Phil Ivey loses Supreme Court gamble

Angel Co Ltd be kept in use after they noticed the design on the back was slightly asymmetrical.

They then sorted the strongest cards – seven, eight and nine – by asking the dealer to turn them upside down. These could then be identified the next time they came into play. Crockfords said Ivey and Sun hid the strategy by saying their requests were based on superstition and the shoe was a “lucky deck”.

It turned a 1% advantage in favour of the casino in Mayfair, central London into a 6.5% advantage in favour of the player.

Lord Hughes added: “If Ivey had surreptitiously gained access to the shoe and re-arranged the cards physically himself, no one would begin to doubt that he was cheating.

“He accomplished exactly the same result through the unwitting but directed actions of the croupier, tricking her into thinking that what she did was irrelevant.”

The Supreme Court upheld the majority decision of the Court of Appeal, which dismissed Ivey’s case on the basis dishonesty was not a necessary element of “cheating”.

The case was dubbed “the battle of the dictionaries” as Ivey relied on the 1989 Oxford English Dictionary definition of cheat, “to deal fraudulently, practice deceit”, while the casino used the

Concise Oxford English definition, “to act dishonestly or unfairly in order to gain an advantage”.

Lord Hughes said it was an essential element of Punto Banco that it was a game of pure chance, with cards delivered entirely at random and unknowable by punters or the house. But, he said, the pro player took “positive steps to fix the deck”.

Last year a US court told Ivey to hand over a similar sum won using the same method in Atlantic City, New Jersey four months before visiting Crockfords.

Mr Ivey said after yesterday’s ruling: “I believed edge-sorting was a legitimate Advantage Play technique.” But Genting’s Paul Willcock said: “This entirely vindicates our decision not to pay Mr Ivey.”

russell.myers@mirror.co.uk

LORD HUGHES SUPREME COURT JUDGE