Phil Ivey's Edge-Sorting Lawsuits: Crockfords and Borgata Explained

Crockfords Casino, London, August 2012. A high-limit baccarat game. Phil Ivey, professional poker player, begins a session. He plays a particular method: he requests that the Gemaco deck be used, and he requests that the dealer always orient the deck the same way when presenting cards to him.

The technique is called edge sorting. It is not cheating in the conventional sense. Ivey is not marking cards or collaborating with the dealer. What he is doing is recognizing that some cards, when printed, have slightly asymmetrical patterns on the back. A king of hearts and a king of spades, rotated opposite, can be distinguished by their pattern edges if you are looking for it.

Ivey knows this. He requests a particular deck, requests consistent orientation, and then uses the pattern variation to know whether the dealer's hole card is high or low. Over three nights, he wins 1.2 million British pounds.

Crockfords reviews the footage, realizes what happened, and denies him the winnings. Ivey sues. The UK courts rule that what Ivey did was cheating, despite no physical manipulation of cards or collusion with staff. He lost.

The Borgata Case

A year later, Ivey plays baccarat at Borgata in Atlantic City using the same technique. He wins roughly 9.6 million dollars. Borgata denies the payout. Ivey sues in New Jersey courts.

The New Jersey courts take a different view than London did. They argue that using information that the casino provided (the cards themselves) to make a more informed decision is not cheating. The cards were not marked by Ivey. The deck was chosen by the casino. The dealer was trained by the casino. If the result is that someone with pattern recognition uses that information to make better decisions, that is not fraud, it is superiority.

Ivey wins the New Jersey case. The Borgata appeals. The appellate court reverses, finding that Ivey's manipulation of the deck orientation process was collusion with the dealer, even if unspoken. The dealer was consistently orienting cards in a way that benefited Ivey's purposes.

This went to the New Jersey Supreme Court. In 2016, the court ruled in Ivey's favor. 4 to 3. The majority opinion held that edge sorting, while sophisticated, did not constitute cheating under New Jersey law because Ivey did not mark the cards or communicate explicitly with the dealer. He used information available to him.

The difference between the two courts is instructive: London found that sophistication could be cheating. New Jersey found that only explicit manipulation could be cheating.

Crockfords brought its case to the UK Supreme Court. In January 2017, the Supreme Court reversed the lower courts. The majority, 4 to 1, held that what Ivey did did not constitute cheating under the Gambling Commission's regulations. He had not broken any explicit rule. The casino had chosen the deck. The casino had allowed the orientation requests. The casino had not specified that patterns were off-limits.

However, Crockfords applied a different legal argument. They sued under contract law, arguing that Ivey had breached the casino's terms and conditions by engaging in behavior that violated the casino's reasonable expectations. The court found that argument had merit. Ivey had used information the casino clearly did not expect him to use, and in doing so, he had breached the implicit contract.

The practical outcome was complex. Ivey kept his winnings in New Jersey but lost them in London. The legal precedents were contradictory: the UK criminal standard said his action was not cheating, the UK civil standard said it violated reasonable expectations, and the US courts said he had done nothing wrong.

The Gambling Commission's subsequent guidance on edge sorting is telling. They clarified that casinos must ensure that all cards are genuinely random in pattern orientation. They did not ban pattern recognition. They just mandated that casinos eliminate the pattern difference entirely.

What this revealed was an asymmetry in casino regulation. In the UK, the standard is: anything that violates reasonable expectations of fair play can be prohibited, even if it is not technically cheating. In the US, the standard is: anything that does not explicitly violate the rules is permissible.

Ivey's edge-sorting cases taught operators that the legal question of what constitutes cheating is jurisdiction-specific. An action legal in New Jersey can be illegal in London. An action that is not criminal fraud can still be a breach of civil contract. The courts did not provide clarity. They provided a map of how differently different jurisdictions define the boundary between skill and wrongdoing.