A student at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas has invented a new type of card shoe that makes the cheating technique of “edge sorting” impossible.
Edge-sorting became infamous when poker star Phil Ivey was stripped of nearly $20 million in winnings from Crockford’s Casino in London and the Borgata in Atlantic City because courts agreed that he had used the technique to gain an illegal advantage on the casinos. Edge-sorting involves recognizing imperfections on the edges of cards to subsequently identify and predict when high cards are coming next from the shoe.
Brittney Martino, a student in UNLV’s Gambling Innovation class, developed a dealer shoe that uses flashing lights to obscure the edges of the cards. She has secured U.S. Patented No. USPTO 9,895,599 for the device, which explains:
“The purpose of the light(s) is to overlay colors or tones and white background on the back of the playing card. The wavelength, pattern (e.g., discontinuous distribution of light) and intensity of the shone light being sufficient to reduce optical contrast of different colors and/or shades on the back of the first playing card. The pattern can disrupt visible perception of the actual pattern printed on the back of the playing card. The emitted/projected pattern may be significantly different from the printed pattern, or only slightly vary from the printed pattern to confuse optical/visible reading of the printed image.
“Where the back of the card, for example, has red-and-white colors, the emitted light should be sufficiently red to color and blend the white into the red; when the back of the card is greenish, the emitted light should sufficiently match the green, and similarly with single colors or multiple colors on the backs of the cards and the emitters.”
