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You're at a highstakes private poker game in a $17 million New York townhouse. You meet all these cool guys. He says you should call him Floppy. This one is Hulk Hogan. And this guy looks just like NBA Hall of Famer and Portland Trailblazers head coach Chanty Bilips, but for legal reasons, he isn't. That's the whole reason you're here. To rub elbows with celebrities and tough guys and make bank. But tonight won't go as planned. You're about to get royally screwed. For years, star-studded underground poker games were held all over the United States, and allegedly, they were rigged. The alleged cheating is said to have been so elaborate, so thorough, even professional poker players were duped. To figure out how all this
supposedly worked, we went down some wild rabbit holes. All it takes is one guy at the table who's suddenly a mind readader. And every time he's got you beat, he calls. And every time you've got him beat, he folds. In this video, we'll cover the three main methods, each more ingenious than the last. They think they're playing poker. You know you're not. This is how a shadowy, elusive cheating ring with ties to the mob allegedly made millions rigging poker games. Confirmed.
Much of our reporting is based on the claims of the United States Department of Justice, as outlined in their official documents, but the cases mentioned are ongoing and all defendants are innocent until proven guilty. Get a drink. Have a seat. It's time to play po. What? You need a refresher? Oh my god. Okay, tonight we're playing Texas Holdem. Right away, each player gets two cards of their own. No, these are your cards. Peek at them carefully so no one sees. You don't touch other people's. Okay, your cards are a jack and a 10 of clubs. Promising. Then everyone bets. For now, just toss in the minimum. In this game, that's $100. The
next round is the flop. The dealer burns the top card and puts three cards on the board face up. These are shared cards. Everyone combines them with their own to make a full five card hand. That king and queen could be great for you. Next is the second betting round. You can match the bet of the player before you. If you're feeling confident, you can raise it. If your hand just playing sucks, you can fold. In the next round, the dealer adds a fourth card to the board. Then there's another betting round and one last card added.
Finally, it's showdown time. The final betting round before it's time to show your cards. Then the player with the strongest hand wins. In order from weakest to strongest, these are the hands in poker. High card like I've got an ace. Meh. A pair. Two of anything. The higher the better. Two pair. Same idea but twice. Three of a kind. Three is better than two. Straight. Five consecutive cards. For example, a queen high straight is 8 9 10 jack queen. Flush. Five cards of the same suit. Five diamonds. five hearts, etc. Full house, three of a kind and a pair, like three sevens and two nines. Four of a kind, two of a kind, doubled, 48s, four kings, etc. Straight flush, a
straight and a flush, like peanut butter and chocolate. Four, five, 6, 7, and 8. And they're all clubs. Royal flush, a flush with all of the fanciest cards. 10, Jack, Queen, King, Ace, all of the same suit. Your jack and your 10 combine perfectly with the king, the queen, and the ace. That gives you a straight, a nice hand, but no one lets you take advantage of it. Every time you try to raise, someone folds, so the pot stays pretty low, and you win, but not much. It almost feels like they knew how good your hand was. But how?
This is a marked deck. You can tell this is a two of spades, a six of hearts, an ace of clubs. The secret is these two parts of the card. This flower thingy and these triangles. For the two of spades, the flower's top petal is colored in. So is the bottom triangle. Six of hearts, ace of clubs. This is just one example. There is many systems for this as there are playing card designs. You can dent your cards slightly, file down the sides, scuff them up good. But anyone at the table could notice these marks. In a high stakes game like this, cheating needs to be more subtle, almost invisible. This might call for luminous work. To see the marks on this card, you need special glasses or contacts. You buy
them from specialized dealers. This is old technology. Here's an ad for luminous cards in the 1927 KC card company catalog. Special glasses furnished free with first order. The company claimed to have invented the term luminous for this type of cheating. But according to gambling expert Jason England, the principle of cheating with hidden markings and special glasses goes all the way back to the Old West. England says that by 1929, this kind of cheating had gone mainstream. The Casey Card Company even got a little touchy about it. We originated this work. No one else has the real thing. Beware of spurious imitations.
