Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa has recently filed an appeal for a summery judgement against Gameco, a playing card manufacturer. In case that the appeal is successful, it would oblige to pay $10 million to Borgata Casino, an amount which the latter lost in the legal battle against the professional poker player Phil Ivey.
According to Borgata’s claims, Gemaco actually knew about the imperfections on the playing cards’ backs and sold them to the casino anyway. The filing notes also prove indisputably that the cards were “marked” and without the defect Ivey and his partner would have hardly won the game.
Back in 2012, Ivey won the massive amount of $10.1 million over a mini-baccarat game at Atlantic City’s Borgata Casino. Unfortunately, it turned out that the player won the game by using unfair means, as he was helped by a partner who managed to detect small manufacturing defects on the backs of the playing cards.
Since then, Ivey’s actions have raised many questions regarding the morality of such a deed and should have he got away with his actions. As a matter of fact, the poker pro’s actions never led to any criminal accusations.
At the end of 2016, the US District Court Judge Noel Hillman ruled that Phil Ivey and his partner Cheung Yin Sun must return the $10.1-million winnings to Borgata. No civil fraud was constituted by the judge, but the latter found that the actions of Ivey and his partner had violated some state regulations related to fairness of the game between the casino and its players.
At the the time of the ruling, Ivey and his attorney Ed Jacobs insisted that the poker pro had not breached any rules or regulations, as the Borgata casino had agreed to the conditions of Ivey’s play over each of his four visits there in 2012. According to them, this simply meant that the player had managed to beat the casino at its own game.
The truth is that Borgata Casino did agree to a number of Ivey’s requests, some of which had clearly been a bit excessive, such as the request of having Mandarin-fluent dealers in the game. The player also insisted that the casino should have only one purple Gemaco card deck used and that the dealer should orient the card backs in a certain way. The casino agreed to all this to happen on all four separate visits of Ivey in 2012.
Anyway, the case is anything but closed. After a US federal judge ruled that Ivey had not taken part in a civil fraud, the player made an attempt to get the case to the US Third Circuit Court of Appeals. He, however, was forced to wait for a resolution of the separate legal actions Borgata is to take against Gemaco.
- Author
Harry Evans
