Cigar Aficionado

It seems like the perfect poker game, the one you waited impatiently for an invite to attend. The stakes are high, and the setting is classy. Taking place in a luxurious home, or perhaps a four-star hotel suite, it has all the fittings for a rich man’s night of Texas Hold ’Em or Omaha.

A professional dealer, a state-of-the-art shuffling machine at his side, divvies out the cards. Top-shelf liquor flows. The food is whatever you desire—filet mignon from the best steakhouse in town and bumps of caviar washed down with icy vodka. Want a Montecristo No. 2? No problem—the humidor is full of them. Good-looking massage girls rub-down backs and shoulders to ease the aches from a long night of play.

Best of all, if you’re a serious poker player—a pro or a sharp amateur—there is star power at the table, a wealthy athlete. He’s the draw, not only for his fame, but also for his ineptness at poker, his large bankroll and his propensity for going on tilt because he hates losing so much.

“The pros smell blood in the water,” says Houston Curtis, who played in the famous Molly’s Game, co-wrote a book about it entitled Billion Dollar Hollywood Heist and is an expert on game protection as well as card cheating. “The pros need to be there because they expect to win a lot of money. That’s how they make their livings, playing in soft games with wealthy opponents whenever possible.”

But this night, despite initial appearances, will not end in bolstered bankrolls for the skilled players—it’s a trap. The operation has Mob fingerprints on it. The shuffling machine is rigged, the “strangers” at the table are in on the scam and the pro athlete isn’t there for his love of poker. Instead, he’s a part of the ruse, a tool in a scheme to transform the night from a game of chance to one with no chance at all.

It sounds like the plot of a movie, but according to prosecutors it actually happened—more than once. Rigged poker games like the one described above were part of a multimillion-dollar, multi-faceted, illegal betting scheme that included professional athletes manipulating games, a shady gambit that led to the arrest of more than 30 people including current and former NBA and Major League Baseball players and members of several organized crime families. Dozens have been busted.

“The fraud is mind boggling,” said FBI director Kash Patel during an October 23 press conference in New York City. “We’re talking about tens of millions of dollars in fraud, and theft and robbery, across a multi-year investigation.”

The indictments exposed elaborately underhanded misdeeds among gifted and well-paid athletes, a veritable Venn diagram of illicit mischief, with pro athletes in one sector, the Mob in the other and a smattering from both groups meeting at the center.

According to prosecutors, the alleged criminal activity happened on the court, on the field and on the green felt of poker tables. On October 23, Terry Rozier, a guard for the Miami Heat, was arrested and charged with employing inside information to alter outcomes for gamblers. It’s alleged that he removed himself from a game in 2023 at a specific point in the action to aid gamblers placing money on his performance. Crooked bettors took the under on his scoring. A middleman who authorities claim shared the information is said to have been compensated. Rozier was arraigned on December 8, pled not guilty to the charges and was released on a $3 million bond.

Around the same time that Rozier first showed up in court, wearing handcuffs and a Charlotte Hornets sweatshirt, Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups was busted for a scheme related to poker cheating. Prosecutors say he was involved in rigged poker games that attracted card-playing pros alongside well-heeled amateurs. They were all supposedly fleeced, victims of a wide range of cheating equipment and techniques, utilizing gear that ranged from fixed shuffle machines to marked cards (along with the glasses required to read the cards) to tables customized with X-ray equipment for exposing the cards in play. In late November, Billups entered a plea of not guilty in New York City federal court. Released on a $5 million bond, he had to surrender his passport and was placed on unpaid leave by the Trail Blazers.

Damon Jones, who played 11 seasons in the NBA for a host of teams, is alleged to have been caught up in that activity as well. He stands accused of leaking information to bettors when he was part of the Los Angeles Lakers coaching staff and participating in rigged poker games. In November, he pled not guilty.

Major League Baseball has also been sullied by accusations. On November 13, Cleveland Guardians pitcher Emmanuel Clase was arrested at JFK Airport, charged with changing his pitches during games to benefit outside bettors. The day before, his teammate and fellow pitcher Luis Ortiz was arraigned in court on similar charges. Both have been charged with taking bribes to dump pitches for sports bettors. They appeared in court together in Brooklyn, New York, on December 2, and pled not guilty to the charges, which included fraud and conspiracy. The tentative date for their trial is May 4.

