The Hustler Casino Live Cheating Scandal surrounding Garrett Adelstein and Robbi Jade Lew continues to roll on with some major developments in the story happening overnight.
So before we give you our analysis on what has happened, let’s briefly recap the story so far.
The HCL Cheating Scandal
A week last Thursday, poker professional and High Stakes specialist Garrett Adelstein lost a hand to relative poker newcomer Robbie Jade Lew, after which he accused her of cheating at the table, citing her strange and unusual decision making as the reason.
The two then met away from the table where Lew agreed to hand back the money she won from Adelstein at the table, although exactly how that transpired is not known for certain.
The story then went viral with the great and the good in the poker world having their own opinions on the matter.
Some agreed with Adelstein that Lew had cheated, other defended Lew accusing Adelstein of being unable to deal with the fact that she didn’t fold in the face of his aggression.
Following the hand, Lew has been active on Twitter proclaiming her innocence.
Over the past seven days the arguments and counterarguments from both sides have rolled on and Hustler Casino announced shortly after the controversial hand that they would be investigating the incident in more detail.
So what has happened since then? Let’s take a close look at events of the last day or so:
Adelstein Donates To Charitable Organisation
With many people of the opinion that accepting the money he lost back from Lew was not a wise move, Garrett Adelstein announced this week that he wanted to draw the spotlight away from the furore (yeah, good luck with that) and instead apply it to something more beneficial.
He announced he would be donating to the Big Brother, Big Sister of Los Angeles charity and wanted others to do likewise.
However, he stopped short of stating he would donate all of the money he received back from Lew to the cause, a fact which a number of commentators on Twitter pointed out.
Lew Gives Her Version Of Events On PokerNews Podcast
Other than a few Tweets, Robbi Jade Lew hadn’t really given a full version of events to anybody, but that changed yesterday when she was interviewed for around 40 minutes. On the PokerNews Podcast by host Chad Holloway.
Lew stated that “No, I unequivocally did not cheat,” on the Podcast and revealed that after her Tweet of a heads up challenge to Adelstein, they had a third party go between them to potentially set up the Heads Up challenge that Lew challenged Adelstein too in the Tweet.
She also clarified some of the issues that her critics had pointed out indicated she was cheating chief amongst them being:
- Lew confirmed that she misread her hand as J3 not a J4, which would have given her the “bluff-catcher’ hand she said she had at the table.
- She states it was her surprise at the hand being J4 and not J3 which made her flustered and try to come up with the reasons as to why she would call in that position.
- Lew also claimed that her post-game conversation with Adelstein centered around her believing she had a J3, not a J4, and that she gave him the chips back as she said it would make him feel better about losing the hand to a misread on her part. She also said that in that situation, she never thought anybody would view this as an admission of guilt.
- She confirmed that she and another poker player at the HCL table on Thursday, Rip, was someone that she had known for a while and that Rip had a large stake in her in the game on Hustler Casino Live. However, she said that it is not uncommon for players to be staked, even by other players in the same game.
- She denied any romantic involvement with Rip and confirmed she is married to Charles Lew, a crypto lawyer.
- Lew’s husband Charles spoke to Joe Ingram on another stream defending his wife and heavily implied that any poker players deemed to have defamed his wife could be the subject of legal action.
However, there was another surprising twist in the story last night when Hustler Casino issued a press release which took everyone by surprise with its content.
Lew Robbed At The Table
Many poker players had opined that in accepting the money back from Robbi Lew, Adelstein had effectively robbed her at the table.
While that is not proven, a shocking statement from Hustler Casino revealed that Robbi Lew was indeed the victim of theft at the table.
In the Twitter release shown above, Hustler Casino revealed that an employee at the casino had stolen around $15,000 worth of chips from Lew’s stack during Thursday’s game.
The staff member in question has since been sacked and the casino is now in the process of reimbursing Robbi with her funds.
However, Lew has decided not to press charges against the employee as it was “unnecessary to damage a young man’s life that would already be negatively impacted by the news of his wrongdoing and termination of his employment.”
Interestingly, it has been claimed on Twitter that the person sacked was the person who dealt with the live graphics on the screen and who also posted the “Insane Hero Call” video to YouTube.
What To Make Of The Latest Developments?
These latest developments are intriguing, especially the news about $15k being taken from Robbi’s stack by a casino employee that has clear links to what went on between the two players and the game in question.
Quite what to make of that, we’re not so sure at the moment.
However, what is evident is that Robbi has provided us with somewhat conflicting stories of what happened and those stories differ in many respects to what Adelstein claimed happened.
Her implication that she was somehow intimidated to hand the money back to Adelstein runs counter to her more recent claims that she did so in order to calm him down and keep things cordial and to explain quite why she made the call she made.
However, if every poker player felt obliged to give back hands they had won with a bit of luck on their side, there’d be a lot of players a hell of a lot poorer.
With Hustler Casino Live conducting a thorough investigation, this story seems set to roll on for some considerable time yet.