Today, the tools of the trade are sold online. Sellers claim their contacts let you see ultraviolet marks on the cards, which is very sketchy internet card cheating merch of them since scientifically that makes no sense. A normal person can't see ultraviolet markings. A typical human eye can perceive wavelengths of 700 to 380 nm. The ultraviolet spectrum is below 400 nm. In theory, you could perceive a little sliver of UV light at the end of the visible range, but the lens of your eye filters it out. The real explanation for the glasses in context is a lot simpler. And it turns out you can make your own luminous cards. So what we do is we take a very light green ink and then you paint it onto the back of a red playing card. Uh
the B67 is a great card to use for that. There's a line across the back of our card which tells us it's a high card, but the faint green ink gets lost on the red card. And that's the idea. There's probably something about the human eye that makes it difficult to resolve those two colors under normal circumstances. So certainly if you painted the green ink on very lightly, it would be difficult to see at all unless you use that red filter to help you uh distinguish between the two marks. The glasses and contacts are tinted red. When you put them on, they act as a filter, allowing red light through, but blocking other colors. All the white parts turn red, but the green becomes a muddy gray. Well, it turns out that everything that passes
through a dark red filter like this one is going to try to turn some shade of red. And if this red filter can't resolve whatever color you start with into a shade that we would recognize as red, it's going to do the best it can. And what that means is that a lot of colors pass through and just wind up on this side of the filter as sort of just an ugly muddled shade of gray. According to England, you could probably make this work with other colors. Some older glasses are tinted blue. There were even rumors of modern versions without any perceptible tint at all. And you can buy pre-marked cards which look even fancier, something like this.
Either way, if someone is wearing the right lenses, everyone's cards are an open, slightly psychedelic looking book. That guy's eyes look a little red. Are the cards marked? If that's what's going on, there's no way you can win. Because in poker, the only thing more important than having the best hand is knowing whether or not you do. The game just started, and it's already way sketchier than playing poker in a casino. Which raises the question, why would you come to a private poker game anyway? Well, you can make a lot of money at these games, but basically it's lunchtime and you want to sit with the cool kids. Like this guy. No, he's not Chanty Phillips. You need to let that
go. But he is a famous athlete and he's the whale. Whales are brought into private card games to attract fish like you. People who want the thrill of rubbing up against a little bit of stardom while feeling a little bit naughty, too. And who knows, maybe this incredibly famous person will really like you, right? The thing is, everyone knows that's why you're here. They were counting on it. In fact, they saw you coming a mile away. It wasn't that hard. Cheaters actually took your money half a dozen times on the way to this game. Remember those chips you bought from the bodega? Count your change, dummy. How about the meter in the cab? Oh, and that SIM card you bought at the airport? You
didn't read the fine print, did you? And you thought you were so cool buying a burner. Well, there's a rake there, too. You know, the cut the house quietly skims just for letting you play. In this case, it's roaming charges. No, I know what you're thinking, and this isn't an ad, actually. Okay, fine. It is. But really, it's more of an intervention with adlike properties. Check it out. SY is an ESIM app you can use in over 200 destinations. Pick a data plan before you travel, and the second you touch down, it activates and connects automatically. No airport vendors, no roaming charges, no rake. Every plan earns you credit toward your next one. And don't be that guy connecting to
airport Wi-Fi while you figure out the bus. Activate SY security features and keep your location private. Download SY now and use the code Fern TV for 15% off. At least one thing in this trip isn't working against you. Not that it'll help. Good morning. Today we are here in New York to announce a historic arrest across a wide sweeping criminal enterprise that envelops both the NBA and Lacasan Nostra. On October 23, 2025, FBI director Cash Patel announces that more than 30 people have been arrested for participating in what he calls a mind-boggling fraud operation. The operation is supposedly linked to Lacosinostra, the mafia, which for some reason the director of the FBI keeps calling Lacasinostra. Lacasinostra and Lacosa Nostra.
The first part of the scheme allegedly involved sports betting fraud by NBA players. The FBI's investigation into it is really actually not a joke called Operation Nothing But Bet. The second part, Operation Royal Flush, concerns allegedly rigged poker games held all across the United States since 2019. According to the government, these games cheated people out of at least $7.15 million. This is Doug Pulk. He's a professional poker player and a YouTuber. He thinks that number may be too low. I would estimate the number is dramatically higher than what we know because often times in these poker games, people will settle in cash.
They'll settle in crypto. They'll settle in all these different ways. I would not be surprised for this to easily be in the 9 figure range. You know, I know a few guys alone that get into the 8 figure range. So, I have to imagine that there are a lot of people involved here to get that number much higher. victim's identities haven't been officially disclosed. Professional poker players are easy targets because they want to play poker. They're looking for these spots to make money. While there certainly were a number of poker professionals that lost big in these games, I wouldn't say that it was just poker pros. I would say that it was there were people from all types different areas of uh the
industry. In the poker world, these games seem to have gotten a little bit of a reputation. Way back in May 2023, pro poker player Matt Berkkey spilled a little tea. There was this game. It started in LA and then it came to Vegas for a few days. Uh, and it was all built around Chanty Bilips. I had heard about the game and the person who told me about it was like, "Look, I know the gamer runners. I'm telling you 100% this game is on the up and up." And I was like, "Well, I know a lot of the people that are involved and I'm telling you 100% that it is not on the up and up." Yeah. And it obviously like was for sure confirmed to be cheated.
