Is Phil Ivey a Cheater?

We all know that Phil Ivey is an elite poker player. He would almost certainly win a poll of who is currently the best poker player in the world and would be in the running for greats player of all time. We also know he loves to gamble away from the poker tables. In light of recent stories about his baccarat play, though, the question has arisen: is he a cheater?

To quickly recap, Ivey won millions of dollars playing baccarat at both the Borgata and Crockfords in London in 2012. Before playing multiple sessions at each casino (the sessions at the Borgata spanned several months), he made special requests to management, outlining very specific concessions he wanted made for him. These requests included things like high maximum betting limits, a dealer who spoke Mandarin Chinese, the use of an automatic card shuffler, and permission to have a guest (who not coincidentally spoke Mandarin Chinese) with him. Ivey needed all of this to take advantage of miscut decks of cards that he knew were being used by the casinos in order to engage in “edge sorting.” The miscut decks, combined with the dealer’s willingness to turn certain key cards at Ivey and his guest’s request, allowed Ivey to know with a high degree of accuracy what sort of card was coming off the deck first, thus giving him a gigantic advantage.

But was that cheating? The casinos certainly think so. Crockfords is refusing to pay Ivey his winnings and the Borgata is suing him to get back his winnings. The Borgata specifically feels he cheated because he asked for the concessions under the guise of being superstitious, thus intentionally misleading the casino.

I feel that the casinos are grasping at straws. Ivey did not cheat. They did not have to grant any of his requests. Whoever was in charge of the baccarat game could have told the dealer not to turn any cards (the dealer could have also refused). Of course, they did all of this because Ivey is a whale and the casinos wanted the chance to take his money. Be careful what you wish for, as the saying goes.

Besides, in addition to all those concessions the casino dug its own grave by either a) not noticing the miscut decks, or b) not caring about them. Whichever situation it may be, it is mind boggling that faulty cards could have been in play, and in a private, high stakes game, at that. Casinos routinely throw out decks that have even the slightest sign of a problem. The most imperceptible scratch on the back of card can get an entire deck tossed.

It’s one thing if the only thing that gave Ivey an advantage was a single deck of miscut cards that simply went unnoticed. I could see how maybe, possibly, the casino would have a gripe. After all, if I see an ad for a brand new Porsche for $6,000, I’m not going to get pissed off when the dealership won’t honor it because it was a typo. But in Ivey’s case, the casinos knew what they were doing. There’s no way that they could have genuinely thought that Ivey was just superstitious. He wasn’t some random with money to burn. He was, as Norman Chad would say, Phil Freakin’ Ivey. The casinos wanted to reach into his deep pockets and dammit, they would do anything they needed to do to accomplish that.

By coming after Ivey, the casinos were simply freerolling. Would they have given him his money back had he lost money while playing with a faulty deck? Of course not.

While what Ivey did might not feel 100 percent kosher to some people, since it can come across as angle-shooting, it was certainly not cheating. He never touched the cards and never did anything that the casino did not expressly permit. He outsmarted the casinos and deserves the money he won.