Phil Ivey Can’t Keep His Fairly Won Ill Gotten Booty

There are any number of reasons not to go gambling at casinos. For one, it’s gambling. The specific reason not to do it is built right into the name. Like sex disease. Though the underlying allure remains rather strong. Secondary reasons might include the unhealthy emotional state gambling necessitates and the smell of stale seafood juice on those in your peer group. Also the fact that casinos hate to lose and hire lots of guys with big sticks and state legislators and Congressmen to make sure they do not.

Famed poker champion Phil Ivey and his lady gambling partner Cheung Yin Sun discovered a way to game the gamers in casino baccarat providing them an odds advantage that produced multiple large wins at various casinos, including ten million at the Borgata at Atlantic City. The scheme involved the simple act of Yin Sun spending a year memorizing the minute flaws in the edges of the backs of playing cards and utilizing those flaws to have the croupier re-sort cards on the table in values that favored the player. Most notably, her partner Phil Ivey.

Ivey and Yin Sun went into this rigging proposition with the expectation that the ‘edge-sorting’ system was technically allowable within the casino rules. The house was aware of their process because they spend a shitload of resources figuring out how players might try to take away their favorable odds.

Ivey and Yin Sun walked away with the millions, but were promptly sued by the various casinos, including the Borgata, which the courts have now ruled should get their ten million back. It’s a bunch of arcane judicial rulings that basically boil down to, the house always wins, fuck you for trying to make gambling not a gamble. Go back to poker where we paid you handsome to beat funky looking Asian dudes in cowboy hats.

This ought to be the official end to gambling world wide, but expect it to continue to be a multi-billion dollar business with no ebb. The same way out-call massages continue to thrive despite the fact that the girls who shows up never looks like the perfect 10 in the photo. More like your aunt with the mole on her face you can’t believe there’s no way to remove. Compulsion is the most fervent trait of human nature. You could do worse than being in the business of living off of other’s lesser angel habits. Owning judges doesn’t hurt either.