Mike Postle
Posted : admin On 3/19/2022Table Of Contents
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When Scott Van Pelt picks up a poker story for one of his 'SportsCenter' segments, it has officially hit the mainstream.
That's what happened when arguably the poker story of the year blew up this past October.
Mike Postle was on another tear. The moonfaced 42-year-old was deep into a marathon poker session at Stones Gambling Hall, a boxy glass-and-steel casino wedged between Interstate 80 and a Popeye's. A Mid-January Mike Postle / Postlegate Update: Those Service Blues The most interest-drawing topic in the poker world in recent months, the outing of alleged cheating by Mike Postle during dozens of “Stones Live” podcasts and a $10 million lawsuit subsequently filed by a lengthy list of alleged victims, is back in the news after two months.
Mike Postle Working On Book Entitled 'If I Did It' By Partick Spewing. June 8, 2020. In Parody Poker News Fresh off winning an argument to dismiss a lawsuit against him for alleged cheating, Mike Postle was in an unusually cheery mood in his first comments after a celebratory round of golf. The attorney for poker player Mike Postle has filed a motion to be relieved of his duties as legal counsel. The motion, filed in Sacramento Superior Court last Tuesday by Steven Lowe of Lowe & Associates, is specific to Postle’s libel case against a dozen people and media outlets in conjunction with the allegations that he cheated at poker.
Before that, Mike Postle was a name known only to a small group of regulars paying attention to the cash game scene at Stones Gambling Hall in Citrus Heights, California, just outside of Sacramento.
When the story began spreading like wildfire through media both mainstream and social, the Mike Postle cheating scandal dominated poker conversation like few topics in the game's history.
When anyone in the poker industry looks back on 2019, the first thing they'll recall is the saga of Postle and his god-mode performances on live stream at Stones.
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Play NowThe Whiff of a Cheat
The Mike Postle cheating scandal started, publicly at least, with a tweet.
Privately, Veronica Brill had been dogged by suspicions for months. She'd aired those suspicions with a select few, including higher-ups at Stones.
How was it possible for Postle to win so much, so consistently, with such staggeringly perfect play?
His moves and instincts were positively superhuman. Eights full versus tens full in a small pot on the river? Postle just called a bet.
Facing heavy action in multi-way pots when nobody had a nutted hand? Postle boldly blasted in a bluff to win the pot.
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In a vacuum, perhaps one or two could be explained away. Connect the dots, though, tack all the clues to a corkboard like a TV detective, and the circumstantial evidence all pointed the same way: something stank at Stones. And Brill seemed to be the only one smelling it.
So, she did what any sane person with a scandal story in poker does in 2019. She contacted Joey Ingram.
Ingram on the Case
Brill reached out to Ingram and told him she was ready to go public. She'd been rebuffed in her attempts to get Stones higher-ups to see Postle's rampant thievery, but she had put together a little 'highlight tape' of Postle's play that she was ready to release on YouTube.
Ingram had actually been invited to Stones a couple of times to do commentary but he never had any interest in making the trip.
'This dude was just playing in a way I've never seen anybody play.'
'It didn't really make much sense to me,' he said of his initial reaction to Brill reaching out. 'I didn't really think much about it.'
When Brill's video came out a week later, Ingram took a look and found himself instantly hooked.
'I saw this dude was just playing in a way I've never seen anybody play,' Ingram said.
He fired up a live stream for his fans, and they painstakingly combed through every hand Postle played over the course of a five-hour streamed cash game at Stones. Ingram had selected the stream at random, and he happened to choose one of the first streams in which Postle's god mode had been toggled on.
Had he selected a stream from just weeks earlier, the show would have wound up rather boring.
Ingram had already seen enough to make him suspect Brill was onto something, but he wanted his followers to watch with him as a sort of sanity check.
'Maybe I'm fu****g crazy and the fans can watch and say, 'No, dude, you're out of your mind.' Or maybe they'll see it too.'
While Ingram and Brill are widely credited with disseminating everything to the poker world, Ingram pointed to the helping hands of two high-profile players as well.
When Haralabos Voulgaris and Scott Seiver got a look at the video and began tweeting about the situation, Ingram said everything blew up and 'it was on.'
