Phil Ivey and edge sorting: the story of the player who beat baccarat

In 2026 Phil Ivey won about 20 million between a casino in London and another in Atlantic City without touching a single marked card. Eight years and three courts later, the question remained the same: was that cheating or taking advantage of a factory defect?

Who is Phil Ivey?

Phil Ivey was considered one of the best poker players at the turn of the century. Professional player, has won eleven World Series of Poker bracelets , the last one in 2026, and has a World Poker Tour title. Known as the "Tiger Woods of poker", in 2026 he entered the Poker Hall of Fame.

The Canadian grandmaster Daniel Negreanu said that if there was a Tiger Woods of poker it was Phil Ivey, and not precisely because of the physical appearance of both, but because has been the best at a relatively young age .

So far, the story of a poker player who has won a lot playing poker. But Ivey wanted more, and likes to play at high limit tables . When he was seen in a casino, many rubbed their hands: media attention was guaranteed. In 2026 he appeared alongside a discreet Chinese player at Crockfords, a casino in the exclusive Mayfair district of London, the same club circuit where two centuries earlier gambling was played. Whist, willing to play to the bank. This is where the story of edge sorting begins.

At Crockfords he earned just over seven million pounds. The casino refused to pay and returned only the million he had initially bet, claiming that had employed an illegal method of marking cards . A few months earlier, at the Borgata in Atlantic City, Ivey and his companion Cheung Yin "Kelly" Sun had won more than nine and a half million dollars at the same table.

But Ivey had not marked any cards . What had he done then?

What is edge sorting?

Edge sorting consists of recognize the value of a face down card taking advantage of the fact that the drawing on its back is not perfectly symmetrical. If a deck is cut with a deviation of one thousandth, the border motif appears complete on some cards and cut in half on others. Those who know how to look can separate the high cards from the low ones without seeing their faces.

Literally translated it would be sort by edges . All cards should have the same design on the back, and they would if they were cut with millimeter precision, but variations appear. The asymmetries are imperceptible at first; Even if you look closely, you will see that in some cards the diamond on the edge comes out whole and in others from the same deck only half.

Knowing which card is coming is a huge advantage. In baccarat the ones that matter are 6, 7, 8 and 9: if you can recognize them before they are discovered, the house advantage turns around. Neither Ivey nor Sun ever considered that they had done anything illegal. Their argument was simple: they didn't touch the cards, they just looked better than the casino.

How edge sorting works step by step

The technique is useless without the involuntary collaboration of the casino. This is the mechanism that Sun and Ivey put in place at the two tables.

1. Detect asymmetry Locate a motif on the back that is not centered and that allows one edge to be distinguished from the other.
2. Ask them to turn the cards Ivey asked the dealer to rotate certain cards 180 degrees, citing superstition.
3. Let the deck go back to sabot The turned cards were picked up and returned to play with the orientation changed.
4. Read the table In subsequent hands, a 6, 7, 8 or 9 was recognized by the edge before being turned over.

There were two other conditions. They asked for a dealer who spoke Mandarin, so that Sun could give instructions without raising suspicion, and so that the deck would not be changed between hands. The casino accepted both: a player who bets hundreds of thousands per hand is granted whims .

Cheung Yin “Kelly” Sun, the true architect of the method

The name in the headlines is Ivey, but The person behind the method was Kelly Sun . Born in China and the daughter of a wealthy businessman, she was sent to Paris to study fashion design and ended up dedicating herself to gambling. He estimates that in his youth he lost around 20 million dollars from his father in casinos around the world.

In 2026 she spent three weeks detained in Las Vegas for a $100,000 promissory note that she didn't cover at the MGM Grand. From there she dedicated herself to studying the manufacturing defects of the decks until she became the best in the world at reading edges, which earned her the nickname The Baccarat Machine .

The distribution of roles was clear. Ivey gave the name: as a world figure in poker, he received favored treatment in any casino, and no one discussed his requests at the table. Sun watched, decided which cards to turn, and kept count. She continues to maintain today that what they did was perfectly legal , and her version of the story will come to the movies: Awkwafina has the role of Sun in a film about the case.

From casino to court: what the judges said

What started at two baccarat tables ended in three courts and eight years of litigation. The first stop was Atlantic City: in April of 2026 the couple took around $9.6 million from Borgata in four sessions, and in August they repeated at Crockfords with £7.7 million that the London casino refused to pay. In 2026 Borgata sued Ivey and Sun; Ivey, for his part, had already sued Crockfords to collect his money.

In September 2026 a federal judge in New Jersey ruled in favor of the Borgata and sentenced Ivey to dEvolver $10.13 million, not for marking the letters but for breaching the contract that every player accepts when sitting at the table. Ten months later, in September 2026, the UK Supreme Court dismissed the appeal against Crockfords and concluded that he had cheated, even though he did not consider himself a cheater.

That British sentence is the one that has caused the most talk, and not only among poker personalities : In deciding the case, the Supreme Court changed the criteria by which English courts assess dishonesty. From then on it no longer matters whether the accused believed he was acting correctly, but rather whether what he did is dishonest for a reasonable person. Ivey lost the money and, in the process, left his name in criminal law textbooks.

The story with the Borgata, on the other hand, never reached a final ruling. Ivey appealed, and In September 2026 the two parties agreed before the appeals court ruled. The terms of the deal were not made public, so no one knows how much he ended up paying, or if he paid anything.

The underlying question remains: Are Sun and Ivey cheaters or is this a flaw in the deck? Borgata himself seemed to doubt it, because in addition to them he sued Gemaco, the company that manufactured the playing cards for the two tables. In September 2026 the same judge rejected five of the six lawsuits and told the casino that, at most, he could claim the cost of replacing the defective deck: 27 dollars . Take it however you want.

If what interests you is the table and not the court, baccarat and Punto Banco are played today with a real dealer in the live casinos, and the online poker It remains the terrain where Ivey made his name.

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