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A report from sports journalist Pablo Torre claims that Los Angeles Clippers head coach Ty Lue attended one of the allegedly rigged poker games where Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups played. The FBI alleges that the rigged poker game included X-ray vision tables and rigged shuffling machines that were backed by crime syndicate family members, the New York Post reported. But now, journalist Pablo Torre is reporting that the Clippers coach was also part of the rigged games. “According to multiple sources with direct knowledge of that April 2019 game in Vegas that we’ve been discussing — the same one where Billups was allegedly profiting off of an extremely suspicious hand and a rigged shuffling machine — another ‘face card’ in attendance was current Los Angeles Clippers head coach Ty Lue, who was at the time an assistant coach for the Clippers,” Torre says. Torre went on to note that Lue has been reported as one of Billups’ close friends. “Now, sources say that Lue did not play at the same table as Chauncey Billups — the man Lue recently called his best friend, and also the man whom Lue would hire as a Clippers assistant himself the very next year, 2020, once Lue got his current head job,” the reporter said. Lue recently told the press that he has been a friend to Billups since he was 17 years old. The Clippers coach is reportedly well known as a big poker fan. Torre claimed that Lue is “considered the nexus of the NBA poker world.” “An open secret around the NBA is that Ty Lue, who lives in Vegas during the offseason, also loves poker,” Torre said, “and is often seen at what is considered the nexus of the NBA poker world — the Aria High Limit Bar — often alongside another retired NBA player whom Lue had separately hired to his coaching staff in Cleveland and who has called Lue his best friend, Damon Jones.” Jones was arrested by the FBI last week for his role in the poker and sports-fixing scandal that has rocked the league. “In June of 2024, both Ty Lue and Damon Jones sat next to each other on the rail — the poker equivalent of courtside at a playoff game — to watch another friend of theirs compete at the World Series of Poker, as seen on the broadcast of that event,” Torre said. According to the Post, Jones has attempted to file for Chapter 13 bankruptcy but was denied the status by a Texas court twice. Follow Warner Todd Huston on Facebook at: Facebook.com/Warner.Todd.Huston, Truth Social @WarnerToddHuston, or at X/Twitter @WTHuston
