Famed poker pro with ‘remarkable’ $9.6M scheme has to pay it back

Famed poker pro with ‘remarkable’ $9.6M scheme has to pay it back
washingtonpost.com

I also think it should have been fairly obvious to the casino employees that some kind of advantage play was happening. Ivey is very well known as a poker player, and while he also is known as a gambler, arbitrary superstitions are outside of his character. The specificity of the conditions he asked for should have tipped his hand earlier than they did, but the casinos probably treated him like any other baccarat whale.

Hopefully this decision is reversed. I don't know what part of the law it supposedly broke, but it seems like the judge believes that the player in the casino has a legal obligation to be a sucker.

" “By using cards they caused to be maneuvered in order to identify their value only to them,” the judge wrote, “Ivey and Sun adjusted the odds of Baccarat in their favor. This is in complete contravention of the fundamental purpose of legalized gambling as set forth by [New Jersey’s Casino Control Commission.] Ivey and Sun’s violation . . . constitutes a breach of their mutual obligation with Borgata to play by the rules” of the state’s law. "

That interpretation is equivalent to saying you can't do anything that improves the odds in your favor in any game. By this judge's reckoning, you have to just be a robot that sits passively and accepts all the hand exactly as dealt and not use any strategy to play the game to your advantage. That's fundamentally un-American if you ask me.

I went and had a go at the New Jersey Casino Control Act and I believe that the judge is saying that Ivey violated 5:12-114(2), which states: "It shall be unlawful for any person playing any licensed gambling game knowingly to use bogus or counterfeit chips or gaming billets, or knowingly to substitute and use in any such game cards or dice that have been marked, loaded or tampered with." (Internal punctuation omitted.)

He's not saying that Ivey had to just blithely take whatever happened; instead, I think the judge is making the argument that Ivey "rigged" the cards to function just like marked cards so they should be treated as such. He's not saying that Ivey committed a crime, just that the game was unlawful under the NJ CCA because the NJ CCA prohibits the use, by either party, of cards that seem to be marked. The law doesn't make a distinction as to who is using the cards or who did the marking, even if the marking is done by the manufacturer.

Link to law (it's a long one but I do not like link shorteners): http://lis.njleg.state.nj.us/cgi-bin/om_isapi.dll?clientID=5...