Note I put the word cheating in quotes, because that is the claim by Borgota casino, Ivey was doing something called “edge sorting” playing baccarat. Basically he was able to exploit a flaw in the cards that Borgata used to increase his odds to almost 20% over the house. The best description is here.
Now Ivey was able to do this because the casino or the dealer specifically acquiesced to several requests he and a partner made, but Ivey did not manipulate or physically do anything himself. It seems to me that the casino simply got played, but the law is a weird thing, so I am not going to claim I know what is legally correct here. However, I definitely side with Ivey on this. The casino fucked up, too bad…that’s why they call it gambling.
Cheating at Baccarat while in the company of a “mysterious” asian woman seems like something that only happens in a Bond novel.
IIRC, courts have generally been friendly to card counters. Obviously this isn’t the exact same kind of thing, but it seems similar enough that I’d bet (not literally) that he’ll keep his money.
Even though the house “bends over backwards to accommodate superstitions”, I think the bosses overseeing the game dropped the ball here. If Phil and Cheng are smart enough to use pattern recognition to their advantage, the casino should also have their smartest bosses looking for those same types of exploits…if you don’t have bosses smart enough to detect them as well, then the casino should not have agreed to higher stakes.
From your link, one of the posters said that the Borgata was probably gonna lean on,
But I think the lack of due diligence by the casino using defective cards and poor monitoring by the dealer and the boss(es) will collectively bite them (the casino) in the ass.
If I walked into a casino and asked them to deal out all of the cards face-up because I was superstitious, I expect that they would just laugh at me. And in the extremely unlikely event that they agreed to my “superstition”, everyone would agree that they were idiots and deserved to lose that money. This case appears to me to be different only in degree from that: There’s no way the casino should have agreed to a request like “Turn all of these specific cards around 180 degrees”, and given that they were so idiotic as to do so, they deserve to lose.
I disagree that its a matter of degree. The difference is that in your hypothetical, the casino knows dealing the cards face-up is to their disadvantage. In the real case, Ivey knew the cards were defective, but the casino didn’t.
I agree Ivey should keep the money in anycase, since it’s the casino’s responsibility to prevent a game from being defective, not the players (though the casino, in turn, has a pretty good case against the card manufacturer.)
I also kind of wonder if, even if they could win in court, it isn’t just to the Casino’s advantage to let cases like this slide. After all, there are a lot of people who go to casinos thinking they’ve figured out some way to beat a game. And the vast majority of them are wrong.
I suspect having the rare case where someone does beat the system known to all the wannabe Rainman types out there might actually be worth a lot more to the casino’s then the couple million they lose.
The casino should know that dealing the cards face-up is to their disadvantage. They should also know that re-arranging the cards a particular way based on their value at a player’s request is to their disadvantage.
While that’s at least initially true,* the very fact Ivey asked for the cards to be dealt in an unusual fashion* should have tipped them off.
I mean, Phil Ivey is one of the greatest card players in the world and all, but Borgata allowing itself to basically be star-struck - and that is the only possible excuse for this stupidity - is hilariously inexcusable. I’m not even a pit boss and I’d know that request was fishy as hell.
This is the most unbelievable story I’ve read today. How can a casino that dumb stay in business?
I used to be interested in magic and gambling when I was in elementary school. I read several books by Scarne, Harold Smith, etc. So I knew when I was nine years old that the VERY FIRST thing you do when someone is winning more than seems likely is to change out the deck, because the cards may be marked or defective. And as others have noted, the request to reorient specific cards should have been a red flag, even if this type of scam was never heard of before, which is not the case.
It doesn’t matter whether the player ever touches the cards, because the dealer may be in on it.
I think the casino should take the money it’s spending on lawyers, and spend it instead on a job search for competent pit bosses.
If the casino accepted his requests at the time how can they turn around and deny him his winnings? And he must have awesome eyesight to be able to spot the imperfections across the table.
That’s not what it sounds like to me. As I read the reports (presumably based on the Casino’s allegations no less) is that the Chinese woman asked, in Mandarin, to have certain cards kept in the same order and orientation. IOW, they weren’t asking to have them dealt a certain way, they were asking to have the “lucky deck’s” orientation preserved. In retrospect this is very fishy, but in the moment I don’t think it’d be particularly strange to have a gambler on a hot streak ask to have the cards left alone.
I compare it to craps players who will demand that dice be slid back to them between rolls a certain way, untouched by the house, and if a die bounces off the table they demand the same one back. In the case here the deck was winning and the dealer mussing the cards would be viewed as the dealer trying to tamper to break the streak.
So, while it was certainly a big con, I don’t think it’s quite as aggressively stupid as is being portrayed.
That said, Casinos aren’t guaranteed to win and they made the series of mistakes that caused this, both management and the dealers, so tough titties. Ivey deserves his money. He didn’t mark the cards, he didn’t have an inside man, he didn’t cheat. The casino happily takes the money that players lose when they do stupid things (and they ply them with booze to boot) so I see no reason for them to get butthurt when they do the shoe is on the other foot.
