Prominent Poker Swindlers

Over the years, poker players have found ways to cheat big in live games around the world! Some of the methods they’ve employed have become the stuff of legend. They have been depicted in movies such as Rounders and The Sting, for instance. Let’s take a look at a few of the biggest cheaters in recent poker history.

In 2009, French poker players Cedric Rossi and Jean-Paul Pasqualini won over two million dollars by employing a series of hand signals to indicate to each other which hole cards they were holding. This is known as collusion in Texas Hold’em, and it’s a big no-no! It creates an unfair advantage for the players involved. They were suspended from the Global Poker Index in 2013. Check out the breakdown of their code in the video below:

In 2018, a mystery player known as Billy the Egyptian was accused of cheating at Alea Casino in Glasgow. He was allegedly working with a croupier and using an electronic card reader, which uses a tiny camera on a mobile phone to electronically mark a deck of cards. These kinds of devices are common on eBay and can read more than 20 cards in a deck! This is similar to a recent cheating allegation known as Postle-gate, where player Mike Postle was accused of using an electronic card reader to make miraculous moves at Stones Gambling Hall in California. You can see an explanation of how this works, here:

Ever find yourself low on chips? Just make your own! Player Christian Lusardi made his own counterfeited poker chips for the 2014 Borgata Winter Poker Open. Once the Borgata learned that there were $800,000 worth of fake poker chips in play, they sent the police to investigate. Lusardi tried to flush an additional $2.7 million in fake chips down the toilet! The chips were purchased from a Chinese manufacturer and Lusardi put the Borgata logo on them to complete the scam. Talk about making money!

As long as cash has been on the table, people have been willing to cheat to get it. In the years to come, we’re sure to see more new and interesting ways of scamming the system.