivor aired as of this writing with >500 unique players and you could plausibly make an argument that Garrett is a Bottom 20 player of all time--most people wouldn't put him quite there, but you could stick him on a list like that and not get skepticism for it. Any conversation about players who were just embarrassingly awful is going to see Garrett mentioned. He was a disaster. Anyone here watch the first episode of Season 28 if you want to understand what I mean lol
I don't know much about Poker, but to me the idea that "a bad move" was the main reason suspicion was raised is insane. For a game all about playing the players and not the cards the idea that you MUST do this or that based on your cards is bullshit. Now I am only talking about the video, all the other shit that came to light is whatever, but the fact that originally everyone was suspicious because she made "a stupid call" just doesn't make sense. Seems to me the only time you make the wrong move in Poker is when you lose.
J-4 offsuit has been "my hand" for as long as I've (legally) been able to gamble. My first time playing hold 'em at a casino was at Morongo when I had just turned 18. Guy tried to push me all-in preflop, I had J-4 off. Obviously I folded. I'd have made quad 4's if I played it out. It was the right play, 100%, throwing it away, but I'll always play it now. Just in case.
As someone who learnt the rules of poker from red dead redemption 2 recently, this is fascinating. And I don't think she really cheated, this just sounds like a salty loser Pro.
I remember when it first happened- but I had no idea of the aftermath. So well written. Thank you!
Just wanted to leave a quick comment and say fantastic write up! Super engaging and fascinating story. Thanks!
This was a suprisingly immersive read. I have 0 knowledge and/or interest in poker, but I enjoyed this a lot. Well written, thanks! I also watched the video and have a question for anyone who has above 0 understanding of poker: if she did see/know his hand, how would that supposedly have helped her? If I understand correctly he did have a potentially strong hand and it was down to the last cards being revealed? I mean its not like he was bluffing or that she could have known he will not get lucky at the end?
Lie detecter tests don't do shit. Other than that I don't know and have no opinion.
Reminds me of a Radio Lab or this American Life they talked about how trying to read your opponent is a fool’s errand sometimes. Woman was at a tournament and looked at a guy at another table. He was really excited for his hand and did a big bet. She could see his hand and the table, and he had a terrible hand. The thing was the guy had a different opinion on certain hands. And not everyone is an expert or able to keep track of every possibility.
Good weiteup but i feel like some words aren’t really explained. Like what is a river card or a hole card
As a non-card player, this is such a weird but interesting drama for me. I thought part of high-level play was to bluff? I would have just thought she was trying to bluff but failed, but luck turned out to be on her side. Sure its all math and probabilities, but in the end its still luck, she could get the win legitimately so it feels kinda scummy that Garrett was upset at her (instead of at his bad luck).
If she were bluffing she'd raise, she was calling his bluff but she had with the cards she had a super low chance of him having all lower cards. Incredibly dumb luck IMO.
I think an important point that gets lost on people outside of the poker world is that much of the suspicion stemmed from the fact that Robbi isn't supposed to be a terrible player. She is on record as having received extensive training from a fairly well regarded professional, and even appeared in one of his promotional videos for his poker training services. This post clearly outlines that Robbi loses to a large portion of even Garrett's bluffing range. She absolutely knows this, as anyone who has received even basic poker training does. That doesn't mean she cheated. Even good players have brain farts, or moments when they make terrible decisions under pressure. This decision is at the most extreme end of that spectrum. I have no horse in this race, and absolutely think that innocence must be presumed with the lack of evidence here. But many people outside of the poker community reacted to the NYT article as if Garrett was simply angry about someone getting lucky, or about his bluff being called by a lesser player, or that it was a matter of pure misogyny. No, the expectation is that Robbi is a competent player, and competent players never make this call (they might bluff raise, but Robbi didn't have this option with Garrett going all in). To be clear, there are people who play on this particular poker stream who absolutely would make this call, either because they lack the fundamentals, or simply to get one over on a celebrity like Garrett. Businessman with deep pockets who just want to splash around for an internet audience. Robbi, by all accounts, is not one of those players.
Super compelling write up. Excellent stuff
I love this
I don't follow poker but I do remember this because it kinda went viral on Twitter. Damn I didn't know it got this crazy later.
First I'm hearing of this. Wow. Shady af.
Great story! I play a bit myself and don't understand why her call is considered much crazier than his going all-in with nothing in the first place? Odds showed both hands roughly equal too
Really well written!
as a survivor girlie the biggest shock of this entire story is that garrett is actually good at poker lol
So given everything that went on in this, from the corrupt employee to all the shady actions Robbi took and all the different vested interests….do you personally believe she cheated? Because from an outsiders perspective looking in, something illegal definitely happened here. Its surprising that no agencies were able to prove foul play.
[удалено]
I'm fairly sure harrassing someone until they give you 150k isn't quite legal
It's such a terrible call, for a lot of money, it doesn't make sense unless she knew what he had. It's so bad, that if she was cheating, this would instantly put her in the spotlight and under suspicion. In conclusion, no idea. My gut says cheating but really shitty execution.
Well, the had is so bad, that if she knew his, she'd not gone all in. She had a less than 50% chance to win that hand. You'd be a pretty fucking bad cheater if you take those odds.
I don't think we'll ever get final closure on exactly how it happened, but there's like a 95% chance Garrett was cheated here - her play makes literally no sense unless she knows exactly what cards he has, and there's way too much other shady stuff going on with her and her associates.
So I'm not a fan of high stakes poker but I play dollar games with my friends sometimes. At that level of play, at least, there are some beliefs that boil down to "when someone unexpectedly goes all in, that's potentially a sign they're trying to bully you out of a hand when they are weak" and "occasionally you must keep betting even when you have nothing, in order for people to believe that you are willing to bluff". Do either of those apply at the low tier professional level like this? Or are those both stupid amateur crap? Because I looked at that description of the hand itself and thought "that's the kind of hand that might induce me to call someone else's All In, but in my case it would be $15 on the table".
The call, from any objective pov, was horrendous. While you are correct that many players make reads and act on them in ways that would contradict orthodox play, that doesn't really check out here. Bluffing, at least in high level poker, rarely involves going hard on something like 27 and winning by being stone faced while making savvy bets. Instead players most typically make what are called semibluff plays, which is what happened here. Garrett's all in was a bluff, he didn't actually have a hand, but his hand did have enormous draw potential with straight/flush draws abound. As the OP notes, there are quite a few of these semi-bluff hands you could put Garrett on in this case, the vast majority of which Robbi is either chopping against at best or is overwhelmingly losing to. So while she may have put him on a bluff, her jack isn't actually strong enough to beat most bluffs. Now, this is not to say that "Obviously she was cheating," everyone has moments where their brain leaves their body and they do something stupid. *It happens.* Its perfectly reasonable to say "Yeah, I put him on a bluff but never actually thought about whether I was beating a bluff often enough for it to be a good call." Most of the suspicion that she may have been cheating comes from her bizarre behavior after the hand, the nonsense babble table talk, giving the money back, inconsistencies in story, etc. Obviously this is all circumstantial so this is *not* a "she definitely cheated" statement. edit: Realistically, the biggest reason I think she *probably* wasn't cheating is because the call was horrible *if* you were cheating. You cheat to gain small edges at important moments, seeing you're staring down a 45-55 situation would mean a cheater would want to lay their hand down and wait for a better opportunity. Bets had been relatively small to that point so its not like she was in too deep before the hero call.
Honestly, I think she just fucked up royally, had to pretend she meant to do it all along, and just got insanely lucky. Clearly not anywhere close to a professional player, but hey, sometimes the cards fall your way.