There has been a lot of follow-up news concerning Mike Postle and his alleged cheating at the Stones livestreamed cash games at the start of this month. From the looks of our initial post of this topic, we thank you for your helpful comments and for sharing updates, and so we thought we might as well write up an update article for this.
Ever since lead whistleblower Veronica Brill came forward and shared to the public what she knew about Mike Postle (pictured above) and his potential cheating practices at the end of September, the poker community had been curious to know how Postle kept on winning big (or losing just a minimum) from these "unusually-looking" livestreamed cash games.
The most recent update from this story is that a $10 million lawsuit was filed by 25 plaintiffs last week. The plaintiffs include Brill herself and poker content creators named Jaman Burton and Jeff "Boski" Sluzinski. The lawsuit was filed with the US District Court, Eastern District of California against: accused cheater Mike Postle, the venue Stones Gambling Hall where the alleged cheating occurred, Stones Tournament Director Justin Kuraitis, and an unnamed chief confederate John Doe 1.
The filing starts with the claim that, "This case concerns Mr. Postle's systematic use of one or more electronic devices, for the purposes of cheating, while playing in broadcast games of poker, to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars from fellow players."
The suit is asking for any damages to be "divided pari passu between and amongst the Stones Fraud Victims in proration to the number of minutes they spent playing on the Stones Live Poker broadcast from January 1, 2019 through the present."
One of the claims in the filing showed, "Mr. Postle's winnings on the Stones Live Poker broadcast, and his correlative play of poker, have been so exceptionally outstanding as to lead the commentator to note his seemingly mystical abilities on numerous occasions, and to lead Stones (Live) Poker to produce various graphics portraying Mr. Postle as a deity-like individual imbued with omniscient powers (with one such graphic conflating an image of Mr. Postle and an image of Jesus Christ)."
Lipman hired by Stones to Investigate
The Stones Gambling Hall initially denied any wrongdoing occurred at first, stating that an investigation even was conducted earlier into the year. They even had the confidence to say that, "The recent allegations are completely fabricated."
Stones then announced that it would suspend its live poker stream and former federal prosecutor Michael Lipman will investigate the allegations after several poker players and other personalities, mainly Joe Ingram, have released their own analytic observations.
Lipman said, "Stones is very serious about finding out what, if anything, has happened with regard to this situation. We are doing what in my experience is a serious investigation in order to determine what happened."
Lipman said the plan is to investigate the allegations by forensically checking out the hardware used for the stream. He acknowledged the poker community's analysis, taking some of them into consideration but most of it has been discounted as merely circumstantial evidence. He said, "We are aware of the comments and analysis that's been done by the poker community and have taken all of that into consideration as part of our inquiry. Most of what they've said is circumstantial evidence as to what may have happened. However, we believe that the definitive evidence will be found by forensically examining the computer systems used to broadcast the stream."
Lipman revealed that Stones hired computer forensics company Stroz Friedberg to investigate the stream's computer systems, "Stroz has flown employees to Sacramento from the East Coast, we have imaged what we believe to be the relevant computers and components and Stroz had begun their analysis. I believe that it will be the computer forensics that will give us the definitive evidence needed to reach the ultimate conclusion. "We have been and will continue to totally cooperate with the Bureau of Gambling Control from day one."
Postle's Lawyer Responds
This type of story has really blown out of proportion that it caught the attention of mainstream media outlets like The Sacramento Bee and ESPN. The former published a story last Friday which outlined the stances by attorneys from some of the defendants involved in the case.
Postle cannot be reached for an updated statement aside from his last known commentary from Mike Matusow's interview as well as some earlier tweets on the controversial subject.
The Sacramento Bee received a comment from Postle's lawyer William Portanova who stated Postle's winning streak was a possible occurrence, "I guess he wins a lot of hands of poker. I don't gamble, because that's how many hands I lose. But we don't know what the facts are. I can just say this: When I play poker I lose almost every hand, so I know such streaks are possible."
Source:
https://www.pokernews.com/news/2019/10/mike-postle-lawyer-responds-35653.htm?itm_content=pn-hp-hero-1
