Phil Ivey has lost a £7.7 million case in the UK as the country’s Supreme Court ruled that Ivey did gain an unfair advantage through edge sorting while playing baccarat at Crockford’s Club casino in 2012.
The casino withheld paying the £7.7 million Ivey won in the session saying he had broken casino rules, but returned his initial £1 million stake. The casino won in several lower court cases and now in the UK Supreme Court.
The case involved Ivey and a partner, Cheung Yin Sun, exploiting subtle flaws in the designs on the back of cards to determine which cards would be dealt next. Ivey had asked Crockford’s dealer to arrange the cards in a way that made it easier to read the cards coming out—a technique called edge sorting.
Ivey has maintained that he was never dishonest and was simply using skill to exploit a weakness in the casino’s handling of the game and it was up to the casino to protect the integrity of the game. He argued, for example, that the casino’s dealers did not have to arrange cards as he asked.
The court, however, upheld lower court rulings that Ivey and his partner had gained an unfair advantage over the casino.
The five Supreme Court justices unanimously upheld the Court of Appeal’s decision on the case saying it was essential that the baccarat game—in this case punto banco, a more random version of baccarat—remained a game of pure chance with neither the casino nor the player being able to beat the randomness of the cards that were dealt, according to BBC News.
The judges were more critical of Ivey than lower courts, which had essentially ruled that while Ivey had been honest, he had still gained an unfair advantage in the game.
“What Mr. Ivey did was to stage a carefully planned and executed sting,” the judges said in the Supreme Court ruling, likening Ivey’s actions to “confidence games.” The judges also ruled that Ivey “duped the croupier into unwittingly fixing” the cards.
“This has been a landmark case in how the courts approach cheating in the modern day,” Paul Willcock, president and chief operating officer of Genting UK told BBC News after the decision. “This entirely vindicates Genting’s decision not to pay Mr. Ivey, a decision that was not taken lightly.”
Ivey, who has said the case was about his honor, was disappointed in the ruling.
“It makes no sense that the U.K. Supreme Court has ruled against me, in my view, contrary to the facts and any possible logic involved in our industry,” Ivey said in a press statement. “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.”
