RainmanTrail
Straight Flush
So this is pretty interesting. This story hasn't picked up much steam yet in the poker world, but I imagine it will.
A friend of a friend is a professional sports bettor who goes by the name of @capjack2000 on Twitter. He's not known in the poker world, but is a familiar face in the sports handicapping world. He's one of the good guys, and is a top notch sports bettor. Anyhow, he was involved as an investor in a televised blackjack show about 15 years ago. He recently looked at the DVD from it and made a pretty crazy discovery. Mike Postle was in the first episode of that blackjack show. But how he got on the show in the first place is where this gets good.
What follows is @capjack2000's account of what went down from his Twitter account. I am just copy pasting it all together below. Enjoy...
******* @capjack2000's Twitter thread **********
Back in 2005-06, I was involved with a product called the Ultimate Blackjack Tour (UBT). It was an innovative, elimination-style Blackjack tournament. They filmed two seasons which aired on CBS at some odd hours. I had a relatively minor investment in the project.
It was a collection of BJ players and poker players (most were also investors) that made up the first season. They held some play-in tournaments out at Lake Las Vegas. The winners of those play-in tournaments made up the final tables that would be broadcast on CBS.
Each televised tournament featured an internet qualifier. That was the real money-making component of all this. An online real-money site where people could play UBT. This was just before the UIGEA was passed. Internet gaming still looked relatively easy. UIGEA killed UBT.
For Season One, they didn't have the internet site up yet, so one of the producers hand-picked the "winning internet qualifier" for each of the televised tournaments. They were all close friends of his. Imagine my surprise when I noticed that the internet qualifier for Episode 109 on the DVD (which I believe aired on 9/16/06) was Mike Postle.
For the non-poker players who made it this far, he's the alleged suspect of the biggest poker cheating case in years.
Ok, so big deal. The guy made it onto a televised BJ tournament 14 yrs ago. The big deal is who his producer friend was that got him on the show:
Russ Hamilton! - The inventor of Elimination Blackjack and the mastermind of poker's previous biggest cheating case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russ_Hamilton_(poker_player)
Here were the "internet qualifiers" along with Mike Postle that were hand-picked by Russ Hamilton for UBT Season 1:
A friend of a friend is a professional sports bettor who goes by the name of @capjack2000 on Twitter. He's not known in the poker world, but is a familiar face in the sports handicapping world. He's one of the good guys, and is a top notch sports bettor. Anyhow, he was involved as an investor in a televised blackjack show about 15 years ago. He recently looked at the DVD from it and made a pretty crazy discovery. Mike Postle was in the first episode of that blackjack show. But how he got on the show in the first place is where this gets good.
What follows is @capjack2000's account of what went down from his Twitter account. I am just copy pasting it all together below. Enjoy...
******* @capjack2000's Twitter thread **********
Back in 2005-06, I was involved with a product called the Ultimate Blackjack Tour (UBT). It was an innovative, elimination-style Blackjack tournament. They filmed two seasons which aired on CBS at some odd hours. I had a relatively minor investment in the project.
It was a collection of BJ players and poker players (most were also investors) that made up the first season. They held some play-in tournaments out at Lake Las Vegas. The winners of those play-in tournaments made up the final tables that would be broadcast on CBS.
Each televised tournament featured an internet qualifier. That was the real money-making component of all this. An online real-money site where people could play UBT. This was just before the UIGEA was passed. Internet gaming still looked relatively easy. UIGEA killed UBT.
For Season One, they didn't have the internet site up yet, so one of the producers hand-picked the "winning internet qualifier" for each of the televised tournaments. They were all close friends of his. Imagine my surprise when I noticed that the internet qualifier for Episode 109 on the DVD (which I believe aired on 9/16/06) was Mike Postle.
For the non-poker players who made it this far, he's the alleged suspect of the biggest poker cheating case in years.
Ok, so big deal. The guy made it onto a televised BJ tournament 14 yrs ago. The big deal is who his producer friend was that got him on the show:
Russ Hamilton! - The inventor of Elimination Blackjack and the mastermind of poker's previous biggest cheating case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russ_Hamilton_(poker_player)
Here were the "internet qualifiers" along with Mike Postle that were hand-picked by Russ Hamilton for UBT Season 1:
- Ron Saccavino : If the name sounds familiar he was implicated as operating two super-user accounts on UltimateBet. "FlipFlop2" and "HeadKase01"
- Dennis Novinsky : Also implicated as having operated a super-user account on UB "DannyBoy55". Saccavino & Novinsky finished 1st & 2nd in a satellite tournament that resulted in a free trip to Aruba for the Aruba Classic (sponsored by UB) in 2006.
- Shawn Rice : Rice infamously came to Postle's defense on 2+2 when the Postle scandal was just starting to break. He used the name of "WestTexasMan."
- Eric Bloore : While Bloore was a named pro on UB under the name of "ErBloore," there has been no connection I have found to him and the super-user scandal.
- Spencer Mohler & Steven Suh : These were the other two hand-picked "internet qualifiers." I could not find anything on them beyond that they played some poker tournaments around that time. Neither seem to still be active.