If Robbi Jade Lew wants to get her money back from Garrett Adelstein, she is going to be waiting a long, long time. In an interview on Doug Polk’s podcast on Monday, Adelstein said it simply isn’t happening.
Adelstein has been relatively quiet in the six months since the now infamous Jack-Four hand on Hustler Casino Live, so the poker community was quite interested in what he had to say in the nearly two-hour interview.
We won’t get into it all, as there is a lot to cover, but one of the biggest takeaways is that Adelstein is not backing down from his claims that Lew cheated him on the livestream.
As a quick recap, the two tangled in a hand on Hustler Casino live in which Adelstein flopped a straight flush draw. That was still the case on the turn, when he bet $10,000. Lew raised to $20,000 with only J-4, no pair, no draw, no nothing. Just Jack-high. Adelstein re-raised all-in to $100,000 and shockingly, Lew called.
J-4 beats almost no reasonable hands in that situation, but Adelstein was holding one of the few that it did. The entire table was stunned as they ran the river twice and Lew’s hand held up. Adelstein immediately believed that Lew cheated, as there was seemingly no way that she would have played that hand like that had she not known what Adelstein had.
They spoke away from the table – it was not a friendly conversation – and Lew gave him $135,000 (half the pot) to allegedly calm him down. Adelstein has since donated the money to charity. In the meantime, a third-party investigation showed no evidence that Lew cheated.
Polk asked Adelstein if he still feels the same about the situation now as he did then, to which Adelstein replied, “In essence, I stand completely by the statement I made. I think it’s extremely likely that I was cheated.”
The poker community’s initial reaction skewed toward the opinion that Lew cheated, as the decision to call there seemed simply impossible. As time went on, though, and people took a deep breath, opinion moved toward Lew, as people heeded Occam’s Razor and realized that the simplest and most reasonable explanation was that she just made a bad play and got lucky or misread her hand and got lucky.
And now, especially with the conclusion of the investigation, many in the poker community want Adelstein to repay Lew. He’s sticking by his guns, though, telling Polk, “No, I will not be refunding Robbi the money, period. I am extremely confident I was cheated in this hand.”
Image credit: Hustler Casino Live
