London’s Supreme Court has ruled in favor of Genting’s Crockfords casino in a high profile “edge sorting” case against professional gambler and poker legend Phil Ivey.
Five Supreme Court justices upheld a previous decision by the Court of Appeal that found Ivey had effectively cheated when he applied the technique – which involves identifying tiny defects on the backs of a specific brand of playing cards – to win £7.7 million playing Punto Banco in 2012.
In their final ruling, the judges insisted, “That Mr Ivey’s actions amounted to cheating is unassailable. It is an essential element of Punto Banco that the game is one of pure chance, with cards delivered entirely at random and unknowable by the punters or the house.
“What Mr Ivey did was to stage a carefully planned and executed sting. The key factor was the arranging of the several packs of cards in the shoe, differentially sorted so that this particular punter did know whether the next card was a high value or low value one.
“If he had surreptitiously gained access to the shoe and re-arranged the cards physically himself, no one would begin to doubt that he was cheating. He accomplished exactly the same result through the unwitting but directed actions of the croupier, tricking her into thinking that what she did was irrelevant.
“It may be that it would not be cheating if a player spotted that some cards had a detectably different back from others, and took advantage of that observation, but Mr Ivey did much more than observe; he took positive steps to fix the deck. That, in a game which depends on random delivery of unknown cards, is inevitably cheating. That it was clever and skilful, and must have involved remarkably sharp eyes, cannot alter that truth.”
The Ivey case has been followed closely by operators around the world, with both the High Court in 2014 and the Court of Appeal in 2016 previously ruling in Crockfords favor after finding that Ivey’s use of edge sorting gave him an unfair advantage and therefore amounted to cheating. A nearly identical case involving US$10 million Ivey and partner Cheung Yin Sun won at the Borgata in Atlantic City around the same time was also ruled in the property’s favor.
However, the case has also divided opinion over whether advantage play should be labeled cheating with Ivey maintaining his innocence after this latest ruling.
“At the time I played at Crockfords, I believed that edge sorting was a legitimate advantage play technique and I believe that more passionately than ever today,” he told Associated Press.
“It makes no sense that the UK Supreme Court has ruled against me, in my view, contrary to the facts and any possible logic involved in our industry. It is because of my sense of honor and respect for the manner in which gambling is undertaken by professional gamblers such as myself that I have pursued this claim for my unpaid winnings.”
