It looks like the 60 Minutes Sports interview will air on Showtime on October 7, 2014. The interview appears to be hard hitting and Phil Ivey was very intense and articulate in the preview. This may be quite an interview. The interviewer is James Brown of Fox Football fame.

All red pros got an unfair advantage through small little rigs in the rng.

disclaimer: i don't think ivey had an unfair advantage on ftp. (i think it's perfectly possible for there to be a poker player who is extremely good at a certain point of time, if not the best, to become dominant for a long time, with a large factor being his own confidence and his opponent's impaired mental game when facing someone who may simply be the best poker player and has had seemingly unbeatable results)

now, my point:
the following statement isn't true:
if he had had an unfair advatage, he would have stopped playing post BF.

reasoning:
a) he's a poker player and obviously likes playing huge cash games everywhere. he doesn't only like playing while cheating.
maybe he did have an unfair advantage, while at the same time if he hadn't had that advantage he would have played nosebleeds anyway and would now have lifetime results like gus or worse. think about it.
b) he might not have known about his secret advantage. might have been a secret tweak to the RNG or whatever.


edit: i didn't press enter wtf



i'd also like to add something positive about ivey, as i really like him as a poker player:
HUNL is obviously far from his main game and he hasn't played it competetively online in a very long time.
however, i recently watched a video on a trainging site where a midstakes coach plays against a good HU reg at nl1k and ivey and the coach watch a video of the match and discuss it. now, while ivey obviously wasn't as well versed as the coach at things like cleverly chosing which combos to use as bluffs or bluffcatchers or which lines/range is least exploitable in a tricky situation, and while he seemed to be technically inferior to these two players, he however seemed to have a superior feel for situations, and he made reads/judgements that ended up being correct vs villain's actual hand or line in several situations where the coach thought/played differently and where the 'technically sound' play seemed to contradict ivey's opinion. now, i'm not saying this means ivey>GTO or something. just saying he's definitely an impressively good poker player

Wow this thread is such BS, cant believe mods havent deleted it yet. Ask any former online pro how much easier the games were back then, and how difficult the games are now. Also, why would Phil cheat and risk his rep when he received 1mega/month from FTP, and was beating the games in Bobbys Room for God knows how much.

And regarding the 5 mega loss on "Polarizing" account: Sample size ( )

this is always repeated and we've all seen it happen, so don't use this stupid ass reason any more. It's been shown time and time again to be false. It's because people are human and if given the chance to cheat for millions with little or no chance of being caught plus no real penalty when caught they will snap do it.

I just don't know why people won't accept that poker is a cheat game to begin with. In a purely honest game the whole point is trying to take advantage of those who don't know as much as you. It is not hard to extend that mindset to soft collusion, then hard collusion, then marked cards, and ultimately dealer manipulation.

Please dont take the above to mean I am a Poker hater. Quite the contrary, i embrace the game specifically because of the above reasoning. I don't like the fact that the rec players have money they made because someone is stupid enough to let them. If some banker or real estate hustler or, if i was lucky enough to play them, which I am not, arab sheik, came into a game I would happily collude with Phil and Doyle to beat him. If some street performer clown who parlayed a hustle into a billion dollar fortune was stupid enough to sit with 4 guys sharing bankroll and playing best hand, i would be elated.

this game was invented to get peoples money. buyer beware and pigs get slaugthered. Just to clarify, if some Yale kid who made a million online, sits in a Peninsula Hotel game, and can't detect the camera gets beat for 300K, I figure he deserved it to. It's like boxing, protect yourself, because noone else is going to. Accept this mindset or take up chess, or maybe world of warcraft.

Two quick notes. It's my understanding that baccarat edge sorting was so new that casino personnel had no idea something was up. And second, it's my understanding that while Ivey was only playing with approximately a 20 percent edge, the edge can be as high as 60 percent if you bet every pair possibility and sort more denominations than Ivey did.

Best wishes,
Mason

edge sorting is around forever...
well described in this 4 years old book
as far as i remember grosejan wrote about it aswell...

wrt to advantage...spotting 8's and 9's gives you about 20%....
tho you have to play a ****load of strait hds...plus the 8 or 9 must be dealt first to you that you can spot it in the window..
long term edge for a session will be roughly 6 to 7%....

Mason,

love it when you reply to posts because you are a boss, but i have no idea what you are getting at in this reply. I dont even know what pair play you are talking about. Are you implying that PI was seeing all four cards (face down) before betting? Spotting the first card out (5 or greater 4 or less) yields a 6 % edge. Pretty huge when you are doing 35 hands per hour at 50k a throw. Don't know about these huge plus EV spots except in the carnival table games like Miss Stud. As far as it not being known,] casinos have been using diamond backs faded into the edge for a while now.

