Home / Poker News February 2013 / The Poker Grapevine – Barry Greenstein Swindled
The Poker Grapevine – Barry Greenstein Swindled
Posted by: James Carter. - Sat, 2013-02-16 09:24
Open Face Chinese Poker has been all the rage in
high stakes poker circles lately. Various professional players have been grinding away at the Chinese Poker tables, but also discussing it in social media and tweeting about it. The popularity of the game has skyrocketed in recent weeks, and given how it seems to get every respectable pro hooked instantly, that didn't really come as a surprise. Barry Greenstein was among those who bought into the hype, and he too began playing using a rather popular iPad app called Chinese Open Face Poker Pass’n Play. The app itself is a free one, however the games taking place through it are real money ones, and there is actually quite a bit of high-stakes action too.
Greenstein was playing through the above said app and he was on a roll: he managed to fleece an opponent out about 100 points, and with each point worth $50, and he was in fact up by quite a bit. At that point, his opponent asked him to double the stakes which he did. Predictably, that's when things took a sudden southward turn for him. Not exactly a newcomer to odds calculus and poker math, Greenstein immediately suspected something was wrong. He started keeping track of how many times the river bailed out his opponent and he found that out of 14 times, 7 times the river came to the aid of his opponent. Alarm bells ringing, Greenstein quit the game and he turned to a computer expert to have the app analyzed. It turned out that cheating was indeed possible, and that hustling was quite probably one of the reasons behind the sudden popularity of the game.
The creators of the app have since corrected the issues, but the harm has already been done.
