\nIn August 2012, Crockfords, one of London\u2019s poshest casinos, refused to pay Phil Ivey $14.3 million he won playing Punto Banco (a form of baccarat), claiming he cheated. Ivey sued, and has now lost, in Her Majesty\u2019s High Court of Justice. Meanwhile, in a mirror-image case, the Borgata in Atlantic City has sued Ivey to recover $9.63 million he also won playing that game.<\/p>\n
\tAnd yes, this is the same Phil Ivey who is by consensus the best poker player alive. He\u2019s won 10 World Series of Poker gold bracelets, more than $21 million in tournaments around the globe, and many millions more in nosebleed-stakes cash games. Given that Ivey enjoys a decided edge in skill at almost every poker table, why would he waste his money and time playing luck- based pit games such as Punto Banco, in which the casino always has a mathematical advantage?<\/p>\n
\tThe answer is edge sorting. Working with a partner, Cheung Yin Sun, Ivey was able, by observing tiny asymmetrical flaws along the edge of the backs of some decks, to read the value of the bottom card of the shoe just before it was dealt.<\/p>\n
\tPretending to be superstitious, Ivey and Sun persuaded Crockfords to grant them a series of unusual requests. They wanted a specific Chinese woman to be their croupier\/dealer. Speaking to her in Mandarin, a language the pit bosses did not understand, Sun asked for all the nines, eights, sevens and sixes \u2013the most favorable cards for the player \u2013to be rotated 180 degrees inside the deck. Sun, who goes by Kelly and is known among high-stakes advantage players as \u201cthe Queen of Sorts,\u201d also asked the dealer not to manually mix up the cards before replacing them into the automatic shuffling machine. The sixes through nines would thus remain easy for Ivey and Sun to identify as they re-appeared at the end of the shoe. Ivey then would increase his bet from a few thousand pounds to as much as 150,000 pounds.<\/p>\n
\tIvey has stipulated that he \u201cmade a number of references to superstition and luck whilst I was at Crockfords\u201d and that having seen a closed circuit tape, \u201cI accept that some of these statements were designed to create an air of superstition around our play. A lot of professional gamblers pretend they are not superstitious, even I do at times but the reality is that I am superstitious. Gambling and superstition go hand in hand.\u201d<\/p>\n
\tHard as it is to imagine the New Jersey-born Ivey saying \u201cwhilst,\u201d it\u2019s even harder to ignore that his tag-team ruse with Kelly Sun was the polar opposite of superstitious. It was a scientifically rigorous method giving him between a 6.76 and a 20.93 percent advantage over the house, depending on a variety of other factors.<\/p>\n
\tEven so, Ivey\u2019s main argument, that it was Crockfords\u2019 responsibility to deal cards with unreadable backs, is one that many gamblers will agree with. As his London attorney put it: \u201cIf the casino fouls up from start to finish, that is something which is the gambler\u2019s good fortune.\u201d His client isn\u2019t responsible for a dealer\u2019s mistakes, even if he tricked her into making them.<\/p>\n
\tLate this morning, however, Judge John Mitting disagreed, ruling that \u201cby using the croupier as his innocent agent or tool,\u201d Ivey \u201cgave himself an advantage which the game precludes. This is in my view cheating.\u201d Crockfords will not have to pay Ivey a farthing, let alone $14.3 million. He is out all that money and has been branded a cheater.<\/p>\n
\tHow this ruling will affect the Borgata\u2019s claim against Ivey is anyone\u2019s guess. With new attorneys on both sides, slightly dissimilar facts in evidence and different gaming statutes, that case will go before a New Jersey magistrate sometime in 2015.<\/p>\n
\tInterviewed by James Brown for \u201c60 Minutes Sports\u201d before Judge Mitting ruled, Ivey said, \u201cCasinos don\u2019t like card counters, shuffle trackers, bias wheel players or any skilled or advantage players, though none of these advantage-play strategies are considered illegal.\u201d<\/p>\n
\tWhether this turns out to be true in New Jersey, the fact is that the casinos themselves try to exploit every advantage at their disposal, offering \u201cfree\u201d villas and flights on private jets (like the one Crockfords provided to fly Ivey from Barcelona) in a relentless effort to sucker whales into playing games the house cannot lose in the long run. If a pit boss even suspects a blackjack player of skillfully counting how many aces and face cards have been played and adjusting his bets accordingly, the casino will ban him and forward his picture to every pit boss in town. But when the shoe is on the other foot, and a cunning player exploits a casino\u2019s mistakes, it cries foul and refuses to pay him.<\/p>\n
\tBecause the player in question is Phil Ivey, these edge- sorting cases are uncomfortably reminiscent of poker\u2019s earliest days aboard Mississippi riverboats, when the biggest winners were card sharps and con artists. The best of them skillfully etched tiny variations in the scrolls and arabesques on the backs key cards. Others, called \u201cline workers,\u201d might add an extra flower petal to indicate the card\u2019s value. \u201cEdge workers\u201d would thicken the lines on the back\u2019s border, while \u201cshaders\u201d used diluted ink to faintly tint one spot or another.<\/p>\n
\tAs mass-produced cards came into play around 1850, larcenous printers began producing pre-marked facsimiles of the most popular decks. Called \u201creaders,\u201d the backs of these decks had slight variations revealing each card\u2019s rank. Openly advertised in mainstream magazines as being \u201ceasy to read\u201d or having \u201cfast blockout work,\u201d readers made perfect vision and confident familiarity with minuscule markings vastly more important than what we now call poker skill.<\/p>\n
\tToday\u2019s plastic cards are precisely manufactured with lasers, though our assumption that their backs are identical can no longer be taken for granted. Card makers are likely to fix the problem ASAP. While it may seem unfortunate that poker\u2019s best player had such a big hand in exposing these flaws while exploiting them, no one has accused Phil Ivey of cheating at the game he\u2019s so good at \u2014 and should probably stick to.<\/p>\n
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In August 2012, Crockfords, one of London\u2019s poshest casinos, refused to pay Phil Ivey $14.3 million he won playing Punto Banco (a form of baccarat), claiming he cheated. Ivey sued, and has now lost, in Her Majesty\u2019s High Court of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-latest-casino-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8124"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8124\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}