Poker Has A Cheating Scandal After One Of The Most Bizarre Decisions To Go All-In You’ll Ever See

Poker can be a silly game. Much like that one Fort Minor song, luck and skill often come together to create names that folks remember forever, but of course, you can get the best of someone by getting really, really lucky. In fact, there are times when a player can be so brave, so daring, that you can’t help but think something is going on.

I say all of that to say this: My friends, we have a good ol fashion poker cheating scandal. Here is the video at the center of everything. It features Garrett Adelstein, who has an 8 and a 7 of clubs, going head-to-head with Robbi Jade Lew, who has a Jack-4 offsuit, during a Hustler Casino Live stream. Things start out innocently enough — Adelstein raises pre-flop, Lew calls, Lew gets a whole lot of nothing on the flop, and then, they go from 0-to-60 really, really quickly.

Adelstein has a straight flush draw and a gigantic chip advantage, so his decision to be ultra-aggressive after the turn and bet $10,000 makes some sense. Lew, meanwhile, is technically ahead with a Jack high, but she has considerably less money and decides to raise to $20,000, so Adelstein tries to drop the hammer and go all-in … only for Lew to call and eventually win the hand with nothing more than her Jack.

You can hear on the stream that the broadcaster cannot believe what he is seeing, nor can Adelstein when Lew turns her cards over — she straight up says that “you like like you wanna kill me” several times. The two discussed after the hand, with Adelstein saying he didn’t understand what was going on. Here’s what happened after, per the New York Post:

After the two had a private conversation, Lew gave Adelstein the money back from the hand. Why did she do that?

“I said that I wanted minimal destruction and asked, ‘What is going to make you happy?’” Lew told the table. “He said, ‘To give me my money back.’”

She then claimed that she misread the three — the turn card — thinking that it gave her a low pair against what she believed was a bluff. She said that she thought she had jack-three.

Lew said that she would “win the money back” that she gave Adelstein and “I’m not gonna deal with drama.”

Things eventually spilled over to Twitter, where Adelstein posted several tweets and a lengthy note to explain his side of things, while Lew claimed that Adelstein “cornered me & threatened me” and challenged him to a heads-up game so “whole world can watch me read you all day.”

In the aftermath, Hustler Casino Live put out a statement saying that while they “are extremely confident in our game security,” they will investigate the allegations of cheating, writing that “we will be looking into every aspect of this incident before putting out the results of our findings.”

While Adelstein tweeted out a video that includes a summary of the events that lead him to believe something strange happened here, Daniel Negreanu, one of the greatest players of all time, expressed his belief that Lew didn’t do anything sketchy beyond finding herself in an “I’m calling the bully situation.” Regardless, unless there is some sort of smoking gun, it is very hard to see allegations of cheating can be proven beyond any reasonable doubt.