The streams continued for the next several days. Ingram knew he was on the story of his life and he determined that he wouldn't let up. He went more than a week straight without a break, four to six hours every night.
'The guy's adamant he didn't do anything.'
'I was like f*** it, I'm doing it every night,' Ingram said.
While many initially preached caution, public opinion turned in a hurry. Those on the fence quickly turned on Postle when evidence mounted, as Ingram and Co. uncovered damning hand after damning hand.
When forum-goers crunched the numbers after grinding through the streams, they estimated Postle had cleaned the games at Stones out to the tune of around $250,000 despite playing mostly $1/$3 and $2/$5 games.
That win rate put him so far off the scale into outlier territory that it left little doubt something untoward had happened — at least to most observers.
'10,000% Innocent'
Doing his due diligence, Ingram managed to get a hold of the man himself.
'He was very courteous,' Ingram said. 'The guy's adamant he didn't do anything.'
Postle also vociferously defended himself on Twitter, saying he's played a 'unique high-variance style' his whole career and been a winner for over a decade.
The tweets have since been deleted and Postle hasn't gone on the record with any outlet other than appearing on Mike Matusow's 'The Mouthpiece.'
Matusow made much contrarian noise on Twitter when others vilified Postle, and whether that was a factor or not, Postle appeared on the show.
Postle stuck to his guns despite the mounting evidence, again blaming the accusations on jealous haters. He denied winning anywhere near $250,000 and said he was '10,000%' innocent.
Into the Weeds
Naturally, the internet sleuths and content creators and forum lurkers took Postle at his word, and the story ended there.
No, what actually followed was one of the deepest internet dives since the release of 'Making a Murderer.' Ingram and his posse of detectives put their heads together during his streams and in a lengthy TwoPlusTwo thread.
Several questions remained unanswered. How long had the cheating gone on? Could legal action be taken? And chief among them: how exactly had Postle pulled this off?
Onlookers tossed around theories and dissected minutiae in the hundreds of posted live-streamed games at Stones.
General consensus eventually settled on Postle somehow having access to the live hole card feed via his cell phone. Internet sleuths uncovered small details that seemed to point this way, with the most influential being a still that showed a blue screen, one that looked similar to the one displayed on the stream graphics back end.
The truth hunters even detected tiny changes in Postle's clothing, the most suspicious being an apparent lump in his hat that some theorized was a communication device.
By now, suspicion about possible accomplices abounded, and investigators dug into the backgrounds of Stones employees. Possible connections were explored, but no smoking gun ever really emerged.
'Obviously, you never see anything like this where a guy's cheating on a live stream, laughing in these dudes' faces and grabbing his dick.'
Nonetheless, Ingram and his 'team' dove into every possible avenue of the story, turning the live stream videos and other relevant internet sources into a 'Holes'-like landscape of pockmarked wasteland. No second was left unwatched by the masses, in case that was the second Postle slipped up and revealed the telling clue.
'My mind was so warped,' Ingram said. 'I was thinking about the story 24 hours a day.
'I don't think interest really waned, honestly. It was growing and growing and growing. There was people that were still extremely interested in there. It's just a matter of finding a different angle. I think it was the biggest month on my channel ever.'
The Mainstream and the Courtroom
Eventually, Ingram wasn't alone covering the saga. The story broke out of its poker glass ceiling as mainstream sources picked it up, with the peak undoubtedly coming when ESPN anchor Van Pelt released a three-minute take during his Oct. 4 'SportsCenter.'
'If a guy showed up to play pickup basketball and never, ever missed a shot for a couple of years, wouldn't he go play in the NBA?' Van Pelt asked.
'If you're some sort of poker god who never lost, who made the right call or fold virtually every single time...if you were this good, why would you be playing in games only with a video feed at a $1/$3 table in Stones poker room? Why wouldn't you be in Vegas winning all the money in the world?
Latest On Mike Postle
There might be perfectly reasonable explanations and answers for all the questions the poker world is asking. They'd love for that to be the case. And if those answers exist, they'd really love to hear 'em,'
Everyone following the story still awaits those answers.
