One thing I like about Baccarat is hearing the word banc, which sounds like bonk, over and over.
Bonk…bonk…bonkbonk…binkbonkbonk.
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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).
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So now that they do know, can we assume they’ll be charged with using marked cards? Will all their revenue from that day forward be confiscated?
I’m just kidding. Of course it will be.
Perhaps some people would trust Ivey less as a result of this. However, the people that matter to him are other high-stakes gamblers, and within that community, one will find very few who believe that what Ivey did here was even in a gray area, let alone ethically wrong. If anything it’s won him the admiration of others.
I’ll admit to bias here, as a large part of my livelihood consists of “abusing games in an unintended way to win” from casinos. They set the rules, I play within the rules, and if their rules allow me to win in ways they didn’t anticipate, that’s their problem.
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They hire professional players and take part of or all the winnings paying a flat fee to the pro. So everyone at the table may not be suckers like one would actually think.
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Fair enough. I tend to admire those who beat casinos as well.
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Yes. Exactly.
The idea that the casino cheated intentionally is absurd because - THEY WIN NO MATTER WHAT! They have math and odds on their side. Unless the laws of math stop working in the Universe, they will NEVER lose.
Hey… that would make a good Doctor Who episode, only we would have to listen to them call it “maths”.
What? I highly doubt they are still using the asymmetrical backs. Again, the casinos have nothing to gain by marked cards, so I am not so sure why some people are so bent on amusing this was done on purpose.
Never heard of this, but I don’t actively play so. I know they make their money as taking a certain percentage of winnings for the dealer service.
Want to share more?
I don’t think anyone is assuming they were doing it on purpose. I think this is an issue of hypocrisy. The law says it’s illegal to play with marked cards, and the casino was dealing marked cards, but somehow they are trying to blame the player. At a casino the player isn’t even allowed to handle the cards, and can’t be held responsible for them being marked. If the law was violated, it was the casino that did the violating.
Though if you wanted to argue in an extreme Machiavellian way, the casino could be using marked cards knowing that if they ever lost big they could claim the player cheated. I don’t think that’s what was going on, but the casino should have the responsibility to make sure the cards are not marked.
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OK, but it doesn’t appear they KNOWINGLY used asymmetrical cards. It seems they are a victim of a manufacturing defect, IMHO.
Ivey KNOWINGLY new the cards were different.
At least that is how I see a difference.
Similarly, if a slot machine flubs up and starts paying out when it shouldn’t that is a result of faulty equipment. (Though somewhere I read/watched about a ring of guys who learned how to “break” certain slot machines for millions - which they largely pissed away.)
I agree, which is why I think it’s absurd the casino is able to sue him to get the money back. I’d make the same argument with the slot machine - it’s your equipment, you are the idiots who created the conditions under which you lost money. I could imagine someone actually tampering with a slot machine, but I think the equivalent of that with cards would be actually manipulating the cards.
Fun story: I remember reading a story about a couple of guys who won on very early digitized slot machines by figuring out which pseudo-random pattern the slot machines were using and doing a bunch of math. Basically they could tell by watching about 10 plays in a row whether the machine had positive EV over the next 100 plays or so. So they walked around casinos watching people play, and then when people got up from machines they either took the seat or didn’t depending on whether the machine was in a good state. They won about $200k in a week, and a casino manager took them aside and said to them: You can keep the money, but tell us what the hell you are doing.
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I THINK the law is that payouts due to faulty machines aren’t valid.
Sort of like if the ATM give you $1000 that isn’t yours.
But an ATM isn’t an opaque random process. The casino could claim any payout what illegitimate and the winner would have no grounds to contest that. I’m not saying you are wrong about the law (I don’t know), I am saying that if that’s the law then it’s bullshit (which wouldn’t surprise me, since a bullshit law that favours casinos would hardly be surprising).
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“Prop players” are commonplace in poker rooms in California, but they’re regulated. The casino pays an hourly fee to the prop, who agrees to sit at whatever table the cardroom wants them in, within a specified range of stakes and game types. The prop plays on their own money and keeps their own wins and losses. The house has no stake in their results, and the props are required to identify themselves to everyone else at the table.
I’m unfamiliar with jurisdictions where it’s legal and commonplace for the house to hire someone to play and have a stake in their results. That seems like a horrible idea. Where have you heard of this?
(For those wondering why the house would pay money for this service… props are generally sent to games that are just starting up, or that have lost a few players, as many recreational players dislike playing at a shorthanded table. Better to cut in to your profit by paying someone a few bucks for an hour than to have the game break up and not generate income at all. Meanwhile, the prop is generally a pro player who’d be playing there anyway, and who considers it a worthwhile trade to get an additional hourly income in exchange for not being able to choose which game they play in.)
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I guess my question is what were the problems that California legislators thought they were solving when they introduced this law? Whatever those problems were, they are presumably happening in jurisdictions that don’t regulate this practice in a similar way (though legislators do sometimes pass laws to deal with imagined problems).
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