Clase is paid $4.9 million a year. Billups has a salary of $4.7 million. Rozier makes more than $24 million in a single season. If you thought that a job in pro sports would lead one to live on the straight and narrow, with an aversion to cheating and a large enough paycheck to make such nefarious deeds unthinkable, you would be mistaken. But why would someone making millions risk everything on such alleged behavior?  

“I think, if the truth comes out, we may find that [some of] the athletes were stuck,” says Curtis, who suggests that some may have been playing to work off gambling debts. According to The New York Times, Jontay Porter, the Toronto Raptors forward-center who pled guilty to wire fraud in 2024 after agreeing to remove himself from two games, had large gambling debts.

“I think they will prove to have been in way deeper than anyone realized,” says Curtis. “Or else they stood to make a lot more money than anyone realized.”

Michael Franzese, a former capo in New York’s Colombo crime family, has experience in creating situations that can lead to the former. He told ESPN magazine that he once bought into an agency that represented athletes in order to cozy up to them. “I did it because I wanted to get close to the athletes,” he said. “We knew if we could get close to those guys, they are going to end up in trouble. If they gamble, they are going to come to us.”

If you think one person or coach can’t change the outcome of a game, you’re not thinking about the myriad sports bets available to a gambler. Aided by the advent of online sports betting, gamblers can wager on many facets of a game via prop bets.

These are wagers on events that will happen over the course of a game that do not include the actual outcome. You can make over and under bets on the performances of individual players, gambling on one person’s points, rebounds or fouls. If an athlete takes himself out of a game, which Rozier is accused of doing, it can tilt the odds to favor gamblers who knew it would happen ahead of time. In that case, they would bet on his personal under (likely for scoring or rebounds). Similarly, in the case of the baseball bets, wagers were made on specific pitches that are alleged to have been plotted out ahead of time. All of this can be escalated with parlay bets, which combine the outcomes of two or more prop bets for higher risks and richer rewards.

Professional sports leagues have expressed concerns over player prop bets. Days after the Cleveland Guardians pitchers were indicted, Major League Baseball announced that authorized sports-betting operators will place $200 caps on individual-pitch bets and keep them out of parlays. The fixing of poker games is a whole other craft. When properly rigged, the game of poker is a deception, an elaborate con, an impossible situation for even the most skilled practitioners. “Professional players walk in and lick their chops,” says a poker-world insider who’s spent time around illegally-run games. People who get an invite focus on the potential profits. “They’re like, how can I be so lucky to play with these idiots who are at a huge disadvantage against me?” he says. “Then, at the end of the night, they walk out, saying, ‘Holy fuck. I just got smoked.’ ”

In short, they are sharks who get turned into fish (what scammers call their victims, even though in these examples they tended to be skilled players who became fish for a night). “The fish doesn’t have to be a bad player as long as you catch him,” says Curtis. “Then, in fact, the best kind of fish is a guy who’s a great player.” These days, it looks like fish are all too often on the menu. And, according to the recent indictments, professionals from the wide world of sports are helping to reel them in.

“Some private games are set up to be rigged,” says Curtis. “And if the cheats need to get involved in a game that is not their own, they get close to employees attached to the game. They find leaks—maybe a guy is cheating on his wife or he owes money from sports betting—and they use that to compromise the employee. Then he becomes a compatriot. And once he’s in a little, he’s in all the way.”

The pro poker players don’t always do themselves a lot of favors either.  “A guy who’s a little greedy and is a good player with a hustler mentality, well, he’s the easiest guy to hustle,” says Curtis. “His greed takes over. He’s not playing as sharp as he normally would, and he is not looking at all the angles in the way that he should.”

One missed angle would be his invitation to the game in the first place. “When you are a professional who does not offer much to a high-profile game being run around celebrities and you get invited, your radar should go up,” advised poker pro Matt Berkey on “The Pat McAfee Show.” Like Curtis, he was not blaming the victims. “I got invited to these [cheating] games. They seemed quite suspicious to me and I was lucky enough to pass,” he said. “Once you get outside of the casino, the rules get bent quite a bit.”

In other words, playing in a game outside of a casino adds to the potential risk for getting taken.

But certain elements contribute to suckering in an otherwise sharp player. As Curtis sees it, the presence of a professional athlete at the non-casino table has a secondary benefit for organizers.  “Having high-profile players in the game,” Curtis says, “makes the game seem clean.”

