Lew sharing the spotlight
Robbie Jade Lew has returned to live-streamed poker for the first time since September 2022 when Garrett Adelstein accused her of cheating.
LATB upped the ante, though, by inviting Lew to its stream
Both Live at the Bike (LATB) and Hustler Casino Live (HCL) built their Valentine’s Day games around Phil Hellmuth this year. LATB upped the ante, though, by inviting Lew to its stream. The HCL stream actively courts controversy, so it was surprising that it was beaten to the Lew invitation. However, after LATB announced the line-up, HCL struck back by featuring an interview with Bryan Sagbigsal.
Sagbigsal is the HCL employee accused of stealing $15,000 from Lew’s stack on the day she was accused of cheating. He is still wanted by L.A. County law enforcement over that affair.
Sagbigsal appeared on the HCL stream to tease a YouTube documentary that he’s been working on in which he plans to give his side of the story.
The poker world reacts
Last night’s LATB stream saw plenty of posts echoing Alex Jacob’s sentiment: “LOL, he made her into a star.”
Lew’s supporters also included WeePro, who wrote: “Gotta love the self-righteous keyboard warriors out here hating on everything they either don’t have or can’t get.”
Those keyboard warriors were in surprisingly short supply. Some, like Nick Palma, still believe Lew to be a cheat. Palma wrote: “I heard Bryan is making a comeback and working the control room at Live at the Bike tomorrow. Not like anyone’s gonna do anything about it anyway the Cheater is being paraded around.”
It seems that the poker world seems has largely moved on from the Lew debacle, leaving Lew in a much better place than she was before the accusations. As to what Adelstein’s been up to since then, that’s anyone’s guess.
What happened with Lew and Adelstein
The now infamous hand saw Lew make an extraordinary all-in call on the turn with J-4 and the board reading Th-Tc-9c-3h. Astonishingly, Lew’s call was correct as Adelstein only had 8c-7c and was behind.
In the aftermath of the hand, Adelstein accused Lew of cheating. He later wrote on Twitter that he “strongly believed” that the hand “wasn’t played legitimately by [his] opponent.”
a case of Lew “making the wrong move at the right time”
A subsequent HCL investigation cleared Lew of wrongdoing. Popular opinion seems to have accepted this point of view, with most players settling on the idea that this hand was a case of Lew “making the wrong move at the right time” as The Cincinnati Kid’s Lancey “The Man” Howard would have put it.
The story was given an additional twist when the accusations against Sagbigsal?went public.
What looked at one point like it might be the end of Lew’s poker career, turned out to have revitalized it.