Streaming brought new ways to cheat at poker. Garrett Adelstein thinks he was a victim of one
LOS ANGELES — Garrett Adelstein was four months out of college, grinding his way through thousands of online poker hands a day while he figured out what he wanted to do with his life.
He was winning an average of $500 an hour and had calculated that he could make as much as half a million dollars over the next year if he kept at it. But Adelstein was conflicted, turning one afternoon to poker forum Two Plus Two to solicit advice.
"The main problem with poker for me is that day to day, I have mixed feelings about how happy I am doing this as a living," he wrote in the 2008 post. "I just can't see myself playing poker as a career for more than another 1-2 years at most."
Fourteen years of playing professional poker later, Adelstein is one of the game's best and most profitable high-stakes cash players, known to viewers of popular casino broadcasts for his loose-aggressive style of no-limit hold 'em and his willingness to buy in for enormous sums of money, bringing as much as $1 million to the table.
On Sept. 29, Adelstein made the biggest bet of his life: risking his well-respected reputation, and possibly his poker career, when he accused rookie player Robbi Jade Lew of cheating in a $269,000 hand against him on "Hustler Casino Live."
Video of the hand — in which Lew's unorthodox all-in call with the jack of clubs and the four of hearts led to an improbable win — was watched by 20,000 people as it was streamed and by millions more as
