Mike Postle, a 42-year-old poker professional who has been broadly accused of dishonest on livestreamed video games at a Sacramento on line casino, has by no means wavered in his claims of innocence. From the second in late September 2019 when Veronica Brill, a fellow participant, tweeted out her suspicion that Postle’s profitable streak at Stones Playing Corridor was too good to be true, Postle has maintained that he’s the sufferer of a conspiracy.
After I reported on his story at size for WIRED, for instance, Postle instructed me that all the allegations in opposition to him had been “pretend information,” and that he had been inexplicably focused by individuals who want both fame or cash.
Now Postle is hitting again at an array of poker luminaries who’ve publicly branded him a cheat. On October 1, Postle filed a defamation go well with in search of $330 million in damages from a dozen named defendants.
Amongst these in Postle’s authorized crosshairs are Daniel Negreanu, a Canadian professional who has gained greater than $42 million throughout dwell video games; Haralabos Voulgaris, a former skilled gambler who parlayed his success right into a job as director of quantitative analysis and growth for the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks; and Run It As soon as, a poker coaching firm based by Phil Galfond, a three-time World Sequence of Poker occasion winner who just lately launched a undertaking to investigate hundreds of Postle’s previous arms. Brill, who instructed me this summer time that she feared being sued by Postle, can also be a defendant, as is ESPN, which aired a SportsCenter phase in regards to the dishonest scandal final October.
The crux of Postle’s lawsuit is that his accusers had been conscious they had been mendacity once they known as him a cheater on Twitter, YouTube, or different media retailers. “Not solely did defendants, and every of them, don’t have any cheap foundation to consider these statements,” the criticism says, “however additionally they had no perception within the fact of those statements, and in reality knew the statements to be false.” Postle claims that he has suffered grievous penalties because of the allegations in opposition to him, together with a complete lack of his poker profession and a crushing quantity of stress that has rendered him barely capable of go away his home. (The latter declare is maybe contradicted by the truth that, in early March, Postle known as me and said that he was at an airport en path to Florida.)
The criticism additionally comprises some intriguing particulars which might be certain to get the poker world speaking. Chief amongst them is a passage that addresses the suspicion that Postle obtained recommendations on his opponents’ playing cards on the cellphone he usually stored on his lap. The criticism states that Postle used the cellphone to verify on his sports activities bets, and that “he started inserting his cellphone between his legs when he began receiving inappropriate messages or photos from girls he was frequenting with on the time.” The criticism additionally comprises a single line that hints that Postle’s authorized staff will search to assault Brill’s character: “Defendant Brill has a historical past of untamed accusations in opposition to a number of individuals over time, none of which have ever been substantiated.”
The majority of the poker world, together with lots of the named defendants, appears to have greeted the information of Postle’s go well with with derision. In response to my tweeting in regards to the case, for instance, Negreanu posted a GIF of Will Ferrell laughing. One other defendant, Todd Witteles, has known as the go well with “clearly frivolous” and has vowed to battle it. The prevailing sentiment in the neighborhood continues to be that Postle will need to have discovered a strategy to glimpse his opponent’s gap playing cards throughout Stones’ livestreamed video games. There isn’t any direct proof of such a scheme—no confederate has stepped ahead to admit their involvement. However many elite gamers insist that Postle made a whole bunch of weird but useful choices that deviated from fashionable poker concept, an strategy often called sport concept optimum. They contend that somebody would solely make such choices in the event that they possessed a nefarious edge. Postle’s lawyer, Jared Densen, didn’t reply to a request for remark.