The Rise and Fall of Poker Cheating Glasses in the Gambling World

While chess is embroiled in the strangest of cheating accusations, poker players are in the midst of their own scandals. Accusations about collusion and cheating during live broadcasts of high-stakes poker games have captured the attention of the world. Many famous players have joined the bandwagon.

One of the more curious claims revolves around sunglasses and their relationship to marked cards. Although most players would never wear sunglasses indoors, this practice is quite popular at the poker tables. The main reason behind this is to hide tells.

Sunglasses are also a common tool in the arsenal of poker cheaters. There are various ways that poker cheaters can mark playing cards, from the old-school approach of secretly scratching, scuffing or bending the cards to the more sophisticated methods like using invisible ink markings that only an external camera can detect.

In a high-stakes live broadcast game in 2012, professional player Phil “Ivey Ivey was accused of cheating. In this case, the casino claimed Ivey was able to see their marked deck and misread his opponents’ live tells.

Ivey denied these charges, claiming that he was simply a better card player and had a knack for reading signals. But the poker community wasn’t convinced. Countless streamers and high-profile players spent hours poring over the Stones cash game footage, analysing every important hand and finding that Postle was making the right calls time after time. Postle was found to be using a super user account to see the hole cards of other players, which explains why he always made the right call.