Not a poker player, so maybe I'm missing something obvious, but: How did he think you were cheating? You had no way of knowing what that card was, right? And if you did somehow know what it was, surely you could have pre-arranged more subtle ways to tip off a player you were conspiring with?
I guess they thought I produced the bluffing player's card to prevent the other player from folding. But you're right that a dealer who was trying to do that could've done so in any number of subtle ways. I couldn't really figure out why they were accusing me at the time, or what I would've gained from it, but it all happened very fast.
There are dealers who are true shuffle mechanics and either know for sure or have a very good idea of who has what. I'm not that skilled.
I re-watched the movie "Casino" recently, and there's a scene where the Joe Pesci character cans a floor man for not stopping a slot machine run after the first or second time someone hits a jackpot in a night. Paraphrasing the movie: "Either he was in on or he's a fucking moron, either way we can't have him here". To bring it back to the original topic, I think in the gambling world, the default assumption is that there's a scam and the employee is guilty until proven innocent. I wonder why that wouldn't apply to a shady firm like Alameda, too, unless management was "in on it". Come to think of it, I guess that's the point of my story, which I didn't realize when I wrote it.
> the default assumption is that there's a scam and the employee is guilty until proven innocent.
To answer your real question - my guess is that this was a place that had a history of moving fast and breaking things. But probably more importantly - there was no way for that person to benefit from the mistake. The BTC price recovered automatically through the quick arbitrage market. The only way they could have benefited would have been if they were the counter party in the sale, which is highly unlikely.
Now, why FTX was a place that operated like this is another question altogether.
Why do you think they didn't have a counterparty with a lot of purchases queued up at certain trigger levels on the exchange? It would have been an easy way to make a lot of money. Then blame a nameless employee for an honest mistake and come out looking as if they'd just absorbed a loss for moving too fast.
Namely because it would have been too obvious. To have this work, that person would have to have set limits well below anyone else. So low that it would have been obvious when someone just so happened to offer BTC at a much reduced price.
There is nothing that says the BTC “mistake” wasn’t a fraud. But for it to have worked (and you’d only have one shot), the setup would have needed to be clear to outside observers.
The other argument for it being a mistake is that if you really wanted to have exploited Alameda/FTX (not sure which, or if there was a distinction), the person could have tried to take more. The amount is small enough to be a “mistake”, but not large enough to make the higher ups question it. Maybe the gains would have been enough for a corrupt party, but something makes me doubt it.
You wouldn't necessarily need to have those buy orders in place the day before. You could time them to go in at $10k if BTC fell below $13k, for instance. Even the exchange might not detect that if it were done carefully.
Meanwhile, I just find it hard to believe that the accepted narrative - backed up by this story - is that SBF lost $10M in this little fuckup and pardoned the employee who made the error. Seriously? This article? How did he know the employee was innocent, how was that proven to be a mistake, and what happened to the employee? Seems even more plausible given this paper-thin explanation that the flash crash was deliberately triggered to move some money off book. The fat fingered employee, if they exist, gets the blame and is nobly pardoned.
I certainly would hope the FBI is putting together a list of all the unrelated counterparties who profited during that event, just to rule out related ones.
You're thinking very small. People who actually own global businesses think in terms of billions, and SBF had billions. $10M is rounding error to them.
I've lost $50M for my employer (a large, reputable, very by-the-book tech company). I've also gained $100M for my employer, on a project that was canceled because it didn't make enough money. (I half-jokingly asked "Well would you spin it out, I'd love to have $100M?", but it was too tied to corporate infrastructure.) My current project is on track to lose ~$10M/year for my employer, but it's considered strategically important, and so we've run it up the chain and every indication is that it's going to launch anyway.
It just doesn't matter when you make billions. It's like how you stop clipping coupons when you start making a six-figure salary, because the time and attention needed to sweat $0.50 isn't worth it when your paycheck is $10K/month.
my dude, my paycheck is $10k a month, and I still clip coupons. Why? Because something I learned from poker. Winning is as simple as never losing money you don't have to lose.
SBF may have been "worth billions," but he sure didn't have enough escape cash on hand when he needed it.
Your division, project managers, VPs may throw around 9-figures worth of investment capital on loss leaders, party on the Riviera and give everyone Christmas bonuses, but all that means squat to someone like SBF once he's under indictment.
A cold hard $10 million in pocket, off the books, earned illegally, that can't be tracked back is worth a lot more than controlling a billion dollar budget or even getting a $100 million paycheck.
The very fact that it's considered a rounding error would work to the benefit of whoever had set up the scam. The real scam is setting up a corporation where you can pass off a rounding error large enough to let you escape federal custody, and that's where he fell short.