The indictment says Bilips and former NBA player Damon Jones were these games face cards. In the wider poker world, they're called whales. Honestly, talking about this case, the authorities throw lingo around like they're auditioning for an 80s cop movie. My message to the defendants who've been rounded up today is this. Your winning streak has ended. Your luck has run out. Violating the law is a losing proposition, and you can bet on that. The Department of Justice says its proof includes financial records, witness testimony, and surveillance photos, plus text messages, audio and video recordings, and photos taken from defendants phones and iCloud accounts,
notably those of Shane Sugar Hannon and Robert Black Rob Straoud. One especially weird possible source of information has generated a lot of speculation online. You better than that. can't hold me, baby. You can't hold me. This is Gilbert Arenus, a former NBA player. He posted this on the day of his arrest about 3 months before the FBI's big bust. Arenus was accused of renting out his mansion for illegal high stakes poker games as far back as 2021. Players were said to have been provided with drinks, massages, and the companionship of young women. The person allegedly hiring these young women and taking a cut of their earnings was an Israeli man, Yavghi Jiora Gershman.
Citing Israeli authorities, prosecutors said this was the right-hand man of the alleged head of an organized crime group in Israel. Among other things, the prosecutors tied this group to drug trafficking, human trafficking, and illegal gambling through Gershman. They said Israeli organized crime was doing business in LA. And the indictment tied Gershman to Gilbert Arenus. And yet, just a few hours after being arrested, Gilbert Arenus posted himself dancing. He says he had nothing to do with the games, in which case these custom poker tables the government took pictures of must have been fan tributes. Weirdly, Arenus also suggests that in exchange for his freedom, he may have cut a deal.
It's not real subtle, actually. A few months later, the FBI arrests Chanty Phillips and the rest. The next day, Arena seems to double down on the snitching thing. A big mac. You see, I'm the Hey, listen. What's in what's this? My lunch, man. I ain't get to eat it over there, man. I was talking too much. The show must go on. The Blazers wasn't going to win anywhere. The last thing they needed was the coach. Later on, he says he was trolling.
What his story really shows is just how inherently murky the world of illegal gambling is. There were so many different branches of this, right? because it started off, as I understand it, with a couple different games. Uh, I think, you know, Chanty Bilips was involved in some capacity early on, but the reality is that as it splintered, we saw these little subgroups, right? Like there was a Miami team, there was an LA team. I've heard something about the Israeli mafia in the LA one specifically. There was a New York ranch. Even here in Texas, we had some people that were trying to run these games. So, the FBI may have busted a criminal conspiracy. Or maybe the arrests were just the tip of the iceberg.
Was it this large entity or was it just someone that was a part of that entity? Right? Was it just one guy who happened to also be in the mafia? Was it one guy that happened to also play in the NBA? You can't really know everybody that was involved. At least two of the rigged games are said to have been in New York. According to the DOJ, there's something special about these games. Before they were rigged, they were just regular underground poker games, but they were allegedly run by associates of the Banano, Gambino, and Genov's crime families. Once they joined the cheating scheme, the mob got a cut. In exchange, it handled protection and debt collection. One game was supposedly held here at 147 Lexington Avenue. The DOJ
links this game to the Banano family. The other is said to have taken place here at 80 Washington Place. It was allegedly run by John Gallo and Amomar Flappy Awa on behalf of the Gambino family. Plus, Matthew the wrestler Dadino, who the indictment links to the Geneov family. The DOJ says in 2023, the games merged and both families took a cut. Thank goodness this entirely fictional game definitely isn't the one mentioned in the indictment. This guy is called Floppy, not Flappy. And this is Portuguese, Hulk Hogan, Dragon Fifth, Casper, and Bolivian Chanty. Their names
might sound like the credits from Good Fellas, but they're a professional crew that has plenty of ways of taking your money. Mark cards are just the start. Actually, maybe this game isn't so bad. It's hours later and you seem to be on a winning streak. Turns out that one guy isn't wearing contacts. He just has pink eye or something. You're still down 60K, but your luck has obviously changed. Or has it? According to the FBI, cheating teams plan their strategy in real time using group chats. Their messages show they knew exactly how to string fish along. All this time, they're in control. There could be a camera inside this chip tray scanning
