DeRosa: Alleged cheating in poker reminds of 2002 Fix 6

I went to bed immediately after listening to Bill & Nico's excellent Spaces last night, and in a rare moment of not checking my main Twitter feed before doing so missed the poker firestorm that developed after Robbie Jade Lew, holding jack high, called Garrett Adelstein's all-in bet.

1. I yearn for a day horse-racing wagering is discussed with this kind of fervor and intelligence.

2. If Lew did cheat it reminds me of the 2002 Breeders' Cup Pick 6 scandal when the perpetrators were felled not by technology but by their ignorance of the mechanics of wagering.

On the first point, the poker hand embedded above, streamed live from Hustler Casino, had more than 1 million views after just 12 hours. Replays and commentary on YouTube and Twitch (one of which is embedded below) have hundreds of thousands of views already.

There are billions of dollars wagered on racing a year but this type of interest is not there.

The simplest explanation, sadly, is that poker encourages viewing itself as an intellectual pursuit on par with chess, bridge or backgammon, while racing focuses on hats and hires countless marketers who insist that racing is too hard for people to understand and needs to be dumbed down at every level.

On the second point, Chris Harn and his crew got caught because a $12 Pick 6 wheel single-single-single-single-all-all is just not how anyone plays the Pick 6, especially back in the $2 minimum days. They tried to make it look good while also playing an all-all-single-single-single-single ticket, but when Volponi won the Classic and they had the only six winning tickets, the scam was up.

Is the scam up here? Just as the Fix 6 crew would have gotten away with it had they played a $2 Pick 6 with a couple singles and a couple spreads before the all, if she were cheating, she surely could have found a better spot if she had a good grasp of the game.