Bart Hanson Caller Warns of Alleged Cheating Duo in Major Las Vegas Casin

The call-in part of American poker pro Barh Hanson’s Crush Live Poker online show is typically dedicated to interesting hands his listeners had played. At times, the call-ins are about disputes about poker rules or potential angle-shooting.

However, last week, a caller by the pseudonym Joe brought a more nefarious topic to the show. 

According to him, a duo of cheaters had been active at the $5/$10 No Limit Hold’em cash game tables at the Aria Casino, one of the best-known casinos in Las Vegas, Nevada, during the time the WSOP was taking place in the city this summer.

He alleges that one of the cheaters would sit at the table with a mask on and his hat on the rail, and would play very few hands. Meanwhile. his supposed accomplice played a very loose-aggressive style, and would consistently win despite often playing marginal hands.

The caller claims that the two suspects would almost always play at the same table, but would never give any indication that they knew each other away from the table.

After talking to other regulars in the game, Joe came to the suspicion that the two were working together in a cheating scheme: the passive player’s hat, placed close to the dealer, allegedly had a camera in it that caught the hole cards as the dealer pitched them to the players. The hole card information was then relayed to a third party off-site, who, in turn, relayed it to the loose player who used it to beat the other players in big pots.

The caller and the other players brought the issue to the floor, and asked them to ask the passive player to remove his hat from the rail. According to the caller’s telling, the suspicious player immediately got very defensive, started talking a lot despite never saying a word prior, and eventually left the table together with his suspected accomplice.

Since the poker room management did not deem there was enough evidence to ban the players, Joe and the other regulars decided to take matters into their own hands. The next time the two suspects sat down to play together, the caller and his friend in the know immediately got up and left. The caller’s friend even confronted the loose, winning player in front of the other people at the table, which eventually made everyone but the two alleged cheaters leave. 

This move made the poker room more interested in the matter as well, according to the caller; and at least they were willing to note the two players in their registration system as potential cheaters who might collude with each other.

What Can You Do About Suspected Cheaters in a Poker Room?

Hansen prefaced the caller’s story by pointing out that poker cheating is very hard to prove in a criminal court, as a jury of the suspect’s peers is unlikely to understand the intricacies of the game that are evident to a professional or an avid recreational player. He brought up the Mike Postle cheating scandal from 2019 as an example.

He suggests grabbing physical evidence — in this case, the hat that is speculated to have a camera inside it — for a better chance of conviction. However, he understands that taking someone else’s property by force may land the honest player in some legal trouble. 

Similarly, if they make too much of a commotion about suspected cheating, they may end up being the one getting banned. On the poker room’s part, Hanson suggests that the least they could do is not allow the two suspicious players to play at the same table, as even couples are banned from doing that in many cardrooms across the country; and they can impose such a limitation without any legal scrutiny.

As for the conclusion of the story, the two suspects are no longer playing in the Aria, according to the caller. However, that does not mean that they had stopped operating; they may have just taken their scheme somewhere else. He and Hanson also noted that this is a clever way of cheating, as the player who actually has the rigged device is a passive, losing player, thus he is unlikely to be suspected by other players for a long time.