the cards as they're dealt. It could be this thing. This isn't a phone. It's a poker analyzer. See that camera on the side? These have been around for a while. This one's from the early 2010s. Early versions were just decoys, but newer ones can actually make calls. These methods work by scanning marked decks with an invisible barcode printed on the side. And the DOJ claims the cheating teams in the rigged games used both. And then there's the table you're sitting at. The DOJ says the rigged games used an X-ray table that could read cards face down on the table. He doesn't specify exactly what that means, but Jason England has an idea. It always gets reported as an
X-ray table. It's not. There's no X-rays involved. Uh it is something called a light table. It was invented in the early 1990s. And basically the way it works is if you have a strong enough light source, uh you can shine it right through a paper or plastic playing card. Of course, under normal circumstances that would be so bright it would be uncomfortable to look at. Uh you know, you'd be going like this the whole time. So you get a big glass table. You put a piece of felt over that table and underneath the glass are hundreds of LEDs that are only shining in the UV spectrum, but you can't see it because it's not in the human spectrum. It's only in the UV spectrum. But a camera above the table can see that light and
it can still see right through a normal playing card. That type of situation plays like marked cards, but there's actually nothing on the cards. The table's doing all the work. If he's right, every time you lay your cards down, the cameras are picking up exactly what you're holding, and an off-site member of the cheating team is taking a good look. This is the operator. He sends the info to a member of the team sitting right here at the table, the quarterback. This could happen in a number of ways. If they're going old school, they could use a thumper concealed somewhere in the cheater's body. It relays information through a series of thumps, telling them
what to do. It's essentially a private Morse code. Maybe long thumps indicate suit and short indicate the card. Then two long thumps followed by four short ones could mean four of hearts. But the quarterback doesn't necessarily need that much detail. Maybe one thump means the fish has a weak hand. String them along. Two thumps means he has a strong hand. Minimize how much he wins. Online you can find all kinds of devices claiming to be modern updates on the Thumper, but why not just keep it simple? Believe it or not, it's generally considered okay to use your phone at the poker table. Generally speaking, the reason phones are allowed is that you want people to be able to play casually and enjoy the game. If you don't have a
phone and you fold now, you just have to sit there. So, I think it's more of a time killer for a lot of players. Some players out of necessity. Some people are just going to say, "Oh, if I can't be on my phone, I'm not going to play." Using it during a hand is a no, but once you fold, it's fine. That's how alleged cheaters could text about strategy in real time. If there's a quarterback at this table, it's got to be this guy. If so, there are plenty of ways he could get all the info he needs. Maybe his phone acts like a thumper. One buzz means you've got a good hand. Two buzzes means you're weak. Or he's checking his messages between hands and whenever he folds. Either way, he's using the info to direct the play
of everyone else at the table. There are plenty of ways to do this. Back in 2024, John South Maza allegedly texted this little cheat sheet to the members of his team for a rigged game in Miami. This means if Mikey Renulli has the best hand, the quarterback will touch a $1,000 poker chip. If it's G, that's Nelson's Spanish G Alvarez, the quarterback will tap his chin. If it's the quarterback himself, tap his wrist or arm. If he's touching his black chips, that means to fold. The fish has the best hand. But back to your oddly similar but not in a legal sense game. Damn it. So much for your hot streak. You check under the table. It seems normal. So does the chip tray. No camera there. All the phones are just phones.
But you're sure they're screwing you over somehow. The final and maybe most elaborate cheating method starts before the cards have even been dealt. This is the Deckmate 2, a popular card shuffler. A lot of casinos use. A lot of other people use it, too. The Department of Justice says it found this picture of a disassembled deckmate in Shane Sugar Hennon's iCloud account. Inside are more than 20 different shelves. To shuffle a deck, the deckmate 2 generates random numbers and puts cards in the corresponding shelves. For example, the card in the top of the deck might go to shelf 12 with the next one going to shelf three. Eventually, the whole deck gets shuffled in this random order.
