Hey, Lauren. How you doing? I'm good. How are you? I am fantastic today. Thanks.

You rarely hear that. Happy for you. Before we dive into the show, I have to ask, are you a poker player?

Not exactly. What do you mean? No, I mean, so you've probably heard of this little thing called CES.

Yeah.

It happens every year in Las Vegas.

Yeah.

So for several years, I would go cover CES, often for your team, and would play a little bit of Pai Gau poker. Are you familiar with Pai Gau? Yeah. It's one of those games I don't understand. Yeah, it's a combination of Paigau, which is a Chinese game with Dominoes, an American poker.

Okay.

And it's a combination of Paigau, which is a Chinese game with Domino's, and American poker. Okay. And it's played at casinos. You get two hands, you get a set of five cards and a set of two cards, and like, you're essentially playing against the dealer. And it's quote unquote poker, right? So that's like the extent of the gambling that I do. Well, I'm already lost. Yeah. How about you? Do you have a poker face? No, I have sportsbook face, which is me just like staring at my phone waiting for the scores to come in. Is that a real thing? I think we just coined that. I think so. So if I'm not mistaken, you're asking this because our guest today definitely has some recent experience playing poker.

Yeah. Andy Greenberg, welcome down, Kenny Valley. We're so thrilled to have you on the show. How are you doing?

Glad to be here again. Good to talk to you both. All right, Andy, get your chips ready because we're about to double down on poker cheating.

Okay, here we go with as many poker puns as possible in this episode.

This is Wired's Uncanny Valley, a show about the people, power, and influence of Silicon Valley.

Today, we're hacking our way through a poker game. Recently, our colleague Andy Greenberg and the crew at Wired's Hack Lab experimented with how the card shuffler machine, DeckMate 2, one of the most common machines using

casinos, card houses, and private games could be altered to cheat in a poker game.

Then last week, the U.S. Justice Department published an indictment against 31 people,

among them NBA stars and members of the mafia for allegedly running a network of rigged

gambling games.

One of their rigging methods, and the one described in detail in the indictment, was a

manipulation of the deckmate two shuffling machine in almost exactly the same way

that Andy and the hack lab folks at Wired previously showed.

We'll dive into why their hackability matters for everyone involved, even for those of us

...