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Comment by Terr_

11 years ago

So if I understand this correctly, the casino alleges:

1. The casino was using cards which, when viewed edge-on, were not rotationally symmetrical. (A separate complaint against the card supplier.)

2. Over multiple rounds of play, as players handled the cards, they rotated them to encode a high/low value before returning them to the dealer.

3. The players requested an automatic shuffler so that the cards rotations were not randomized by the shuffling process.

4. Players observed the edges of the "shuffled" card stack to determine whether incoming cards were high/low, using this information to improve their odds.

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Terr_

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downandout  11 years ago

Players were not allowed to handle the cards. In this case, they were playing mini-Baccarat. In traditional Baccarat, players are allowed to touch the cards and even bend and turn them all they want, but all 8 decks are thrown out after every shoe (i.e. touched cards are never played again). In mini-Baccarat, players do not touch the cards, and the cards are reshuffled instead of thrown away. This type of scheme only works in mini-Baccarat (and Punto Banco - a mini-Baccarat variation), and the casino would only comply with the unusual requests that made this scheme possible for very big players. Casinos are very tolerant of high rollers - Caesars Palace was fined $250,000 a few years ago for allowing a man to jump up on a Baccarat table and dance before placing his bets.

In this case, Ivey had an Asian woman with him, and she told the dealer that she was superstitious and asked that the dealer turn cards of certain values a different direction. That she was Asian was important because the casinos are claiming that Ivey requested that his dealers speak Mandarin Chinese, and that the instructions to turn the cards were given by the woman in Mandarin so that supervisors wouldn't hear and immediately object to the request. In any event, the dealers complied. This incredibly simple strategy apparently worked at Borgata and Crockfords in London, to the tune of over $20 million in combined winnings. Because the casino could have simply said "no," I find it extremely unlikely that the Borgata will prevail here.

This was much more of a social engineering hack than anything else. Interestingly, because of this issue, casinos (at least in Las Vegas) have purchased cards with a new type of background that looks like pixelated noise - much harder to do this with.

  • dfc  11 years ago

    Do you have any links to the pixelated cards?

    This dancing story is nuts:

      > A complaint filed  by the board against Caesars Palace  says a customer was
  > playing baccarat in the high-limit baccarat room on Oct. 10, 2009. On three
  > separate occasions, the man climbed onto the baccarat table from his chair,
  > walked on the table and made a  bet before returning to stand on his chair,
  > eventually sitting down, according to the complaint.
  >
  > On the  second occasion, the player  performed a dance on  the table before
  > returning to  his chair, the  control board said. The three  incidents took
  > place over a 45-minute period, according to the complaint.

    (I think this is what you are referring to. But it is from 4 years ago.)

    Link to complaint: http://gaming.nv.gov/modules/showdocument.aspx?documentid=30...

  • mikeash  11 years ago

    What a ridiculous lawsuit. It's barely removed from a bank suing a customer because the customer walked in and said, "Can I have a million dollars?" and the bank gave them a million dollars.

ronaldx  11 years ago

Minor technical correction:

Players are not typically allowed to handle the cards in punto banco, so would have needed the dealer to turn the cards for them.

This, I understand, is one reason they preferred a Mandarin-speaking dealer.

Sometimes you're given the option to deal out the cards yourself, but this would be more likely to break Ivey's careful edge sorting. If it was offered, I would strongly tend towards declining it.

Other thoughts:

Traditional card counting might still have been useful, assuming only the top card would be readable.

Finally, this is only what Ivey has admitted to. I politely suggest that there are other ways of getting an advantage.

  • dlss  11 years ago

    This. A previous article stated that Ivey and his friend talked the dealer into rotating some cards (6s 7s 8s and 9s) prior to the first shuffle.

    • gojomo  11 years ago

      I don't think any dealer or casino would agree to a total re-orientation before the first shuffle/game.

      My impression from prior coverage was that the rotation occurred as the cards were revealed during play, so that on each next shoe, more and more (potentially all ) of the intended cards were reversed.

      3 replies →

    • imjk  11 years ago

      Can you link me a source to that article? Phil Ivey is perhaps the greatest living card player in the world. Do not underestimate the near autistic savant level of perception and mental capacity that he and other genius card players have. I can imagine Ivey still being able to gain an exploitable edge merely by simply recognizing the direction in which specific cards are returned into the deck.

      5 replies →