My mom once told me, “You can’t get something if you don’t ask.” Phil Ivey has apparently taken advice from my mom.
Details have come out of how the man many consider the best poker player in the world allegedly took advantage of a defect in the playing cards to win nearly $10 million playing baccarat at the Borgata in 2012.
In lawsuit filed by the Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa in United States District Court for the District of New Jersey, the Borgata said that Ivey called the Borgata in April 2012 to make special arrangements for a visit in which he planned to play high stakes baccarat. Under the pretext of superstition, Ivey made a number of requests, including a private gaming area, a dealer who spoke Mandarin Chinese, permission to have a guest sitting with him, an eight-deck shoe of purple Gemaco Borgata playing cards, and an automatic card shuffler. The maximum bet was set at $50,000 and Ivey agreed to deposit $1 million with the casino in advance.
After these terms were agreed upon, Ivey played baccarat for 16 hours at the Borgata on April 11th, 2012 and won $2,416,000. He returned in early May and won $1,597,400.
In July, he went back once again, this time depositing $3 million in “front money” and renegotiating the maximum bet up to $100,000. On that trip, he won $4,787,700. He made one more visit to the Borgata in early October, winning $824,900 after supposedly being up as much as $3.5 million.
The Borgata alleges that Ivey and his companion, a Chinese woman named Cheng Yin Sun, took advantage of a defect in the Gemaco cards to manipulate the odds in their favor. The special requests, the Borgata says, were not because Ivey was superstitious, but because he and Sun knew of the defect and had needed those alterations to the game to set their plan in motion.
Normally, the patterns on the backs of the cards are symmetrical; a card, when face down, looks exactly the same no matter which way it is oriented. The Gemaco cards were miscut, though, making the pattern asymmetrical. As such, Ivey and Sun able to get the dealer to turn certain cards after they were dealt so that some were oriented one way and some the other, making it possible to know which cards were which.
Without going into all the details of the game of baccarat, the important part in this case is that the cards 6, 7, 8, and 9 are key cards. If the first card dealt to the “player” is one of these, the odds of the “player’s” hand winning greatly increase. Ivey and Sun identified these cards and Sun asked the dealer in Mandarin Chinese to turn them opposite the other cards. The automatic shuffler was requested because the device leaves all the cards facing the same direction when shuffled, allowing the “edge sorting” to remain intact. And because the same cards were reused at Ivey’s request, the key cards remained turned shuffle after shuffle.
Once the edge sorting was setup, the leading edge of the first card off the she was visible, giving Ivey and Sun “first card knowledge” and therefore a huge edge.
According to the lawsuit, the normal house edge on a “player” bet (one can bet on either the “player” or the “banker” or a tie) is 1.24 percent. With “first card knowledge,” the customer ends up with a massive advantage of 21.5 percent on “player” bets.
The Borgata is suing Ivey and Sun on twelve counts, including Breach of Contract, Breach of Implied Contract, Breach of Implied Covenant of Good Faith and Fair Dealing, Fraudulent Inducement, and Fraud. It is also suing Gemaco on six counts, including Negligence and Breach of Contract.
The Borgata was not the only casino Ivey beat using edge sorting. In August 2012, he and a Chinese female companion named “Kelly” did the same thing at Crockfords in London (this is not “alleged” – Ivey admitted to it), winning £7.8 million. In a reversal from the Borgata situation, Ivey sued Crockfords in the spring of 2013, as the casino would only pay him back his original £1 million stake.
The two soap operas are intertwined, as the Borgata found out about the Crockfords incident prior to Ivey’s October play at the Atlantic City casino and believes that Ivey began losing on purpose to cover up his edge sorting.
