How Phil Ivey Won $20 Million at Baccarat With Edge Sorting

Phil Ivey and Cheung Yin Sun won about £7.7 million at Crockfords in London and about $9.6 million at the Borgata in Atlantic City in 2012. They never marked a card and never used a device. They used a flaw in how the cards were printed, and both casinos later refused to pay or took the money back.

What is edge sorting in baccarat?

Edge sorting is a way to read the back of a playing card by spotting tiny differences between its two long edges. On most decks the back looks the same whichever way you turn the card. On some decks the pattern is cut slightly differently on one long edge than the other, so a card facing one way is not quite identical to a card facing the other.

A player who knows this can get the dealer to turn the cards that matter so they all face one way. Once that is done, the edge of a card tells the player what it is before it is ever flipped. Because the cards stay face down until the hand is played, the player can bet with information the house does not know he has.

How did Phil Ivey and Cheung Yin Sun edge sort the cards?

They asked the dealer to turn certain cards "for luck" as they were dealt, which sorted strong cards one way and weak cards the other. In baccarat, 6s, 7s, 8s and 9s help the first hand, so those were the cards worth sorting. Sun did the talking at the table, telling the dealer whether a card was good or bad and which way to turn it.

The shuffle was the key step. Accounts of the Borgata case say the pair asked for an automatic shuffler, a purple Gemaco deck, a Mandarin-speaking dealer and a private pit. The shuffler kept each turned card facing the same way, so the sorting survived into the next shoe. One published account says Ivey bet below the table maximum while the deck was being sorted, then raised to the maximum once it was.

How much did Phil Ivey win at Crockfords and the Borgata?

He won about £7.7 million at Crockfords over two days in August 2012, playing Punto Banco, which is baccarat with fixed drawing rules. In the same year the pair won about $9.6 million at the Borgata over several visits, where the casino allowed a stake of $100,000 per hand according to one report.

Add the two and you land near $20 million, which is where the video's headline figure comes from. The exact total depends on the pound to dollar rate you pick for 2012, so treat it as a round number.

Why was baccarat a good game for this?

Baccarat has a low house edge, so a small real advantage turns the game around. On the usual eight-deck game with a 5% commission, the house edge is about 1.06% on the Banker bet and about 1.24% on the Player bet, according to Wizard of Odds. The Tie bet sits near 14.4%, which is why nobody builds a plan on it.

With those numbers, an advantage of several percent for the player is huge. Accounts of the Borgata case put the player's edge in the region of 6 to 7 percent once the cards were sorted. At high stakes per hand, that adds up to millions over a few sessions. You can see the same idea in our guide to what house edge means in iGaming and in how expected value turns a percentage into a dollar figure.

What did the courts decide?

Both courts ruled against the players, though for different reasons. Crockfords kept the £7.7 million, and in October 2017 the UK Supreme Court backed the casino in Ivey v Genting Casinos [2017] UKSC 67. It held that edge sorting was cheating for the purposes of his contract claim, because he had interfered with the game in a way the casino had not agreed to. The judges accepted that Ivey did not see himself as dishonest, and the ruling also reshaped the test for dishonesty in UK law. Ivey has said he did not cheat.

In the US, Judge Noel Hillman ruled in 2016 that the pair had not committed fraud but had broken their contract with the Borgata and New Jersey's rules on marking cards. He ordered them to repay $10.1 million. The two sides settled during the appeal in July 2020, and the terms were never made public.

Is edge sorting the same as card counting?

No. Card counting tracks cards that were already dealt, using only what every player at the table can see. Edge sorting uses a flaw in the cards themselves and needs the dealer to turn them as the player asks. Casinos can ban a card counter but generally cannot call the counting itself a crime, while edge sorting ended in court rulings against the players. For the other side of this story, see our guide to how card counting works.

What can casinos learn from the Ivey case?

The fix is in the cards, the shuffle and the staff. Decks with symmetrical backs remove the flaw, and shuffling by hand or with a new machine can break the order. Dealers can also be trained to question requests to turn cards, even when they come from a big bettor with a polite smile. The Borgata later took the card maker to court over the flawed deck, which shows where some casinos think the blame belongs.

Online, the problem looks different. A live dealer studio has to get the same things right, and the software side has its own checks, like random number generator testing. If you want the wider view of table games, read our guide to online casino table and card games.

The bottom line

Edge sorting worked because baccarat's house edge is so thin that a small flaw can erase it. It also ended in rulings against the players on both sides of the Atlantic, with £7.7 million never paid and $10.1 million ordered back. If you run a casino, the lesson is that a low house edge is only as safe as the cards, the shuffle and the people at the table.

If you are weighing what it takes to run your own casino, see our pricing for what launching a white-label casino platform costs today.