If you’ve ever heard the term edge sorting at all, you’ve probably got some multimillion-dollar heist movie playing in your head.
But the reality is a bit grimier and more mundane, though no less suited for a Hollywood blockbuster.
It was around long before Phil Ivey, one of the world’s richest poker players, took down the Borgata, Crockfords, and potentially others for tens of millions.
Edge sorting, or the turn, as the old riverboat card sharps used to call it, has long been used to swindle casinos and gamblers from New Orleans to St Louis.
Edge Sorting: Explained
But before we get into all that, what is edge sorting? Edge sorting is a technique used in card games, particularly in blackjack and baccarat.
Edge sorting involves players identifying slight differences on the edges of cards (like asymmetrical patterns or imperfections) to predict high or low cards, gaining an advantage over the house.
To the untrained eye, the back of a deck of cards will appear completely symmetrical. But look closer along the top and bottom edges and along the sides.
Casinos most often use a repeating diamond geometric shape. Now note that it is more than likely that the portion of the diamond remaining on one side is larger than the other. Once you see it, it is very hard not to see it.
And while you might think that this must be a fluke—surely, in this day and age, casinos don’t use cards with obvious asymmetries—you’d be wrong.
Using Edge Sorting
Eliot Jacobson, a renowned author on Advantage Play, found that more than half of the decks he inspected in Las Vegas last year were still susceptible to edge sorting.
However, you won’t be able to use the strategy at real money online casinos, as it only works in person.
- Now, what if we were to put all of the high cards with the larger diamond portion facing to the right in blackjack.
- Then all the lower cards with the smaller diamond portion are placed to the left.
- We might be able to determine the relative value of the next card out of the shoe and whether the dealer has a small or high card.
You might think that both blackjack and baccarat are poor examples, because the dealer or floor supervisor would have to presort the cards.
It’s that lack of imagination that is why you are sitting here reading this instead of swindling some casino out of millions, but more on that later.
Edge Sorting Examples
Under normal circumstances, games like blackjack and baccarat are the key games people use edge sorting with.
Edge Sorting Blackjack
In blackjack, edge sorting works by spotting tiny irregularities on the card edges to identify high or low cards, giving players insight into the deck’s order.
For example, a player might recognize a 10 or face card from its edge design and adjust their betting accordingly, using this information to increase their odds against the house.
Edge sorting surpasses the best basic blackjack strategy, as it can fairly accurately predict the card that comes next.
Edge Sorting Baccarat
Like blackjack, edge sorting relies on observing slight asymmetries on the backs of certain cards, particularly high-value cards like 6, 7, 8, or 9 which are key in baccarat.
Players can sometimes request the dealer to rotate certain cards under the guise of “superstition” during shuffles. Over time, this rotation process creates a distinguishable pattern for high-value cards based on subtle differences in edge designs or patterns on the back.
Edge Sorting Poker
But what about hand-held poker variants like Mississippi Stud and Three Card Poker?
What if we put together a whole table of folks who knew to turn some cards one way and the rest another? We wouldn’t need the dealer, and we could put all the cards the way we wanted them in just a few hands.
Despite Phil Ivey’s Baccarat scores, edge sorting teams have hit these games the hardest, and both the cheats and the casinos have conspired to keep it quiet.
The player advantage with edge sorting in these so-called carnival games runs from a reasonable 2% in Let It Ride to a worrisome 16% in Three Card Poker and a devastating 64% at Mississippi Stud.
Teams have taken down huge scores against unprotected games all across the country and continue to do so today, yet hardly a drop of ink is used reporting on it.
This silence benefits both the sorting teams, as the way to stop this hustle is remarkably simple, and the casinos, as they already have to deal with thousands of wannabe card counters who train for months to get a 1% advantage.
What might they do if they discovered all they needed to do to get a sizeable double-digit advantage was to turn some cards?
This is why you seldom hear of edge sorting teams being prosecuted even after courts in two countries seemed to say that edge sorting violates at least civil law.