One of the people charged with playing in the rigged games is a Texan by the name of Curtis Meeks. According to the indictment, he is one of two people alleged to have supplied cheating technology for the games and it’s also been reported that he played in at least one of them. He has pled not guilty.

Meeks can be seen in action via an online streaming feed on Bally Poker Live. Wearing splashy jewelry and playing an equally splashy game, he’s believed by at least one person who played against him to be a jeweler, though he’s also a boxer. PokerScout describes him as losing some $118,000 on Bally Poker Live games. “They try to build a schtick,” says the insider, explaining that those involved in fixed games want to look like loose players in order to attract the money. (There’s no evidence to suggest Meeks was doing this.) “If you have one good game, and you’re cheating, you can make a million or $2 million. That’s all you need.”

One particular game involving Meeks and a professional athlete that conned multiple pro poker players allegedly raked in $900,000 from those not in on the scheme. According to a player who was there, the supposed scam seems to have been anything but subtle. “It was in a shitty high-rise and it was a shitty table,” the victim says, contradicting the usual set-up for games that are built as big-money operations. “It was supposed to be a 10K buy-in with rebuys. But then it started out at 20K. Which meant they could get our money quicker. Hands went down. Money never came to people in our group. It always went to the four guys who were in on the scam.”

Games named in the FBI indictment are said to have taken place in Las Vegas, Florida and the Hamptons. One victim at the latter location, according to the insider, was a young, wealthy investor who’s good enough to beat amateurs but an underdog against real professionals.

With the cheating in play, the skill levels of the fish didn’t really matter. “These guys are just looking for people who are rich, who can pay,” says the source. “They don’t care if you’re a pro or an amateur. And they will scare you into paying.”

It is believed that the young investor fell into the game after playing in New York City and paid off without a whole lot of intimidation, not realizing, initially, that he was cheated. Others put up a fight. One group played in a game on credit, and shut it down after realizing they had been scammed and didn’t want to pay. The cheaters insisted that the game was fair. “We offered for them to take lie detector tests, and they agreed,” says one of the players. “But they never showed up for the tests.”

Three months went by. Threats escalated. In the end, most of the money got paid.

Although this all came to light to the general public only recently, claims about Billups playing in illicit poker games aren’t new. The poker pro Matt Berkey mentioned it on his podcast, “Only Friends,” in 2023, and he was talking about an incident that dated back to 2019.

“I heard about the game,” said Berkey, claiming that it was “built around” Billups. “The person who told me about it told me he knew the game-runners and that the game is 100 percent on the up and up. I told him that I knew some of the people involved and I know, 100 percent, that the game is not on the up and up.” Berkey explained that his friends who played were “for sure” being cheated. “People who didn’t understand the rules of no-limit Hold ’Em were jamming in hundreds of big blinds with a gutty [a gut shot straight draw] and drilling it. Only the pros were losing.”  

As technology advances, it makes cheating easier. Two of the more effective techniques involve the X-ray tables and rigged shuffling machines that are said to have been deployed in the games currently making headlines. The X-ray scam employs cameras planted in the table to provide images of all the cards being dealt. Reconfigured shuffling machines take advantage of cameras built into the equipment. Curtis explains that they are there for a legitimate reason, to make sure that cards have not been switched in or out of the deck. Cheaters rework the camera so that it sends them all the cards, mixed in the proper order. Then it’s easy for a collaborator at a remote location to communicate with the operator at the table, via an open phone line and a tiny earpiece, to tell him who will win the hand. The operator then signals the information to his partners at the table.

There’s also a tool known as an analyzer, which casino consultant Sal Piacente describes as “the most dangerous piece of equipment being used.” That employs an infrared camera to read the cards after they have been shuffled. Like all the underhanded tech being used in crooked card games, it gives the cheaters an insurmountable advantage.

Scariest of all, perhaps, is the ease with which these tools can be obtained. “You have to know the right people,” allows Curtis. “But when you are taking dark edges, you quickly put together a Rolodex of the people who have the equipment. They’re not hard to find. The equipment is easy to use.”

And if you wind up sitting at one of those rigged tables? “It’s complete death,” says Curtis. As was learned by those alleged to have gone up against the athletes and the mobsters, “you can’t expect to win unless you are in on it.”