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Posted on 10/23/2025 3:53:55 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
The FBI has arrested Chauncey Billups, NBA champion, Hall of Famer, and coach of the Portland Trail Blazers for his association in a rigged poker game operated by some of New York City’s most notorious crime family. “Why would Chauncey do it?” the world of sports is asking. He’s already worth tens of millions of dollars. That’s a question for Billups, his attorneys, his God, and, presumably, Blazers ownership to answer. But as someone who regularly plays a lot of low and micro-stakes poker, I have a pretty good idea.
The games I play in are monitored by security cameras, with armed guards at the exits in case people get out of line. When I play in World Series of Poker or World Poker Tour events, there are a strict set of rules by which the vast majority of players abide. There’s some rule-bending, but it usually involves peeking at other people’s cards, using computer solvers to help make quick decisions at the table, or a variety of “angle shooting” tricks upon which the poker world tends to frown.
In the rare instances when actual cheating does occur, with the occasional earbud installed to allow a player who know what’s happening on the internet livestream in which they’re participating, the poker world roots it out pretty quickly, and that player quickly finds themselves uninvited, in legal trouble and having to actually work for a living instead of playing cards.
Chauncey Billups, on the other hand, fell prey to the sinister temptations of the “private game,” which is where all poker pros know the real money lies. The Bonanno, Genovese, Lucchese and Gambino crime families paid Billups, as well as two Miami Heat players, Terry Rozier and Damon Jones, to participate in New York games that involved rigged card shufflers and special glasses and contact lenses. Rozier also apparently faked an injury to throw games, or at least manipulate NBA stats, winning thousands of dollars in sports betting as a result.
So the NBA is at least partially rigged, big surprise, but let’s keep our eyes on the cards. As the New York Post put it, the mob used the NBA stars to attract “fish” to the games. However, these weren’t mere fish. I play against fish on the average Thursday night as they pull crumpled $20 bills out of their wallets in a desperate attempt to beat a game they can only occasionally win. These were bonafide whales.
It might seem odd for people to risk playing a private game, run by the mob, when the bright and mostly regulated lights of Atlantic City casino poker are just 80 miles away. But poker is a tempting devil. The idea that you can turn $100 into $2,000 isn’t just an abstraction. It’s a reality, and it happens in card rooms around the world every day. Blowing thousands of dollars at a time also happens regularly. So whales don’t even necessarily know that they’re whales. They’re just swimming in the ocean.
And the temptation of playing with actual professional basketball players, who we’ve seen on TV and probably gambled on before, is pretty high. In the skeezy world that makes up my days and nights, guys get pretty excited if they play against someone who was once a AAA pitching coach for the Red Sox, or a backup point guard for Michigan State for a couple of seasons. Imagine playing against Mr. Big Shot himself from the Pistons. You’d never suspect that he’s actually a bald, black Le Schiffre.
“The fraud is mind-boggling,” said FBI director Kash Patel at a press conference yesterday. Yet when I heard about it this morning, it didn’t quite boggle my mind. If you play poker, you just assume that kind of stuff is going on at private games, at all stakes, all the time. I, for one, would be very wary of playing in a game run by someone named “Flappy” who’s backed by the Gambino crime family.
There’s no real mystery that the mob would run a shady card game. That’s nothing new. Or that rich marks would fall for their schemes. The real question revolves around Billups, who risked his shining reputation and his substantial fortune to help criminals cheat at cards. We can only assume that the mob made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.
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That was my first thought, they must have threatened him.
>>”As far as the Wise Guys threats...a guy like Billups has any number of Black gang bangers at his beck and call whose proficiency with violence makes the Wise Guys of today look like school crossing guards.”
The mob is a network. There’s a reason it’s called organized crime. That will always give them an advantage over a loose collection of undisciplined and not particularly smart street thugs.
Yep, looks like it:
The article doesn’t cite any particular evidence for its claim, but if it’s true then it sounds like the whole team was involved, not just Billups.
All major sporting events are rigged...
If you want to lookalike the refs, the next logical step is the owners and players...gambling is the engine...
Didn’t any of them watch the Sopranos?
These BBall players like Jordan play for very high stakes and they may have cleaned him out. It is a very addictive habit.
mafia and sports’ betting is nothing new, there is always inside information and someone has to take the fall and lose.
Right. And that rape charge against Billups years ago was all just made up too. Uh-huh.
I didn’t say the claim was made up, just that the article didn’t cite a source. Read more carefully next time.
I read ya, pal.
What exactly did you read?
I’m breaking down the NBA gambling scandal that just broke - Terry Rozier, Chauncey Billups, and 34 others arrested in a massive FBI operation targeting four of the five New York families. I ran 12 bookmakers for 30 years, so I know exactly how this works. Athletes are easy prey - they get in deep, owe money, then we own them. Rozier allegedly faked an injury to help inside bets. Billups was a “face card” luring victims into rigged poker games with X-ray tables and card counting devices. I’ve been warning the NBA, NCAA, and 300+ universities about this for decades. This won’t stop - gambling is too lucrative and the mob is too smart. Here’s the real story behind Operation Zen Diagram and Operation Nothing But Net from someone who lived it. -— Michael Franzese
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6k5lLnue7hA
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