About a year and a half ago I attended the 15th International Conference on Gambling & Risk Taking and heard the paper "Baccarat Edge Sorting: A Further Look" by Teresa Dalton; University of California, Irvine; and Robert Hannum, University of Denver, Colorado. Going by memory, my understanding is that if you sort the 6s, 7s, 8s, and 9s and make the pair bet every time you have the advantage, your edge is about 60 percent.

The author (Hannum) stated that Ivey was only sorting the 7s, 8s, and 9s and did not make the pair bet at every possible opportunity, so only had about a 20 percent advantage.

Here's a link to the conference's program:

http://www.unr.edu/Documents/busines...onfProgram.pdf

where this paper is listed, but I was not able to find the paper itself .

Also, it's my understanding that Ivey did not have to place his bets until after the cards had been dealt. So you statement about having to spot the 8 or 9 in the window does not apply.

Best Wishes,
Mason

Possible, of course, probable, yes, does it change how naturally gifted he is hell no.

dunno about sidebets ...std way to cheat at baccarat is marking 6's,7's,8's and 9's...or getting them turned in same direction when cards are imperfect manufactured....
if we know that the first card to be dealt is from this group, then we make a wager on the player hand.....if the first card is not in this group, then we wager on the banker hand....this strategy gains an edge of 6.8%...

if we are allowed to wager after first four cards are dealt....our edge will ofc sky rocket....65% seems to be about right...

can't imagine a casino with such suicidal security standards...but apparently with some casinos greed>>>>>brain.....
http://www.worldgameprotection.com/t...ch-Your-Backs/

for them to let him bet after the 4 cards are out of the shoe,defeats the whole purpose of the shoe. the big boss/s had to be in on complying with this absurd request. to let him bet after he sees the cards out is a no brainer the cards are marked? of course phil cheated in concert with the mgmnt.team., they shd have at least 5- 10 ppl in jail already.

why do dealers fan the deack,both sides? to impress u? were looking for marks,spots,creases etc, "yea phil ,here ,we dont burn a card before turning, just for u...." idiots all and for phil to be swayed to the dark side and cheat thats what it is. cheating, i feel bad for him, he is tarnished, and we all are weighed and measured, all are found lacking, some more than othes. i lost all respect for the whole lot of poker royalty who betrayed us.

Betrayed by the poker royalty would make a good t shirt

Unless there is some evidence you assume no he is not a cheater. Its worth investigating as it seems poker is synonymous with cheating but until you have something I don't think it is fair to throw accusations about. I don't see the casino incident as either cheating or immoral and I don't think it has any similarities with stealing from players.

Really I think this thread should be locked because asking the question still damages his reputation by association. Its like if someone made a thread asking "Is x a paedophile?" - just asking the question damages the reputation of the person involved because it creates a public perception that its a possibility and that it is reasonable to suspect that person of being liable to do that.

artisan, getting info from the card makers and then perpertrating a scheme to de fraud a legally licenced business is beyond cheating ,you are correct it is Not cheating,im sorry, it is pure thievery. he's a thief is more accurate. thanks for clearing it up. how do you defend his good pals ferguson,furst,gordon,lederer,et al?

The edge sorting isn't cheating. He used an advantage to one up a casino, which every player should/would do if they could. Casinos worldwide take hundreds of billions of dollars a year from players so no one should feel bad for a casino. Casinos in the US can legally ban you for being a winning player. Think about that.

Not sure about his FTP results before/after BF. Pretty suspicious he was such a huge winner when he was sponsored by FTP but since then he can't win.

this

easier to win when you can play everyday against the same competition

No one has posted anything to show that this even may have happened. So anything following from this line of of thought is purely theoretical.

Right?

Yup. Far more likely he (his people) spotted a flaw and exploited it than they were with a card supplier.

All the accusers,

Are shuffle trackers cheaters? Hole carders? Most people in blackjack who are capable don't think twice. What's so different between this and taking advantage of a weak dealer and/or procedure (exactly what happened...)?

eta - hell, what's so different between this and a loser who makes bets based on patterns he thinks he sees on the board? Both are trying to do the same thing...

Is Phil Ivey the Tiger Woods of cheating?

personally i think that every site has some "rungood" and some "runbad" accounts. ivey is playing the highest stakes available online and the playerpool is very small compared to other stakes. so 3 years ago ivey was winning a lot of money and nowadays he isnt. so whats the reasoning? i doubt ivey is getting outclassed in nowadays game so heavy that he looses millions in a short priod of time. the strengh between players should be equal the same or increase decrease a small amount. now fulltilt is under rational group and he had to create a new account (polarizing). i only have one guess and that is that ivey has a runbad account or something like that.

fwi this post reads for some persons like a rigtard post but i dont see any other reason why ivey should loose so much money in such a short period of time.

Well, so what if he did? Its not fraud if he took a legit edge that is not against the rules. The casino allowed it to happen. Anyway **** the casino.

How much is he stuck now post black friday?