Phil Ivey is widely regarded as one of the greatest poker players ever to sit at a table. But the biggest paydays of his career didn't come from poker at all — they came from baccarat, and from a technique so obscure that most casinos didn't even know it existed until it cost them tens of millions of dollars. The video above walks through how "edge sorting" worked, and how it ended not with Ivey banking a fortune, but in courtrooms in New Jersey and London.
What edge sorting actually exploits
Edge sorting isn't card counting, and it isn't a hack in the technical sense. As the clip explains, it targets a manufacturing quirk: on some card decks, the pattern printed on the back isn't perfectly symmetrical along the long edge. Look closely enough and certain cards can be told apart from the back, before they're even turned over.
On its own, that's not much use — you'd need the cards to be dealt in a way that keeps the "tell" edges facing consistently. This is where Ivey's edge, and his partner Cheung Yin Sun's sharp eye for the flaw, came in. Playing baccarta at Borgata in Atlantic City and Crockfords in London, the pair asked for a specific brand of cards and had the dealer rotate certain cards under the guise of superstition. Once enough key cards were turned the same way through the shoe, they could identify high-value cards before they were revealed, tilting a house-edge casino game into a player-favourable one.
The result, as widely reported, was staggering: around US$9.6 million from Borgata across several sessions, and roughly £7.8 million (about US$12 million at the time) from Crockfords. Both casinos noticed the winning patterns and refused to pay some or all of the money.
Skill, advantage play, or cheating?
That's the question two separate courts had to answer, and it's why the story has become a reference point in gambling law. Borgata sued Ivey and Sun in the United States; a New Jersey federal judge found in 2014 that they hadn't defrauded the casino outright, but had breached their contract with it, and ultimately ordered Ivey to repay the winnings — a bill that ran past US$10 million with costs, later settled privately in 2018 on undisclosed terms.
In the UK, the Crockfords dispute went all the way to the Supreme Court. In 2017, all five justices ruled against Ivey, finding that manipulating the dealer into sorting the cards amounted to taking "positive steps to fix the deck" — cheating in the eyes of the law, even though Ivey never touched a card himself. Crockfords kept the winnings.
Why it matters to punters
The takeaway isn't really about baccarat — it's about where the line sits between spotting a genuine edge and manufacturing an unfair one. Ivey found a real, verifiable flaw and used skill and observation to exploit it, yet two separate legal systems still called it cheating because he engineered the conditions himself. It's a useful reminder for anyone who follows advantage play: an edge that depends on tricking the other side of the table rarely survives scrutiny, in a casino or anywhere else. This is a legal and historical story, not a betting strategy — nothing here is a suggestion to chase an "edge" of your own at the tables.
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