I reckon 100% of your numbers are pulled directly from your ass.

If anything I'm being conservatively low on the 80% figure. If you tell the average (non gambling) member of the public that a professional gambler had the cards manipulated so that he could tell high from low in a game that almost entirely depends on knowing that, then a huge majority will say it's cheating, because it is.

Us poker players are aware of other dimensions that the general public are not, which is why we don't see it quite as black and white as that.

The judges IMO fall somewhere in the middle between the public and us.

So your basic position is that edge sorting is cheating? Or that Ivey requesting someone to flip around cards is cheating?

I think if you frame the scenario as the casino knowingly agreeing to every step in the process it would be a lot harder for people to consider it cheating. Swindle would be a good word. Scam is a hard one to get around.

Nonsense.

Inserting marked cards is blatant cheating.

Using cards manufactured within tolerances and approved for use in a casino are not marked cards.

Ok.
Define "randomness". If the dealer has a weak shuffle and I shuffle track do I walk away because I don't want to be accused of cheating? Is shuffle tracking in Baccarat illegal, but legal in Blackjack?
Not true. He asked the dealer to rotate selected cards. The dealer did it with full authority. If the casino had proper loss management procedures in place this request would have absolutely no impact at all in generating an advantage.
It would not be described as cheating. It would be violation of casino rules, e.g. unauthorized handling of cards.
The cards were to be shuffled to assure randomness, yet we know the casino's shuffle was weak and did not assure sufficient randomness. This is not Ivey's fault. He did not violate any rule.
The front-loading dealer goes on break, and the AP leaves. Wow, what a revelation!
Peacock terms, "fix the deck". And the cards were manufactured to known tolerances and the casino approved for use the cards in question.
Then develop a procedure to shuffle the cards that assures an acceptable level of randomness.
The truth is the casino had very weak loss management protocols, and Ivey took advantage of them without violating rules. That is a reasonable definition of advantage play.

Your logic is wrong and so are your numbers. You're leaving the part out where the casino AGREED to the card flipping and that edge sorting is a very well known thing among professional gamblers/casinos.

Ya I mean I didn't feel I even needed to reply because the two scenarios are so different, but well said.

Which they could have stopped by simply denying his requests, which they didn't. Call it hubris, call it greed, call it stupidity; the casino is at fault for agreeing to Iveys requests. Imagine a situation where Ivey requested to see the dealers hole card in blackjack and the casino agreed. Now he can play perfectly. Is that cheating? THEY AGREED TO THE REQUEST. Now after they lose 7m pounds they go to court and claim they didn't know the hole card being exposed gave him an advantage. I mean wtf is this nonsense. They're playing Phil ****ing Ivey at baccarat; of course he's going to gain an advantage. One way to stop that is to deny the requests he makes to alter the game. The level of incompetence is actually mind boggling, and they're extremely lucky to have saved the loss.

It doesn't matter. I can name 100 cases where an innocent man was found guilty based on case law and argument; this point you are stressing is unimportant. We're not debating the validity of the court here.

ok you're right, I seem to remember Lord Lucan proclaimed himself a professional baccarat player. That worked our well.

There are no decisions in Punto Banco other than the initial amount to bet and whether to bet on player bank or tie- the cards dictate all the action. There is no worthwhile edge in counting and I can't think of any edge in shuffle tracking other than possibly betting the tie, but that would be extremely rare just like counting edges. In any case, cards are often used only once.

I would imagine that cheating is possible in any game including Punto, so if you describe such a cheat as a professional, fair enough, but we will have to agree to differ on that one.

Re your comments above some of them are just silly:

wat?


Given sufficient evidence of the activity, that would be a criminal charge and easy conviction, it is laughable to suggest otherwise.

The cards were shuffled perfectly. Ivey effectively marked them thus rendering shuffling pointless.

What has that to do with anything? Ivey arranged the cards by duping the dealer, Ivey fixed the deck by duping the dealer.

I suspect you are right, but not that any injustice has resulted as all arguments were thoroughly considered. I think the Supreme Court only took the case because they wanted to tidy up some law around "dishonesty" and the requirement in some circumstances that a defendant believes that what he did is dishonest. This case was the ideal opportunity to do that without a criminal conviction being at stake.

Nope, people itt, including me, said it was cheating long before the judges ruled...for the simple reason that it obviously is cheating - he used deception to change the nature of the game.

Edge sorting is cheating, whereas observing a natural flaw in the manufacture of the cards without requesting the cards to be unnaturally rearranged I would call shrewd but not cheating.