'If you were this good, why would you be playing in games only with a video feed at a $1/$3 table in Stones poker room?'
One key moment many had awaited arrived about a week after the story broke. Postle and Stones were both named parties in a $10 million civil lawsuit filed by Mac VerStandig on behalf of Brill and the other wronged players. The suit hinted at a potential accomplice with an unnamed 'chief confederate' charged in what the suit billed as 'the largest known cheating scandal in the history of broadcast poker.'
Postle's lawyer hinted he'd build a defense based on Postle's winnings being within the realm of reason.
'When I play, I lose almost every hand, so I know such streaks are possible,' he said.
Despite the potential for the case to make the cheated players whole and provide investigators with some closure, no further details have emerged in the intervening months.
A Slice of Poker History
For Ingram, the Mike Postle case represented a chance to document a unique piece of poker history in a style all his own.
He remembers the coverage of the Ultimate Bet superuser saga as 'discombobulated' and hopes those looking back or curious about Postle someday can simply scroll through his videos and get a coherent sense of the story, with all its twists and turns.
In all his hundreds of hours of content across several years time, Ingram can't recall a story anything like the Postle case. Asked what it compared to in his career, the only thing he could come up with was when he dove into some UFC content after Khabib Nurmagomedov infamously jumped out of the cage to instigate a postfight brawl after beating Conor McGregor. Ingram's subsequent breakdown is approaching 20 million views.
Poker-wise, Ingram said Jaclynn Moskow, the infamous 'LIVE at the Bike' 'joke bet' and airport scammer Michael Borovetz all stand out.
None, however, reaches the level of the Postle saga.
'Obviously, you never see anything like this where a guy's cheating on a livestream, laughing in these dudes' faces and grabbing his dick,' Ingram said. 'You don't know how to proceed. You've never seen anything like this before.'
Neither had the poker world, and that's why this incredible story will be remembered as one of the biggest of the year.
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Mike PostlePoker and the LawPoker PlayersLive casino pokerCash Poker
The most interest-drawing topic in the poker world in recent months, the outing of alleged cheating by Mike Postle during dozens of “Stones Live” podcasts and a $10 million lawsuit subsequently filed by a lengthy list of alleged victims, is back in the news after two months of only very minor developments.
This time out, it’s about another development in the case — actually publicly discovered by yours truly — that will be likely be of trivial legal importance in the long run. However, it’s exactly the type of side story that sets observers’ tongues wagging, especially in a case where everyone wants to know the latest but actual news has been slow to emerge.
About the only advancement in the case in December was that co-defendant Kings Casino, the parent company of Sacramento’s Stones Gambling Hall, had agreed with plaintiffs’ counsel to waive the formal service of paperwork regarding the filing of the suit. Such waivers happen all the time, and it was the second such waiver here, matching one already agreed to between plaintiffs and another co-defendant, Justin Kuraitis, in November. The reasons for these waivers are simple; they get everyone involved on the same page and help the whole process move forward in an orderly manner.
Yet there was an interesting entry amid the legalese: a declaration that the primary figure in the lawsuit, Mike Postle (right), had yet to be served. While I wrote up a story about the minor news for another site, including the curious note about Postle, I also queried the plaintiffs’ attorney, Maurice “Mac” VerStandig, about the Postle-service entry.
VerStandig didn’t reply. That happens a lot in legal cases, as lawyers won’t or can’t speak on the record about matters that are still fluid. So I waited, checking the case’s official docket every few days for updates on this or other case matters. My patience was rewarded about a week ago, when I discovered that VerStandig himself had filed an interesting supplement to a procedural entry regarding serving a case summons on Postle, in which VerStandig alleged that Postle had intentionally been evading service regarding the lawsuit.
It turned out that serving Postle with the notice of the federal lawsuit had been an ongoing and difficult problem, though whether it’s “evasion” is up to the court (or our readers) to decide. In the wake of the lawsuit’s filing in October, Sacramento defense attorney William Portanova represented himself as Postle’s lawyer to local news outlets, including the Sacramento Bee. Then, according to VerStandig’s filing, VerStandig had communicated with Portanova, asking whether Portanova would accept service on Postle’s behalf.
