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Strange story. He took these casinos for $8+ mils in Baccarat and the casino refused to play. Claims he and his partner were "edge sorting" despite the casino agreeing to use the deck that Ivey requested.
Working with another gambler, a Chinese woman named Cheng Yin Sun, Ivey arrived at various casinos to which he had wired money ahead of time. The pair had a list of demands about the game that the casinos were all too happy to accommodate. Perhaps because the game relies on chance, baccarat players are notorious for believing in luck and rituals. Further, as Sun told the New York Times Magazine in an article last summer, Asian players are also viewed in the industry as superstitious.
So when the pair specified certain conditions, the casinos always obliged. In this case, as recounted in court documents, the conditions they asked for were “(1) a private area or ‘pit’ in which to play; (2) a casino dealer who spoke Mandarin Chinese; (3) a guest [Sun] to sit with him at the table while he played; (4) one 8-deck shoe of purple Gemaco Borgata playing cards to be used for the entirety of each session of play; and (5) an automatic card shuffling device to be used to shuffle the cards after each shoe was dealt, which retained the orientation of each card that Sun requested to be turned.” Again, these conditions might have tipped off a counterparty knowledgeable about gambling (like a casino!) that something was up. But again, Borgata agreed to everything.
They did not agree out of the goodness of their hearts. Casinos love to indulge high-rollers because they know that the longer a player spends at the table, the more money he will lose. So they allowed the requests, and thereby exposed themselves to Ivey and Sun’s advantage: the cards in question had a minute flaw. It was just a 1/32 of an inch deviation in the pattern on the back, but Sun had trained herself to spot the tiny variation. By getting the dealer to rotate certain cards before adding them back into the deck, she and Ivey could more accurately figure out which way to bet the next time around.
The practice, known as “edge sorting,” did not violate any of the rules of baccarat, nor did it conflict with the terms agreed upon by the casino and the gamblers. Nevertheless, Borgata cried foul and sued, claiming Ivey and Sun “knowingly engaged in a scheme to create a set of marked cards and then used those marked cards to place bets based on the markings.”
http://thefederalist.com/2017/01/13/...inos-big-fail/
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Originally Posted by RetiredinPunta