How to Stop Edge Sorting
The casinos don’t want to draw publicity to edge sorting and it can be stopped very easily.
The reason why sorting teams who may have their winnings seized seldom raise a fuss, is because all a casino needs to do to thwart these teams is cut the deck in half every time before the shuffle. Then give one section a 180-degree turn thus thwarting the sort.
Every time there is publicity on this almost 150-year scam, the casinos remember to make that turn, and the teams have to scour farther and wider to find their next victims.
This is why the Phil Ivey court cases and the ensuing international press coverage were most likely catastrophic for edge sorters for decades to come.
Phil Ivey and Edge Sorting
So what exactly did Phil Ivey do? Mr. Ivey was introduced to Cheung Yin Sun in January 2012 by an advantage player known as Steven Black.
Ms. Sun had already perfected a rather unlikely offshoot of the edge sorting con for baccarat, which mainly relied on the casino’s greed to work properly.
She had spent years gambling around the globe and losing, which also helped convince casinos that she was prey, not a predator. But in this case, the tiger really had changed her stripes and had learned some new tricks.
While Sun had piled up several low six-figure scores using her newfound technique, it was only with Mr. Ivey’s money and fame that she could graduate to the big leagues.
Beating the Casinos
When you consider the millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours in training that casinos spend on keeping their money secure, it’s almost incomprehensible how quickly they tripped all over their own time-honored policies and procedures to get a chance at Mr. Ivey’s cash.
The edge sorting team requested dealers who spoke Mandarin, eight decks of cards that would be reused, an automatic shuffler, and that all four cards would be placed face down on the table before bets were made.
- No casino in their right mind would ever deal cards before the bets are placed, regardless of whether they are face down or not.
- Not just the Borgata, not just Crockfords and Mohegan Sun, but allegedly at least a half dozen others run by some of the brightest men in the gaming industry, allowed this at tables with stakes as high as $100,000.
- To top it off, Ms. Sun would then instruct the dealers in Mandarin to turn the lucky six, seven, eight, and nine cards in one direction and the unlucky other cards in a different direction.
Phil Ivey Edge Sorting Winnings
When played perfectly, this gives the edge sorting player over a 30% advantage. It’s actually shocking that the pair didn’t win more money.
No one is actually sure how much money they made between January and an ill-fated trip to London in August because neither the casinos nor the pair are talking.
But what we do know is that in August, they beat Crockford Casino in Mayfair for about $12 million. Crockfords, perhaps at some point realizing their folly, decided not to cash them out, and both lawsuits and accusations began to fly.
The Borgata, having been stung by the pair to the tune of about $9.5 million in four trips over the spring and summer of 2012, decided that they would risk ridicule and sue to attempt to reclaim their losses.
Though they go it alone with no other casinos that the pair were known to have played at joining in. Then Foxwoods in Connecticut would eventually be sued by Ms. Sun and two of her previous partners for a $1.4 million win that wasn’t paid.
Ivey and Sun lost the court cases and had to repay their winnings, however, no judge ever accused them of doing anything illegal. While it may not rise to the level of a crime, it does indeed breach civil contracts between the player and the casino, negating their winnings.
Ivey and Sun continued to fight the civil charges in a series of rear-guard actions until a private settlement, with terms that have not yet been disclosed, was reached in 2020.
Is Edge Sorting Illegal?
Edge sorting occupies a gray area in gambling law, as it isn’t explicitly illegal, but courts have frequently ruled against it. The trick is to do it and not win too much or too often.
The legality hinges on whether it violates casino rules or is considered cheating under the law. In cases like Phil Ivey’s, courts in both the US and the UK ruled that edge sorting constituted a form of deception, as he used it to exploit the casino’s oversight without altering the cards or using external devices.
Casinos argue that it undermines the element of chance central to gambling, effectively “breaking the rules”.
While edge sorting doesn’t violate any specific law, casinos may pursue legal action or withhold winnings, and courts often side with the casinos, viewing it as an unfair advantage that goes beyond legitimate gambling strategy.