I'm pointing out why it would have been a worthwhile scam for him from my own experience of launching the first serious Bitcoin casino and coming to the rational, purely cost-based determination that there was no way to make enough money from opening it to Americans to let me avoid the likely consequences of that if the feds decided to treat Bitcoin as currency and go for me, which I now know they would have. I determined I could probably pull $10M in a year, but it wouldn't be nearly enough. I'd need to have at least $50M to have a chance. But this is the thought process you can probably project upon SBF running a flash crash, not the "too small to worry about" idea. $10M of misplaced money is right in the ballpark for someone a little stupid who's considering running for the islands.
There's usually a ton of jokers who have $0.01 bid orders in a bunch of markets, just in case of a flash crash. I certainly do - if Bitcoin hits $0.01, sure I'll buy a few thousand dollars worth. I actually looked at the order books around 2019 (this is just a simple free API call) and it was O(high hundreds to low thousands) of people.
It's a bit rarer to have limit orders at say 1/4 the current price but not extremely low, but they still happen. Enough to have plausible deniability at least. Check the order books; my recollection is that this was still O(hundreds) of people.
He said the player was attempting to bluff. In a given set of community cards, you're calculating the possibilities in which you can get beat. You're also watching your opponents actions to see if their lies (bluffing) are plausible.
Let's say you have a seriously strong hand, and there's only one way you could see that you could be beat. The opponent may have that hand now, or they may be hanging around in an attempt to upgrade to that hand while bluffing in the meantime.
In some cases, the above scenario is obvious. Everyone at the table knows well enough what each player is attempting to project. Every player knows which cards to look for to be revealed. It can be devastating to the bluffing player for that card to be accidentally exposed as a burner card.
Given there was a burner card exposed, then there was at least one more card to be added to the community cards. At this point, the bluffing player would be in a tough spot. The player with the stronger hand would likely be raising / re-raising to call the bluff and / or get more chips into the pot.
Continuing the game after the exposed card would have been pointless. You also feel stupid getting exposed on a bluff, when you otherwise might not have had to show your cards. You're probably going to be very pissed.
Edit: The dealer would have had no way of knowing what the burner card was, but the dealer could have known what card the bluffing player was looking for. However, I don't see how it would make sense to expose that card intentionally as a cheating move. Maybe the dealer could have used that as a signal to expose the bluff. My guess is the bluffing player was bluffing in an attempt to make their hand (fake it until you make it) and the other player sensed that. Maybe the other player wasn't convinced and would have won the hand regardless. But at the point of seeing the exposed card, they both knew it was over.
NOTE: We would have to know more about how this played out to do much more speculation than the above.
ftw, this is a perfect explanation of that hand and the betting / emotional situation of the players. Also, it was the river, and it was heads up. But I'll be damned if I can recall their hands or what card I flipped by accident.
I guess. What I don’t know is whether you can call a misdeal and cancel the round. But if you’re the one who’s not advantaged by the situation will probably be upset if you had a good hand. I suspected there are rules for such a scenario since Im sure it was not the first or last time occuring…
Let's assume the poker dealer is working a scam with one of the players, "Sam." On this particular hand, the scam is falling apart. Maybe Sam didn't pick up on a signal, or he has gotten out of sync with the plan.
The dealer sees the tragedy coming down the pike, and as a last ditch effort he spoils the whole game to prevent an even larger loss from occurring after the river card.
For example, on this particular hand, maybe the cards were preloaded into the deal to actually harm Sam. This was done deliberately because we need to keep some volatility across hands to make the cheating more subtle. So, on this hand, Sam is supposed to bet a little bit early, then fold. He loses some of his money, but the whole game seems on the up-and-up.
Except, oh no!, Sam appears to think this is one of the planned winning rounds, so he just keeps betting! Sam has made an error, and may lose big. I (the dealer) am going to suck it up and pretend to make a mistake. I'll get yelled at in public, but the bosses will thank me later for rescuing Sam.
If there is a bluffer on the table, revealing a burn card is going to be net neutral or negative for them. Then add in the meta game! A mob bosses son won't want to look like they did nothing in a situation like this. They need to show they are not a pushover.
It sounds like he didn't think he was cheating and that it was a honest mistake.
An escalation (though obviously not to violence) makes perfect sense for a second error of that type, however. It's the kind of mistake that seems innocent enough but if it's deployed in a pattern it can obviously assist the bluffee.
Fool me once, fool me twice, etc. It's not uncommon for dealers to be in on scams, obviously.
