The 'lucky streak ' defence
Is claiming that Mike Postle just ran insanely well going to be an effective argument with a jury who don't play poker?
The Mike Postle story took a new turn last week with his lawyer William Portanova commenting on the case. In an interview he said something which looks like it could make up the basis of the case for the defence, he said:
I guess he wins a lot of hands of poker. I don’t gamble, because that’s how many hands I lose. But we don’t know what the facts are. I can just say this: When I play poker I lose almost every hand, so I know such streaks are possible.
When you consider the thousands of collective hours of forensic investigation that the poker community has put together making the case for the prosecution, dismissing the story as a lucky run of cards seems laughable. However, this could be an effective strategy when put in front of a jury.
Understanding the evidence requires understanding poker
The reason why this case rang so many alarm bells in the poker community was first and foremost because Postle was winning at a rate we had never seen. Famously his winrate is more than double that of Potripper, the Ultimate Bet ‘superuser’ account which literally had access to hole cards. The second major reason why almost everyone in poker thinks Postle cheated is because of how perfectly he played, especially on the river, seemingly always able to make the correct play on the exact hand his opponent held (rather than range of hands).
If you understand poker, this is an open and shut case. But you have to understand poker to understand precisely how unusual Postle’s winrate was. The biggest single form of gambling the general public are exposed to is when somebody wins the lottery, which has odds around 1 in 13,983,816. So the message “winning streaks do happen” is going to resonate with a lot of potential jurors.
As far as poker itself, the general public still believe that the modern game is mostly about physical tells. They see things like the Judge’s game from Rounders and assume that the big winners are the people who can tell you what you had for dinner last Thursday based on the way that your nostrils just flared. The Godlike persono Mike Postle had garnered during the live streams may just carry over to the court room if the defence is built on this 'master of psychology going on a hot streak'.
A specialist jury or a smoking gun
Rationally speaking I don’t think Mike Postle has a strong case, like almost everybody else in poker I think the evidence is about as overwhelming as it gets without an obvious ‘smoking gun’. The perfect play in almost every hand and the statistical unlikeliness of the winrate is what sealed it for me, and that is before you dive into the crotch staring, the RFID issues and the fact that hundreds of the brightest minds in this game have all come to the same conclusion.
But I, like everyone reading this, have been around poker for a long time so I know what to look for. I still think the case against him is so overwhelmingly strong that a jury would agree, but it does require the jury to understand the case against him, which is a big ask.
This is not to say that the general public are dumb, this is no different to if a poker player was selected for a jury on medical negligence, they would be just as out of their depth. It’s a specialist situation that would require a specially selected jury that understands odds and probabilities, or a smoking gun, to make it a slam dunk case.
How do you think this case will go down in a court room? Let us know in the comments:
