On the November 24, 2015 Gambling with an Edge radio show, our guest was surveillance expert Willy Allison. Willy provides consultation to casinos, helping casinos protect themselves from a variety of “threats” including strong players. One of our questions for Willy related to the lawsuits involving Phil Ivey. We suggested that however the cases work out in court, the executives at the casinos involved probably admitted to themselves that it was their own fault for not protecting the game better. We asked Willy how much he thought the surveillance departments were to blame. He basically said, “extremely little or not at all.”
(For those not familiar with the Phil Ivey cases, Ivey and his Asian female partner were playing versions of baccarat. They requested a particular type of card, cut imperfectly so as to make it readable from the back when some were oriented north-south and the remainder of the deck was oriented south-north. They also asked for a Chinese-speaking dealer and wanted to use an automatic shuffling machine. After playing a while, Ivey’s partner requested the dealer to let them peek at the cards and decide, based on superstition, whether to orient them north-south or south-north. Superstition had nothing to do with it. Once turning the cards the way they wanted, just by seeing the orientation of the top card and betting Player or Banker respectively, they obtained something like a 6% edge over the house.)
In our discussion, Willy referred to what Ivey and his partner did as a “scam.” Richard Munchkin, my co-host on the radio show, expressed an objection to that word.
While all of us agreed that Ivey and his partner planned this all out and their goal was to use this type of “edge-sorting” to extract a large sum of money from the casino, we disagreed whether this was a “scam” or a “plan.” The first word implies something illegal. The second word carries no such implication.
For Willy Allison, who conducts surveillance seminars and teaches casinos the value of using standardized procedures while stressing that casinos should not to deviate from them, the “normal” order of things is for the casinos to follow procedures. If you can induce the casino to deviate from those procedures, it violates the integrity of the game. He believes it is wrong to violate how the game is designed.
Skilled players have a different outlook. We know the “normal” order is for casinos to win and the players to lose. That normal order is not attractive to us. So we look for legal methods to change that normal order.
At a poker table, where Ivey is at least in the discussion for being the best player in the world, if he notices a player shakes a little when he is bluffing, he certainly is going to use that information. If he can sometimes ask a question and observe how his opponent reacts, he’ll use information gathered there as well.
My vote (which doesn’t count for much) is that Ivey’s plan was clever, well-executed, and perfectly legal. Willy’s argument on the show was that the edge-sorting gave Ivey information that nobody else had. Although the discussion moved on to different things and Willy didn’t specifically say whether he thought what Ivey did was legal or illegal, he did say that it violated procedures. I concluded from that comment that he felt it was either illegal or should be illegal.
Who’s right? It’s up to the courts. One court in London has ruled in the casino’s favor, although it did say that Ivey did not cheat. That decision is being appealed. There are similar cases in New Jersey and Connecticut and it is unclear how judges will rule in those cases.
So even though we didn’t reach a firm conclusion on this, I think the airing of both sides of the argument made for a good show. I encourage you to listen.