The Numbers Don't Lie

It's not proof, but it's exceedingly strong evidence:

A few months ago, controversy broke out in the poker world. Mike Postle, a relatively small-time player in a local poker room in Sacramento, California, ignited the controversy by systematically accumulating a string of wins, replete with mind-boggling displays of brilliant lay-downs, heroic river and all-in calls, and, in poker parlance, “God-mode” instinct and insight into his opponents’ hole cards.

Many of his sessions were televised on “Stones Live,” a live poker feed streamed from Stones Gambling Hall on Twitch, and eventually caught the eye of a number of poker video bloggers, who took one look at his unlikely victory string and smelled a rat. They then concentrated on his sessions, examining every hand—every hero fold, call, and raise—and particularly noticed his habit of placing his phone in his lap during the sessions. They noticed that he routinely pulled his hat down to shield his eyes as he glanced down at his phone.

They noticed an usual feature—a bulge—on the side of his baseball cap, which he occasionally wore when he wasn’t looking down at his phone. They located similar-looking caps online and found that the bulge in these caps was caused by a device that transmitted audio signals through bone conduction.

In short, they busted him. It could have been anything—smoke signals from across the room, blinking lights, bone-conducted audio signals—whatever. It didn’t matter how he was cheating, what mattered was that his success at the table was such a statistical anomaly in a game and profession guided in large part by micro mastery and manipulation of statistical risk and reward. So there was no question that he was doing something to gain unfair advantage over the other players at the table.

What put these bloodhounds on the trail of the alleged cheat wasn’t the phone in his lap, or the strange shape of the side of his cap. It was the numbers. The percentages. The law of averages. The wholly improbable, unprecedented, all but impossible string of perfect decisions and corresponding cash-outs that could not possibly be accomplished without, well, cheating.

To the veteran poker players, it was simple: The cards are meant to fall randomly, and the cards for this guy always seemed to fall the same way. The man was cheating.

If you’ve read the Department of Justice inspector general’s report on the Carter Page FISA application, be it the executive summary or the whole thing, you may have come away with the same feeling those poker bloggers had when they took their first look at Postle’s win record at the casino. This isn’t right. This can’t be.

There’s no way the cards can all fall one way, no way every “mistake” can redound in support of the government’s “case” against Page. There’s no statistical way every single oversight, clerical error, unchecked box, unread file, misplaced document, unread email, uncorroborated assumption, unverified assertion, omission of exculpatory evidence, and inclusion of false allegations can all fall against Page, and in favor of the FBI’s goal of providing probable cause to convince the court to believe he was an agent of a foreign power.

There’s no way 17 glaring omissions, mistakes, mischaracterizations, and straight-up lies can make their way, undetected, unquestioned, and uncorrected, through the now-legendary labyrinth of supervisory coordination, from line agents to Woods Procedures to FBI supervisors to DOJ reviewers to FBI counsel, FBI deputy director, FBI director, DOJ general counsel, deputy attorney general, and attorney general certification.

There’s no way none of those people caught one of those 17 mistakes. No way each link in the chain—every single one of them—simply assumed this one time that the previous link had carried out all of their supervisory and verification responsibilities and blindly affixed their certification mark on the package without review. No way it all falls one way.

Unless. Unless this wasn’t actually the most statistically improbable perfect storm of innocent oversights and clerical errors, all of which worked in favor of the government’s case and adversely to Page. Unless the percentages here were so outlandish and unlikely—a demonstration of abject, systemic incompetence carried out, quite literally, against all odds—that there is a logical explanation for all of this, after all.

To anyone capable of reasoned and objective analysis, that explanation is simple: The cards are meant to fall randomly, and the cards for this guy always fell the same way. The FBI was cheating.

Read the whole thing.