This is the other reason why it’s so stupid for the casino to sue here. If they try to claim that there’s an “implied contract” that the player isn’t allowed to profit off of the casino’s stupidity, then that sets a precedent that the casino likewise isn’t allowed to profit off of the player’s stupidity… And there goes the entire casino business model.
The concept of “sorts” or “one way backs” has probably been around since the day after playing cards were invented.
Think about those dollar store decks with a picture of a puppy or a sailboat or the like on the back – then think about how easy it would be to line up all the high cards or all the red cards or all the face cards or whatever so the backs all face the same way. That’s what this is about.
The casino did not follow their own shuffle procedure. They beat themselves.
The thing is, Ivey (and most likely the same woman) pulled off the exact same stunt in a casino in London, England. In that case, the casino got wise and kept the players’ winnings and pushed their stake back at them.* That means not one but two casinos at around the same time had faulty cards and baccarat dealers that could be taken advantage of so easily. I would really like to know if the two casinos got their cards from the same source. And whether Ivey had someone else tip him off as to which casinos were using those exact type of cards.
*In that case, Ivey is suing the casino for his winnings. At Borgata, he seems to have pocketed the winnings and now the casino is suing him to get them back. Hmmmm…
The cards are not faulty. They are a common design. You can do the same thing with most any cards on the market; just look for any kind of asymmetry in the back design, the more subtle the better. It is a very old trick used by magicians, card sharps and various tricksters and scammers for hundreds of years.
The beauty of this scheme is that Ivy got the casino to do the move for him. He was not (and will not be) arrested. The casino is simply hoping to recover some of the money by lawyering him into making a settlement.
The only crime here is the criminal stupidity of the casino managers for permitting such a crucial part of their shuffle procedure to be manipulated. This may not be the actual oldest card trick in the book but it is very very close.
They can’t possibly win in court. The entire thing is on the surveillance tape and Ivy & friend didn’t touch the cards. There will be a log in the Surveillance Room when the pit called Surveillance to explain the irregularities in the card handling and shuffling procedures. The log will mention by name the casino supervisor who authorized it and the video will show several supervisors / managers standing there allowing it to all take place.
It’s even worse, though. The Borgata could have kept this mostly quiet. Few outside the scene would have ever heard or cared,. By doing this, they’ve just made themselves look like complete buffoons. They also just advertised themselves as the place to stay away, because they’re liable to sue winners.
Only a couple of days ago I watched The Player: Secrets of a Vegas Whale on Netflix, about blackjack player Don Johnson who negotiated playing conditions that allowed him to win millions. He even explains all the things he insisted on. While watching it I was amazed that the casinos could be so easily fooled. Guess I don’t much about how they operate.
I agree that the casino is in the wrong to sue over this, but isn’t this also going to hurt Ivey? I mean, I wouldn’t let him play in my casino and if I played poker, I don’t think I’d want to include him in a game for money.
Of course, with $30 million in the bank, maybe he doesn’t care.
I don’t see how the casino has a case. If I asked a dealer to tell me what his hole card was in blackjack, and he told me, is that my fault for asking? If you could figure out the hole card with the same precision as you could in this baccarat scheme, i have a feeling your odds would increase dramatically.
And I don’t see this hurting Ivey either. It certainly doesn’t change my opinion of him, because this is apparently a well known method (by the Casinos!), and he basically asked the casino to flip certain cards. The answer “no” would have been given to any of us, because we aren’t Phil Ivey. But good for him for taking advantage of the casinos, especially since it was within their power not to do it.
I don’t exactly understand the issue with the cards, and how flipping them would provide the player with the correct info (I understand the basic concept, I just don’t understand what the cards look like yet, nor do i understand why a Casino would not replace a deck of cards that could be exploited like this with one that cannot be. Perhaps another link will show the example with actual cards instead of a description).
Personally, I think Ivey wins this hands down and the casino knows it. However they are trying to inform the gambling world they are onto this and will no longer fall for it, and they are also trying to embarrass Ivey publicly. Maybe some folks will look at him differently, but I think gamblers will only like him more. He exploited a casino with their help. There isn’t much compassion for a casino, so why would anyone feel negatively toward someone who did nothing wrong and gained a huge advantage?
I haven’t seen anything on any youtube video, but the drawing in the linked article, after I studied the card, does show the subtle difference, so i can understand the concept.
What I am more impressed with is Ivey’s ability to spot that difference from across a table, just hoe far was he from the cards? I am unfamiliar with baccarat. Is he sitting on top of the dealer, a couple of feet away on the opposite side of the table? I assume since it is just him and the Chinese woman against the house, he would be close enough to see the difference in the card backs.
I would also think that this is an easy thing for the card manufacturer to fix. All they have to do is change the pattern on the back of the card to be symmetrical whichever way the card is lying.