B. E.

Phil Ivey won £7.7 million at a casino that refused to pay him. The UK Supreme Court later ruled he cheated. Poker legend Daniel Negreanu called the way casinos treated him “disgusting.” In the video below, Negreanu explains why he believes the casinos were happy to exploit Ivey until he found a way to beat them. Ivey and his partner spotted tiny differences on the backs of the cards. They persuaded the dealer to rotate certain cards, allowing them to distinguish high cards from low ones. The casino supplied the decks and agreed to their requests. Ivey never needed to touch the cards himself. Negreanu argues that a casino cannot offer someone a game, accept their money and then reject the result when they win. He points to the free drinks, flights and other perks casinos use to keep gamblers playing. He also describes casinos offering Ivey rebates on his losses. They wanted his business badly enough to give him better terms, and he worked out how to use those terms against them. If a casino agrees to every request and then refuses to pay when you win, who actually broke the rules?

Professional poker player Phil Ivey won $9.6 million at the Borgata. The casino paid him, then sued to get it back. At London’s Crockfords, he won another £7.7 million. They refused to pay. In the video below, Ivey says his job is to play the game, find a weakness in the casino and use it to win. He calls the casino his opponent and points out that it spends millions of dollars protecting its games. He wanted a specific brand of cards, a Cantonese-speaking dealer and the same decks reused. The casinos agreed. His playing partner, Cheung Yin Sun, asked the dealer to rotate certain cards, presenting it as a matter of luck. The cards had tiny differences along their backs. Once high-value cards faced one way and the others faced the opposite way, those differences helped identify what was coming next. Ivey never marked the cards. The dealer handled them. But the casino didn’t understand what those requests were doing to the odds. He called it an advantage. The casinos called it cheating. In 2017, the UK Supreme Court ruled against him: persuading the dealer to arrange the cards crossed the line. The casino had approved his requests while expecting to win. Ivey knew something about its own cards that it didn’t. Was he cheating, or should a casino know its own game before accepting someone’s money?