According to the manufacturer, Light and Wonder, the whole thing takes just over 20 seconds. And the Deckmate 2 also has this little camera inside so it can identify every card that passes through. The idea is that it can detect whether there are any irregularities in the deck if certain cards are either missing or doubled up. And since it can identify cards, it can shuffle them in a specific order, too. Say if you want the deck neatly organized by card and soup. And it can potentially do a lot more than that because the Deckmate 2 can be hacked. Security researcher and consultant Joseph Tartaro proved this at the annual security conference Black Hat
USA back in 2023. 2 years later, he showed Wired how it's done. On the back of the Deckmate 2, there's a USB port and an Ethernet port. If you can access these ports, you can hack the shuffler. The DeckMate 2's design is supposed to protect its code from being messed with. Every time the shuffler is started, the firmware creates a hash of its own code. This unique string of characters is like a snapshot of the state of the code at that moment. The firmware then checks that against a verification hash. If the code hasn't been messed with, the two should be the same. But Tartaro and his colleagues changed the
verification hash, making it match their altered version of the code. Suddenly, the Deckmate 2 couldn't tell it had been interfered with. Tartaro installed the altered code with a Raspberry Pi. It also connected the shuffler to his phone via Bluetooth. Then every time a deck got shuffled, the deck mate 2 sent him the exact order. But at the start of a poker hand, the deck gets cut, changing the order in a random way. Tartaro found a way around that, too. The app he created just needs to know the cards at one specific position at the table. Seat 2, seat 4, the flop, whatever. Let's say the player at seat 3 has a two of clubs and a king of hearts. With just that, the app can figure out the deck's
new order. It tells the cheater what everyone's cards are and who will win the hand. To use the app, Taro and Wired cooked up a system. Taro would fold so he could pull out his phone. He'd enter his own cards into the app. Then he'd tell his accomplice how to play using hidden signals. The DOJ claims the rigged games used hacked shufflers, often deckmates one and two, to predict the best hand at the table, and that info went to the operator and then the quarterback. It doesn't say how exactly the shufflers were employed. But Tartaro and Wired tested their method in a regulated casinol-like environment in a home game.
Come on, the possibilities are endless. If the dealer's a mechanic, that is, if he's crooked, he could be faking the cut. If the shuffler put the cards in a special order, the fake cut keeps it that way. Then there's no need for an app. The order of the cards determines who's going to win, and the operator knows this before the deck even pops out at the shuffler. Or maybe the dealer's straight, but this guy over here puts the flop into an app. The app figures everyone's hands. The operator sees it, calls the quarterback, hangs up. One buzz, the fish has a weak hand. The quarterback touches his nose, everyone gets the signal. Go in for the kill. At the end of the day, this is all
hypothetical, but there's one thing we can be sure of. Great tip. playing in a home game and they're using an automatic shuffler, be scared because those things can be rigged or they can transmit the order of the cards to you be used to beat you. And there have been countless stories of that. That's probably been the number one form of cheating has been using these shuffling machines to know which cards are coming out where. You've got a pair of sixes and are trying to bluff your way through a hand to get back to even, but nobody's buying it. If the Deck Made 2 is hacked, everyone knows exactly what you're up to. They slowly raise the pot and pretty soon you're in over
your head, and with that, you're toast. You've burned through a lot of money tonight. But at a game like this, there's no cash on the table. That's just asking for trouble for the game to get robbed or raided. So, you trade in your chips and stagger home to sleep it off. When you wake up that afternoon, you start justifying things. Something was weird about that game. It was definitely rigged. Was it the guy with the pink eye? Was there a camera over the table after all? Or was something up with that shuffler? It doesn't matter. You can feel something was wrong. Well, you know that old saying, if you don't know who the sucker in the room is, it's you.
Everyone was in on it. Every single player at the table was part of a cheating team. You'll never know exactly how they did it this time, but they were there for one reason, to take your money. So, you decide you're not going to pay. When you get a short text about the money you owe, you politely decline. The DOJ says the victims of the rigged games were sometimes instructed to transfer their debts to a specific person who would launder the money. The alleged cheaters would receive their earnings the same way. That's why most of the charges, like those for Johny Phillips and Damon Jones, involve wire fraud. The DOJ's allegations suggest that payment was taken seriously. For instance, the
DOJ says that in November 2022, an individual it calls John Doe number five started getting text messages from someone named Xen Who. These messages were about a gambling debt, and they weren't friendly. Shortly after, things allegedly got physical. Later on, Jean Hu and several others allegedly showed up at the Washington Place game. When they got John Doe, number five, to come outside, one of them assaulted him. The text messages aren't the only evidence. The DOJ claims it recovered from Xen Hu's phone. The detention letter also mentions a voice note that it claims Flappy Aa, the alleged organizer of the Washington Place game, left on June 18, 2022.
I'm not giving nobody a dollar. I said, "Listen, I don't give a you do what you want. This, that, and the third." Then he was like, "All right, cool. I'm going to start just telling people." And I sent them the picture of my gun of me holding it with a selfie. I said, "I'm going to shoot you in your kneecaps." You're not scared of the guys in our fictional game. At some point, you start talking a little [__] So do they. And then one day, a few guys show up and they're not here to talk. As they make their position clear to you, you vow never to try to hang out with celebrities and tough guys again. And just before you lose consciousness, you think, I should have at least used the code Fern TV at sycom/fernv.
