[Poker] The infamous J-4 hand that nearly tore the poker community apart

This is a repost. I am not the original author (see disclaimer at the bottom).

If you’ve ever watched high-level poker on TV, you’ve probably seen plenty of bad beats. A pro player makes all the right moves only to lose to the river card. An amateur makes a dumb move that winds up netting him/her millions. Most pros accept this as a feature of the game, as the element of randomness leads to some bad luck once in a while. But last year featured a hand so strange, so outside the norm that it drew legitimate suspicion of foul play. And nobody could have predicted the wild rabbit-hole this scandal would take us down…

The scene? Hustler Casino, a popular poker hotspot in Southern California known for its high-stakes play. The casino also hosts its own live streams on YouTube, with tens of thousands of live viewers tuning in nightly to see players at the big money tables. Most of the players that appear on these streams are amateurs with deep pockets, but they also manage to draw some big pro names like Phil Ivey, Doug Polk, and Tom Dwan for their games. The casino therefore has a strong reputation among the pros and maintains relationships with these players to ensure they keep coming back.

On September 29, Hustler Casino Live hosted a cash game featuring a pro regular, Garrett Adelstein, widely known as one of the best cash players in the world – and one of the worst Survivor players, but that’s neither here nor there. He was doing fairly well against the table full of amateurs, including Robbi Jade Lew, an LA local with no prior high-level cash winnings who only started playing poker seriously during the pandemic. There was another amateur player by the name of Jacob “Rip” Chavez playing at the table, a former boxing trainer for Jake Paul, who will also become significant later.

The hand

Here is the now-infamous hand if you want to watch it in its entirety. Garrett is dealt 8-7 of clubs, a solid hand with a lot of flop potential, while Robbi has J-4 offsuit, a pretty garbage hand that you should usually fold. But Robbi has good position on Garrett and clearly wants to try something tricky, so she calls his raise and the two of them go to the flop.

The flop comes 10h10c9c, giving Garrett a straight flush draw, meaning he’s one card away from the best possible hand in poker but currently has nothing. He makes a small bet, and Robbi calls – strange, but so far not super suspicious.

The turn card is a 3h, a blank for both players. Garrett again bets small, Robbi makes a small raise to try and scare him away, and Garrett decides to go all-in for roughly $150,000 (a common play for strong draws like his to scare away all but the best of holdings). At this point Robbi still has nothing and has no choice but to fold. But inexplicably to everyone (including the commentators), she goes deep into the tank, thinking for several minutes and even wasting a time chip to keep thinking, before she calls!

The river turns up no help for Garrett, and he knows he’s beat. They turn over their hands, and Garrett is absolutely shocked at her call. The table is amazed at her successful “hero call” and compliments Robbi on her big win, and she engages Garrett in some light trash talk, but Garrett looks like he thinks something is very suspicious about her call and betting patterns.

A quick aside on ranges (technical poker speak here). In a situation like Robbi’s where you are considering a hero call, you have to assign a “range” of possible hands that Garrett could be representing with an all-in. By making the call, Robbi clearly had him on either a bluff or a draw. But strangely, several bluffs or draws STILL would have beaten her, including Ax, Kx, Qx, J8, or any pair. (You can even hear her say “I thought you had Ace high” at 5:27, which is a hand that would have beaten her.) Garrett happened to have the one exact hand combination she could beat within that range, and 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.

Immediate aftermath and reactions

Garrett stepped away from the table after this hand and spoke to one of the stream managers off-camera. A few minutes later, Robbi was called away from the table to talk with both Garrett and this manager about the hand. As Garrett recounted in a statement after the fact, he questioned her directly about her play logic and shared his suspicions that she had somehow unfairly won the hand via third-party communication with somebody who knew the hole cards. Part 2 here. Robbi eventually offered to pay Garrett back the money she had won from him in the hand, and he accepted, interpreting this as an admission of guilt from her and an attempt to make the situation go away.

Hours later, Robbi fired back at Garrett, saying that she won the hand fair and square by reading him correctly. She also gave a slightly different version of events during their off-camera discussion, claiming that Garrett “cornered and threatened” her until she offered to pay him back. Robbi also appeared on Joe Ingram’s live stream later that night (at roughly the 6hr31m mark) to further defend herself, saying that she paid Garrett back not as an admission of guilt but as a peace offering to get him back to the table.

Interestingly, after Robbi gave Garrett his money back, the player known as Rip got up from the table and yelled at Garrett for pressuring her into it. Several other players also expressed disgust at Garrett’s behavior, but Rip in particular seemed to have a personal stake in the matter, and he could later be seen on stream talking privately with Robbi, indicating that the two had more than a passing relationship with one another. And indeed, earlier in the live stream, Robbi had mentioned that she and Rip were “business partners.” Had Rip staked her in this game, and was he upset that her paying Garrett meant that his cut of her profits would be lower?

Word of this incredible hand spread like wildfire through the poker community in the coming days, and the clip of Robbi beating Garrett went viral online. Poker pros were initially split on the scandal. Several pros like Daniel Negreanu, Ronnie Bardah, Melanie Weisner, Faraz Jaka, Allen Kessler and Liv Boeree came to Robbi’s defense, arguing that she may have just been caught up in the moment and made a bad play that happened to work out. Negreanu also argued that her paying Garrett off afterwards is not necessarily an admission of guilt, but perhaps just a way of avoiding conflict and settling the matter without further drama. Others like Shaun Deeb, Eric Froehlich, Tom Dwan and Doug Polk seemed fairly confident that something was fishy and sided with Garrett.

