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Boston Celtics forward Jaylen Brown said the NBA isn't doing enough to protect players from issues surrounding sports betting, speaking about the issue a day after a prominent player and coach were arrested for their alleged roles in a nationwide gambling scandal.

"They're like, 'You make X amount of money or X, Y and Z, you should be able to deal with all the extra negativity, the people approaching you about the parlays,'" Brown said Friday at Madison Square Garden before the Celtics face the New York Knicks. "It creates a negative discourse around the game and players when people have money involved. ... It's leading to situations that we can avoid if more conversations were had right now."

Who knows if this will go anywhere but good on Jalen for calling out how the league really needs to take more responsibility for helping the players avoid screwing themselves. They have absolutely let the fox into the henhouse (with an assist from the Supreme Court natch) and since I don't think sports gambling is getting significantly more regulated anytime soon, if they want to avoid scandals like this becoming more prevalent they need to have a firmer hand. I remember when salaries were first starting to really balloon 15-20 years ago, the league did a lot of PR about their rookie boot camps and other player supports to teach them how to manage their wealth and avoid getting too taken advantage of. They need to significantly revamp and reinvest in that stuff.

Kevin Garnett Played in Alleged Rigged Poker Games; Not a Suspect | PokerNews https://share.google/W0uwBlpWkrfVscBal

Some interesting stuff in there

so it is alleged that billups knew about the poker cheating and some anecdotal evidence suggests that he engaged in it himself, guess he played some pretty suspicious hands according to people at the table drawing to an inside straight etc, now kg and ty lue played in the game so were they in on it was billups ripping them off were billups and his associates protecting them from the scam

kgs people are saying he only played in the game once and didnt even stay that long but who knows

getting this all from

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhp4XgK5Gk4

high stakes private games are wild find the right one and you could get rich but theres such a high chance of getting ripped off one way or another

some anecdotal evidence suggests that he engaged in it himself

i was unclear on this back when it was announced so i went and read the release that came w/ the indictment, and it's a bit hard to parse because it refers to billups as a member of "the cheating teams" but doesn't explicitly state whether his participation in the cheating went beyond just being a "face card," though that seems implied to me. however if you go and read the actual indictment itself there is at least one explicit allegation stating that billups "participated" in the rigged games. i.e.

"40. For example, in furtherance of the Rigged Poker Scheme, in or around April 2019, several of the defendants participated in Rigged Games in Las Vegas, Nevada, at which they defrauded Victims of at least $50,000. The defendants CHAUNCEY BILLUPS, ERIC EARNEST, JAMIE GILET, ROBERT STROUD, and SOPHIA WEI organized and participated in these Rigged Games using a Rigged Shuffling Machine supplied by STROUD."

i guess you could really drill down on what the word "participation" means in this context but i think a fair reading of this would be that chauncey was at the table in a game he (allegedly) knew was using a rigged shuffler

also to carry over our conversation on why an NBA player might get involved in point shaving, the IRS is said to have placed an $8 million lien on rozier the same year that he took himself out of the game

https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/46760404/heat-terry-rozier-faced-8-million-tax-lien-irs-2023

“Ty Lue is a recurring character in this story…”

cant believe this shit with billups what a scumbag

the profile of the career criminal who masterminded the shceme in the pablo torre vid is pretty sweet, classic crime doer

so it is alleged that billups knew about the poker cheating and some anecdotal evidence suggests that he engaged in it himself, guess he played some pretty suspicious hands according to people at the table drawing to an inside straight etc, now kg and ty lue played in the game so were they in on it was billups ripping them off were billups and his associates protecting them from the scam

― lag∞n, Thursday, October 30, 2025 10:50 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

curious what the obsessives on the 2+2 forums think, they cracked the Mike Postle thing pretty thoroughly and these folks only accuse others of cheating as a last resort. I don't think one hand or even a few hands can be evidence of anything, if you've played in wild home games there are some real degenerate gamblers who also tend to drink a lot and misread their hand, but yeah at a certain point you can be pretty certain something is going on

yeah i dont think we have the hands but apparently some pros who played in the game were very suspicious

wonder if the feds have the hands via the various devices these guys were using

is the allegation that they knew what cards were coming, or that certain players knew what was in everyone's hand?

both

unclear if it was at the same time theyve detailed a bunch of different tech a card scanning table like they use on tv, a hacked shuffling machine, and glasses that can read marked cards

does make sense to involve billups in the actual cheating since he has more plausible deniability for playing crazy as a rich athlete throwing around cash than some guy who seems like hes in the mafia

From last week's NY Times (free link):

When the dealer ran decks of cards through a shuffling machine, the trap was set.

This was no ordinary shuffling machine, according to the indictment. It contained hidden technology that read the cards in the deck and instantly predicted which player would be dealt the best hand, prosecutors said.

That information was transmitted outside the building to someone known as the operator. The operator, in turn, alerted a player at the table who was in on the scheme — “the quarterback” or “the driver.” Finally, that player told his comrades what was about to happen, prosecutors said, through a system of secret signals. The signals included touching certain poker chips to communicate different outcomes while appearing to be harmlessly fidgeting.

The players at the table could essentially see the future and know who would win a poker game before a hand had even been dealt.

John Doe #1 had no way of knowing that he was doomed by split-second bursts of electronic data, enmeshed in a cross-country criminal enterprise. No way of knowing how many John Does would line up behind him.

that shuffling machine apprently is just one thats commonly used in vegas to track cards in order i guess to review if they need to investigate anything, describing it as a hack is prob inaccurate it was working as intended the criminals were just using the data nefariously

the hoop collective pod with the former federal prosecutor is by far the best content i've come across on the indictments--she is very good at explaining stuff and and makes some interesting points about how different the two cases are and how the betting one might be on shakier ground than the poker one.

I enjoyed nate duncan and nate silver on duncan’s pod yesterday too

doug polk says in his new video that he personally knows people who have lost a cumulative $10m in these celebrity athlete poker games, video is pretty rambling and goes over a lot of stuff we already know but thought that ten mil number just from people he knows was interesting as it implies these guys stole a shitload of money

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzd9QGyifjc

I've no doubt the poker game(s) were rigged and it all went down more or less as described by the prosecution. But I don't trust the Trump DOJ to play a clean game either. The phrasing of the indictments are full of ambiguities when it comes to whether Billups knew about the elaborate cheating apparatus. He is described a "participant", who helped to "organize" the game, and he almost certainly knew that his presence at the table was designed to lure in some big money players, but the extent of his knowledge regarding the fraud is merely a floating implication. I'm going to wait to see the result of the trial.

yea one thing about poker players is they are always degens first even the insanely talented ones like Ivey, I'd imagine a lot of them get into a game like this and suffer misfortune upon misfortune but they can't quit

still think about the UltimateBet/Potripper scandal and how many well known poker players were just dumping nonstop to that guy. looking at his results it was clear something was up but none of them could take a step back. nobody wants to think they're dumb enough to get scammed

at the very least its a failure of the poker whisper network that so many pros got taken

wonder how skilled they were at the fleecing you could do it in such a way that it would be hard to notice if you werent too greedy just one or two coolers a night, dont invite the victims bask too many times, but scammers arent know for not being too greedy

it’s a pretty good system because even if someone realizes you were cheating their options are a. rat on the mafia to the cops b. confront the mafia yourself

as someone who still plays online that worries me very much, nobody would've suspected anything with the superuser accounts if not for these guys winning like 10 standard deviations above the 2nd best player. I think it would be pretty easy to be subtle about it and still wind up with a winrate above anyone who isn't cheating. a couple well-timed bluffs and 1 or 2 hero calls a session is all it would take.