Bernard J. Snowden

Professional poker player Phil Ivey won $9.6 million at the Borgata. The casino paid him, then sued to get it back. At London’s Crockfords, he won another £7.7 million. They refused to pay. In the video below, Ivey says his job is to play the game, find a weakness in the casino and use it to win. He calls the casino his opponent and points out that it spends millions of dollars protecting its games. He wanted a specific brand of cards, a Cantonese-speaking dealer and the same decks reused. The casinos agreed. His playing partner, Cheung Yin Sun, asked the dealer to rotate certain cards, presenting it as a matter of luck. The cards had tiny differences along their backs. Once high-value cards faced one way and the others faced the opposite way, those differences helped identify what was coming next. Ivey never marked the cards. The dealer handled them. But the casino didn’t understand what those requests were doing to the odds. He called it an advantage. The casinos called it cheating. In 2017, the UK Supreme Court ruled against him: persuading the dealer to arrange the cards crossed the line. The casino had approved his requests while expecting to win. Ivey knew something about its own cards that it didn’t. Was he cheating, or should a casino know its own game before accepting someone’s money?