Hustler investigates

It should be noted that there was another infamous case in 2019 of a casino employee colluding with a player to cheat on live streamed games, and in that instance the casino’s response was to shut down the stream forever and go radio silent on the matter, providing zero closure for the fans and player base. However, Hustler Casino wanted to handle things differently, as the co-founders of the live stream believed in the integrity of the product and wanted to uncover the full truth. They began to review the footage and hired a third-party firm to conduct an internal investigation of the incident.

On October 6, Hustler released a statement updating fans on the investigation, and they revealed a shocking discovery made during their review of the tapes. At one point during the game, while Robbi was away from the table, a Hustler employee by the name of Bryan Sagbigsal walked up and stole $15,000 worth chips from her stack without anyone noticing. The casino fired Bryan and brought the matter to the attention of the local Gardena Police Department, who approached Robbi and asked her if she wanted to file charges against Bryan, but she declined.

In the hours and days following this revelation, online sleuths were quick to draw connections between Bryan and the allegedly cheated hand. For one thing, Bryan had tweeted in support of the production crew shortly after the hand went viral (later deleting his entire account after his theft was made public). 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.

Doug Polk was permitted backstage access to Hustler during the investigation, and he discovered that Bryan’s desk was located directly in front of the hole card displays during live streams and that a file cabinet had recently been moved right next to the desk, as though to shield himself from view of the other employees. A couple days later during a separate live stream, Bryan was also caught on camera approaching the table and handing something to a different player; it was later revealed to be poker chips totaling $10,000 that he owed the player. Wonder where he got the money to pay him back? And how many different players did Bryan have financial ties to, exactly??

On October 7, Garrett posted a lengthy report on the TwoPlusTwo poker forums, outlining every bit of potential evidence he had that there was foul play involved. He concluded that Robbi was likely part of a (minimum) three-person cheating operation involving Rip, Bryan the employee, and potentially another player at the table by the name of Nik Airball, based on their suspicious on-camera behavior and previously-undisclosed financial ties to one another.

Robbi released her own statement hours later, saying that Garrett’s report was “full of inaccuracies and conjecture” and continuing to maintain her innocence. She also submitted herself to a lie detector test in an effort to further prove her innocence. Nik Airball preempted the report with a statement of his own and explained why he loaned Rip $175k to play in the now-infamous cash game. On October 9, a user claiming to be Bryan Sagbigsal made a post on Two Plus Two poker forums refuting Garrett’s cheating claims and affirming his own innocence in the scandal.

Things get really, really weird

At this point in the investigation, the poker community was HEAVILY invested in the outcome and wild speculation abounded. Many felt that a player of Garrett’s caliber would never risk his reputation with such accusations without good cause. Crazy theories were thrown about regarding possible cheating methods, including vibrating jewelry (sound familiar, chess fans?), the dealer giving odd hand signals and Jake Paul fight tickets being used as bribery for collusion. Poker pros were making parlay bets with one another on who was involved and a bounty for information was created, which eventually grew to over $200,000 for anyone who came clean about their role in the supposed cheating ring.

The LA Times wrote an article telling Robbi’s story, which only intensified the scrutiny on her. 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).

Robbi’s own behavior following the Hustler report was also scrutinized. Some questioned the legitimacy of the lie detector test, which was conducted by a shady bail bond business. The LA Times also disputed her prior claim that she had submitted her phone records to them when they never received any such thing. Many questioned why she had initially failed to file charges against Sagbigsal but later changed her mind when confronted about it. There was even speculation that Robbi had faked DM’s that Bryan allegedly sent her to try and distance herself further from him and explain her apathy to her stolen chips.

Hustler’s conclusion

The memes and wild conspiracy theories were truly out of control by this point. The eclectic cast of characters and downright absurd allegations felt akin to a Netflix melodrama, and it seemed impossible that things would resolve without some explosive revelations coming to light. But unfortunately, nothing ever did, and slowly but surely, interest in the investigation waned as it became clear no cheating ring was about to be uncovered.

Weeks later, on December 14, Hustler Casino completed their investigation and published their findings. They concluded that, while cheating was theoretically possible in the hand, no evidence of wrongdoing had been found, either by production staff or the private investigation firm hired for the task. The report refuted several of the more outlandish cheating theories, from the vibrating jewelry to the hacked RFID card reader system. HCL also announced increased security measures for future live streams, including limited access to hole cards among production staff and requiring signed statements from all players that they are not financially affiliated with anyone else at the table.

Garrett responded to the report by praising the security changes but making no comment on the findings themselves. He has yet to return to a live stream since the incident (his wife just had a baby, to be fair), but said that he has “found peace” away from poker and is open to returning to Hustler or another stream in the near future. Robbi released her own statement to the LA Times, saying the results were “as she expected” and implying that further legal action would be taken on the matter in the future (which has yet to materialize).

So the controversy ended with a whimper rather than a bang. The poker community remains divided on the subject, but for now the Robbi naysayers have been quieted by the lack of evidence. Many still believe Garrett should have to apologize and/or return Robbi’s money before he is accepted back into the community, though that seems increasingly unlikely to happen by the day.

Meanwhile, the J4 hand has become the stuff of legend, and players frequently tweet at Robbi sharing their own success stories with the dubious hand. Robbi’s popularity has grown significantly throughout the incident, especially after the Hustler investigation cleared her and the massive bounty went unclaimed. We may never know if there was foul play in the infamous hand or not, but it remains one of the biggest scandals in the poker world in over a decade.

Disclaimer

This is a repost from reddit. I really missed this sub so I decided to post some top articles from time to time until hopefully one day this community will be large enough to produce its own content.

Read the original here