In 2012, poker pro Phil Ivey and his friend, Cheung Yin Sun, won £7.7 million playing punto banco at London’s Crockfords Casino. After a delay because of a bank holiday, though, the casino refused to pay them, claiming that they cheated. In 2014, a High Court ruled in the casino’s favor and now, a three-judge Court of Appeal of England and Wales panel has upheld that decision.
Ivey and Sun used a method of keeping track of cards called “edge sorting.” They had discovered that the cards the casino used had been miscut, making the pattern on the back of the cards uneven. To take advantage of this, they asked the dealer in the punto banco game to rotate certain key cards (after they were seen) 180 degrees. To the untrained eye, this seemed to make no difference, but Sun could see the slight differences in the card backs, so this rotation gave away the value of the cards. Ivey and Sun also requested that the casino “hold the shoe,” meaning that they wanted to have the same deck used when they came back the next day, claiming superstition.
After the appellate ruling, Ivey released a statement, saying:
This decision makes no sense to me. The trial judge said that I was not dishonest and the three appeal judges agreed but somehow the decision has gone against me. Can someone tell me how you can have honest cheating? I’d like to add that I am very grateful to Lady Justice Sharp who decided that the trial judge was “wrong” to decide that I had cheated.
Lady Justice Mary Arden, in writing the majority opinion, used a sports betting example to help explain cheating without dishonesty:
It is possible to think of actions which are neither deception nor interference with the process of the game, which may in some circumstances constitute cheating. For example, someone who has material information (for example, as to whether a star player will play in a particular game) which is not in the public domain may place a bet on the result of the game on the basis of that information. That person may be guilty of cheating because he has used his unequal access to confidential information to make a profit. In this type of situation, Parliament may well have taken the view that it was enough that covert use of confidential information was intrinsically wrong and that it could amount to cheating without any requirement for subjective dishonesty.
In her conclusion, she further explained how the edge sorting was cheating (several paragraphed snipped for space):
The crucial factor in this case is that Punto Banco is a game of pure chance. What Mr Ivey caused Crockfords’ staff to do was to take steps which would alter the chance of his winning materially by some 8% in his favour. In my judgment, because of his plan to play using the knowledge obtained from the reorienting of the cards under his direction, those matters amounted to interference with the process by which the game was conventionally played. It was quite different from card-counting which involves memorising where particular cards are.
…..
The question whether a reasonable person would say this is cheating turns on whether there was a dramatic effect on the odds in the game. Punto Banco, as I have already said, is a game of pure chance, and not a game of mixed skill or chance. The casino is highly regulated. It does not try to win every game but the house edge means that it should win over time. Edge-sorting materially altered the odds in the game of Punto Banco offered by Crockfords.
In the circumstances of this case, the fact that Mr Ivey was an advantage player did not mean that his actions were simply part of a cat and mouse game between him and the casino, and not cheating. Moreover, on the judge’s findings [case citation], Mr Ivey took steps not explicitly mentioned in his description of what he said an advantage player would be entitled to do.
