Card Maker in Phil Ivey-Borgata Case Liable for $27

It may have been party to a $10million lawsuit against Phil Ivey, but the New Jersey casino at the centre of the poker legend’s edge-sorting scandal has been told it can claim only $27 from the card manufacturers they blamed for Ivey’s massive win!

It has been five long years since Phil Ivey won $9.9million from the Borgata, using an edge-sorting technique which the casino claimed was cheating. Ivey has since lost every round of this and another similar court battle against Crockford’ Clubs casino of London – Crockfords refusing to pay Ivey his winnings and an appeal court judge describing Ivey’s actions as “cheating”.

The latest courtroom battle didn’t really involve Ivey, but rather the casino claiming that Gemaco were responsible for the flawed design which allowed Ivey and his accomplice Cheng Yin Sun to detect minute discrepancies in the patterns printed on the back of the cards.

U.S. District Court Judge Noel Hillman, however, this week declared that this was only one factor which led to Ivey’s massive wins, and ruled that the most the Borgata could hope to win if they went to trial was a paltry $27 – the cost of replacing the cards!

Last October, Gemaco asked for the case to be thrown out, claiming that the Borgata had ‘not been able to provide evidence that there were visible discrepancies on the cards requested by Ivey upon his visits to the Atlantic City casino.’

Ivey’s requests, which were mirrored in the London case, included using specific decks  of purple Gemaco cards, Mandarin Chinese-speaking dealers and a private room in which to play. Ivey and Cheng also asked the dealers to rotate the cards at specific angles in order to see the flawed patterns more clearly.

Gemaco has also been at the center of a court battle involving Vegas’ Golden Nugget Casino. Back in 2012 again, gamblers realized that cards were coming out of the deck in a predictable pattern and won $1.5 million during 41 straight hands of mini-baccarat.

Although they refused to discuss the most recent ruling in the Ivey-case, its parent company said on Wednesday the Golden Nugget dispute was settled ‘without the casino suffering a financial loss’.