Joe Ingram Returns to Podcast Scene with 2-Hour Garrett Adelstein Interview

Joe Ingram’s Poker Life Podcast was once a staple of the online poker community. “Chicago Joey,” however, went over a year without uploading any videos to his popular YouTube channel.

For a long time, his last upload was on April 2nd, 2025. However, Ingram has now broken that unfortunate streak, and put up a 2-hour-long interview with Garrett “GMan” Adelstein.

Adelstein has been on an excessive promotional tour for his autobiography Beneath the Cards. Most poker fans know him for the infamous J4 hand he played against Robbi Jade Lew on Hustler Casino Live in September 2022 — four years ago by now. Not only is the cheating allegation controversy a big part of Gman’s book, but also, as he admitted to Ingram, it was the fallout after the incident that inspired him to write it in the first place.

As he put it during his interview with Ingram, the J4 hand has completely “flipped his entire life around”. It led him to quit playing high stakes poker and focus on his book instead. In the meantime, he and his wife have also had their first and second children.

Adelstein admitted that during the controversy, he acted as “a bit of a villain” and did not have the right mindset. That realization prompted him to go to therapy. He picked up free association writing as a therapy exercise, which ultimately inspired him to pen his autobiography after encouragement from his wife. Adelstein also pointed out that he had spoken about his mental health struggles to Joe Ingram before on his podcast, with which he was hoping to help other poker players.

Gman revealed that Doug Polk has tried to recruit him as a coach for Upswing Poker in the past. While he declined the offer, he made sure to give plenty of poker strategy advice in his book, not just an account of his life. He stressed that he is going for a "heuristic” teaching approach, he is not just sharing solver outputs.

From Black Friday to the Live Felt

Ingram brought up that the two of them took two completely different life paths when the infamous 2011 Black Friday events disrupted their online poker careers. Ingram relocated to Vancouver, Canada to be able to continue playing online poker, while Adelsten shifted his focus to live poker. “Online poker didn’t jive with me,” he said about his decision, citing his extraverted nature. Therefore, he was not willing to move countries and leave his social circle behind to pursue that path.

He was living in Scottsdale, Arizona when Black Friday hit. So, he looked for the nearest major casino, which was Casino Arizona and asked what their biggest No Limit Hold’em game was. The highest stakes table was a $5/$10 spread limit game — Adelstein admitted that he did not even know what “spread” meant at the time. He ultimately adjusted to live poker, and highlighted that that form of the game requires a lot more patience than its online form: while online, he could play up to 1,000 hands per hour multi-tabling, on the live felt, he sometimes only got to play 20 hands an hour in a slow game.

He described live poker as “online poker with added elements,” such as physical tells.

Adelstein also revealed that he has only busted his bankroll once in his entire career, when he was 22. Then, he was forced to move from the $50/$100 tables to the $1/$2 tables and rebuild from there.

2017 brought a big change in his life. On the verge of quitting poker not for the first time, Adelstein was invited to play on Live at the Bike, one of the first live streamed online cash games shows, by Ryan Feldman. This allowed him to build up an audience in the poker world.

Adelstein told Ingram that at the age of 25, he was cheated at the very first private game he played in. In his second private game, the host never paid out the winning players. This made him stay away from home games for the rest of his career. He thought that with streams, he found a way to get into high stakes games with a soft player pool, something private games typically offer, without having to fear being cheated. The 2019 Mike Postle cheating scandal at Stones Gambling Hall changed that perception of his — evidently, this topic ultimately led to another discussion about the infamous J4 hand against Robbi Lew.

It is clear from his interview with Joe Ingram that Garrett Adelstein still believes that he was cheated by Robbi Lew and her alleged accomplices.

He lamented the fact that he never received the CCTV footage of the stream to analyze Lew and other players’ body language when the incident occurred, despite asking for it multiple times. However, he stresses that he does not want to imply that the Hustler Casino Live staff or any of the players playing on the stream today are involved in any nefarious activities.

Adelstein announced that he will be releasing a documentary video about the J4 hand as well later in the year. As for his book, he said that he did not want to make it about J4 alone, but he is fully aware that is that hand that made it commercially viable to begin with. 

Watch Joe Ingram’s Interview with Garrett Adelstein in Its Entirety Below