My understanding of baccarat is that it would not benefit the house in any way to know exactly what cards are coming up. While there might be variants were it would, I think ultimately the idea of having your dealers actually make decisions at the table would be flat out insane for a casino for any card game. Dealers should be gussied up robots. The whole point of the game is that the casino knows the odds exactly.
Thanks for all your insights. As someone who was baffled at the casino’s behaviour, it should have been obvious many poker pros are basically compulsive gamblers and that’s how they got into that situation.
And, yes, it does sound like the judge’s ruling is basically saying that the law says you aren’t allowed to win.
To me this situation is plain: Ivey and Sun clearly abused the game in an unintended way to win, but the casino went along with it every step of the way and they could have very easily avoided this. It’s the equivalent of showing up at a craps table and saying, “Can I use my own dice?” Sure, playing craps with loaded dice is cheating, but if they said yes then they agreed to play the rigged game with me.
The flip side of this is that Phil Ivey has very much damaged the “confidence and trust” that people will have in Phil Ivey. Ultimately I’m not sure that’s worth the amount of money he won (to him, it would be easily worth it to me).