Portanova told VerStandig he’d ask Postle if that would be okay, but then never got back to VerStandig. Instead, over the following days or weeks, Verstandig attested to making at least three more calls to Portanova, none of which were returned. Finally, when the two connected, Portanova asserted that he was only a criminal attorney and did not represent Postle in civil matters. It seems like that could have been said however many weeks earlier, when the two first spoke or exchanged e-mails, but lawyers just gotta lawyer, one supposes.
Anyhow, when combined with other matters, it seemingly created a lengthy delay in attempting to serve Postle with the summons. Sometime in early December, plaintiffs’ attorney VerStandig hired a Sacramento process server. The process server tried for most of December and into January to serve Postle, with no luck.
Details on the process server’s attempts weren’t available when I wrote my earlier feature, though they have since been filed as part of the case. The process server first tried to catch Postle at his last publicly known address, on December 16, in the eastern Sacramento suburb of Rancho Cordova, but learned that Postle hadn’t lived there for roughly three years.
A more detailed address search uncovered Postle’s current residence in the northern Sacramento suburb of Antelope. The home is just a 10-minute drive from Stones Gambling Hall, where all the alleged cheating occurred. The process server renewed his efforts, making six separate trips to the home at varying times of day over two weeks, the last visit coming on January 2, 2020.
On most of these visits Postle’s home was dark, but on at least two of the process server’s trips, Postle’s black SUV was present, though no one answered the door.
After the failed January 2 attempt, Verstandig tried to serve the summons himself. On January 3, he visited Postle’s home, found the SUV present and the lights on, but no one would answer his doorbell rings or knocks, which he continued for eight (!) minutes.
VerStandig then retreated to his car and watched and waited for more developments. Through a window, he then observed a figure he believed to be Postle moving inside. (Verstandig played in at least one of the “Stones Live” games with Postle, so he knew Postle by sight.) VerStandig then returned to the door and knocked and rang the doorbell some more… and still no response.
All this led to VerStandig filing the initial service-evasion complaint just two days later. The process server’s declaration and a second Verstandig notice were filed several days after that. That second VerStandig filing notes that a formal summons has also been mailed to Postle’s current address, an alternate form of legal service permissible under California law.
What it all means is that in any event, Mike Postle will be forced into court at some point to answer the claims. That much is inevitable.
One odd thing is that despite Postle’s own apparent seclusion in recent weeks, apparent friends of his are mounting a publicity pushback of sorts. Among the most curious items of late was a blog published on a site called “RounderLife”, associated with an old Gulf Coast poker magazine of that name that ceased publication a decade ago.
The piece attempted to attack the mathematical claims that Postle may have won as much as $300,000 during the several dozen sessions where the alleged cheating occurred, and that the methodology used to make those claims was in itself laughable. While it’s true that the methodology needs verification, the RoundersLife blog was itself a massive red herring; the claims of cheating were based on multiple factors, including highly implausible lines of play by Postle in big pots that invariably resulted in huge profits. And even if Postle won only a smaller fraction of $300,000, he still exceeded by several variance sigmas the returns that even a player on the heater of a lifetime could expect.
Mike Postle Wiki
If one believes in Occam’s Razor, then the sole conclusion from that is that Postle cheated. Whether I or any of our readers do believe in that truism is, however, a separate matter. I prefer to keep digging out the facts. And it turned out that Postle was or is a part of that old “RounderLife” magazine. One outlet claimed that Postle actually founded the mag, but I can’t speak to that. What I can attest to (and have downloaded) is an issue of RounderLife that shows Postle, then living in his native Mississippi, as running promotions and marketing for the magazine:
It could have been Postle himself who posted that article, though it could also have been a close friend. Postle has been employing, or at least allowing, his network of good-ol’-boy friends to try to shoot holes in the plentiful allegations and evidence he faces. A couple of those even attacked me and my piece about VerStandig’s evasion allegations. Not to worry; that stuff comes with the territory.
Mike Postle
In any event, the whole Postle affair remains a lightning rod for the poker world. We’ll return to the story, here at the KAP blog, when further interesting developments arise.