Yes cheating is too strong a word for a precise description. In my earlier post I stated that the Casino should have been ordered to pay both sides' costs and to donate 7.3M to Gamcare as they were culpable in many ways.

Well known, but against the casino's rules and against the law if it involves outright collusion with the dealer or unwitting collusion by the dealer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_sorting

I believe the manufacturer's cards were known to exceed the tolerances by ivey's partner, which is why the waited for certain decks to be in play (manufacturer was also sued but the cards used were destroyed from what i recall). Knowning that the value cards were discernable if turned, ivey went about a scheme to make the "markings" or defects in the edge of the cards apparent to him but no one else.

In my opinion, he "utilized" the marked cards even though he did not mark them himself or introduce them into the game. The decision makers (the courts, not fantasy polls) determined this constitutes cheating.

By some twist of fate I don't have Crockfords rules of play in front of me. But most of us learned that lying was wrong by the time we got to pre-school. And most of us learned that if you lie to get your way you are dishonest.

I guess I find it surprising that so many here seem to believe that because two world-class scam artists conned low-level employees into stacking the deck for them by lying and deception, they should get a pass. How anyone cannot see that this was a scam of the highest order is beyond me.

But then many of those people also think it was okay for Ivey to take as much as $40 millions off of Full Tilt as well. Even people who revile Fergusson and Lederer give Ivey, the largest beneficiary of the Full Tilt scam, a pass. Go figure.

It's like watching a battered girlfriend explain how her boyfriend isnt really like that. Her bruises, her fat lip, even her black eye will never convince her otherwise.

Um, having looked at the method used to track the edges of the cards, it would seem to me that rotation of the cards makes it easy to use one edge, but using BOTH sides of the cards should make some of the cards recognizable regardless of orientation. This would be a smaller set of cards but should offer an edge that is exploitable.

If this were to be possible, then would everyone agree that such observation is not cheating?

What if you knew this, and requested the dealer to not change decks. At that point would you be cheating, by requesting the house to not correct a flawed deck?

This would not be cheating.

At this point you become a cheater.

If someone flashes you a card, you didn't cheat if you saw it. If you try to see someones cards you are cheating. It's pretty simple.

Full Tilt has nothing to do with this what are you even bringing that up for? Why did you ignore the main point where the casino lied under oath so that they could have a better chance of winning the case? I guess that's an acceptable form of lying and cheating to you

please link details of casino lying under oath

All I can find is this from the first case



Is this what you state is perjury?

If they weren't under oath then they weren't under oath. I said presumably in my original post. Ivey and sun weren't under oath either though. One lie is just as important as the other to the case though. It's so strange seeing you guys frame ivey as this mastermind criminal scam artist and the casino as this defenseless entity.

Quit saying that. Ivey didn't mark the cards. The dealer rotated the high cards on request and the shuffler that the casino used which was also an Ivey request didn't include a rotation. All of Iveys requests had to be verified by someone higher than the croupier, and they all were.

You're missing the number of other things Ivey requested that the casino agreed to, including: specific brand of cards, specific shuffler that didn't include a rotation, etc.

Do you know how edge sorting works? Cause you seem to be commenting on it a lot but don't seem to be confident in the process of it or why it's possible, and how the casino here did a half dozen things which made it possible and not doing any one of those things would have made it impossible.

I bring up Full Tilt because it gives evidence to a pattern of dishonest behavior by Ivey, all the while not owning it and saying his actions were honest, and a matching pattern of forgiveness and denial by his fanboys. He obviously had no qualms about taking Million$ off of a website that was paying it's owners not from revenue but from player deposits. Various people have said it wasn't a Ponzi scheme because reasons, but whatever. At the least it was highly dishonorable and highly dishonest, and Ivey was the largest beneficiary. But he never personally made any restitution, and he was somehow teflon when it came time to play the blame game.

Not aware of the Casino reps lying under oath. Perhaps you should provide a link if you are making such a bold statement. I read the judgement; I didn't note any reference to what casino employees did or didn't know about what edge-sorting was. The case came down to whether or not what Ivey and Sun did was fair play or cheating, not to who at the casino knew what about what they did.

It's pretty obvious that the staff on hand at the time of the scam weren't aware of edge-sorting. And it's pretty clear that the Casino risk-management wasn't aware of the problem either. Whether they should have been more informed or better at their jobs didn't come into the judgement, nor should it have.