NBA stars, mobsters, and marks with fat wallets are all part of an alleged ring of rigged poker games. Here's how these games are assembled, who attends, and how the purported cheating happens. Former NBA player and Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups (center) exits the Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse after his arraignment on October 23, 2025, in Portland, Oregon. To the uninitiated, the arrests of Chauncey Billups and Damon Jones last week for allegations of involvement in rigged illegal poker games may have appeared like an unusual collision of worlds. How could prosecutors claim that former NBA players (one a current coach), professional gamblers, and even mafia members all ended up rubbing elbows as part of the same high-tech cheating scheme that allegedly began in 2019 and ran for several years?

WIRED recently demonstrated how to cheat at poker by hacking the Deckmate 2 card shufflers used in casinos. The mob was allegedly using the same trick to fleece victims for millions. Security researcher Joseph Tartaro demonstrates how he can insert a hacking device into a USB on the back of the shuffler that alters its code, then transmits the deck's order via Bluetooth to a phone app. The Deckmate 2 automatic card shufflers used in casinos, cardhouses, and high-end private poker games around the world are designed to shuffle a deck in seconds with perfect, computer-generated randomness, vastly speeding up play. They're also, amazingly, sold with a camera inside that can observe every card in the deck before it's dealt--a fact that's become very convenient for poker-cheating hackers and, allegedly, members of the Cosa Nostra mafia.