Phil Ivey just lost his FIRST cheating suit, UK judge rules in favor of casino ...
An expert witness who testified on Ivey’s behalf told The Washington Post the gambler was allowed to control the way the game was played because he is a high roller. “High rollers are a precious commodity in the casino industry, and so they are ceded any number of special requests to get their business,” said Eliot Jacobson, a self-described “advantage-play expert” and a former professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara who taught computer science. “It’s competition for scarce resources.”
Jacobson, whose clients include casinos, strongly disagreed with the outcome. The judge “said going forward in the future a casino in the U.K. can be ignorant and should a player come in and win money off them using a new method, the casino doesn’t have to be accountable for their ignorance at all,” Jacobson said. “That to me seems an absurdity.”
Imagine you go to a casino to play blackjack. You find a table, sit down and buy some chips. Gambling has few barriers to entry.
After awhile, you notice: For some reason, all of the cards higher than 9 are marked. Because of some slight imperfection in the deck, you can tell whether a card is an ace, king, queen, jack or ten before it’s turned over. Because of a manufacturer’s mistake, you have a huge advantage over the house. And the dealer doesn’t notice.
You decide to stay at the table. You win $12.4 million dollars. But later, the casino figures out how you won, says you cheated and refuses to pay. So you sue.
So: What’s a judge to do? Were your gains ill-gotten — or is it the casino’s responsibility to watch its own back?
A different version of this question was put before a British court after American poker pro Phil Ivey sued a London casino. In 2012, Ivey was accused of cheating at Punto Banco, a form of baccarat, by Crockfords, which withheld Ivey’s $12.4 million winnings.
And on Wednesday, Her Majesty’s High Court of Justice decided Ivey had done wrong — and won’t get paid.
“He gave himself an advantage which the game precludes,” Judge John Mitting said, as Bloomberg reported. “This is in my view cheating.”
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