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Comment by lkjhgfdsa1 | Hacker News Reader

In that case anyone who lost a game of baccarat (or any card game) played with those type of cards at anytime in NJ has a case against the casino and could sue to get the money back because the contract was illegal. I wonder if those are standard cards used at the casino ... they do offer them as souvenirs so it seems like they might be. If they are used by the casino or other casinos for games, that's probably thousands of games and potential court cases. Sounds like a class action lawsuit actually.

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if you can prove, casino knows[1] that the cards are not symmetrical, yes.

"knowingly to use or possess any marked cards"

Isn't the ruling above saying just that? Otherwise they're having their cake and eating it too. So which is it?

My reading of that is that at least one party has to knowingly use the marked cards. If neither party is aware that the cards are not symmetrical, there is no unfair advantage and the game is fair.

They know it now; they did not know it previously.

Right, but it's not dependent on intent. The other casino didn't intend to leave the deck unshuffled, this casino didn't intend to buy marked cards.

But, they did. So the games played with those cards(/unshuffled decks) shouldn't count.

If the law doesn't function in both directions it isn't law, it's codified graft.

> Right, but it's not dependent on intent.

But it does appear to be dependent on knowledge, as per the law quoted in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13227445

Ivey and Sun knew how to read the marked cards.

If I was caught carrying marked cards nobody would believe I didn't know. The casino has an entire anti-fraud department which exists to catch this sort of thing and we're supposed to believe they didn't notice this for years...

But that's only half the post you linked to... Importantly, the precedent involving the unshuffled deck didn't involve knowledge. Despite everyone's intentions the game was not setup correctly so it didn't count.

If so, then these games (all games with these decks) were also not setup correctly. Either all games with these cards are improper or none are.

And importantly, nothing other than penalizing the casino will change anything. This ruling incentivizes them to leave marks in their cards, dice, etc, and call them out in the future to invalidate any unpleasant results.

Considering that the imperfections were on the order of 1/32 of an inch, or 0.8 millimeters... Yes, I can absolutely believe that they were missed on visual inspection.

Well it's irrelevant in this instance since the exploit used by the gambler and the woman required the dealer to rotate and leak information about the cards. The cards themselves did not seem to be enough for the gambler Ivey to exploit the system, they needed to be rotated.

Now if any other player performed such a task, sure, they're probably able to make a case too. But not every baccarat player met the criteria in this case.

But seeing as the cards then are identical to other cards they're using, can they still be considered marked? That's what I mean, they're either marked or not.

Consider a deck of cards that has a triangle printed on the back. This triangle is printed exactly the same on every card, such that they are all indistinguishable from each other.

Now rotate some of the cards 180°. Those rotated cards are now distinguishable from the other cards, because the card print is not rotational-symmetric. This rotation is what caused the cards to be marked, even though the printed pattern was exactly the same.

Typically card backs are rotational-symmetric in order to avoid this. However, it seems like this particular pattern had imperfections -- within 1/32 of an inch -- which a trained eye could recognize. (The judge even admitted this as quite a feat.)

I understand technically how it worked, I'm merely arguing that their interpretation of "marked", and also their interpretation of the party doing so is quite liberal, at least for a courtroom.

The player (Ivey) did not bring, substitute, touch nor coerce the casino into doing anything with the cards. His assistant asked the dealer to flip some cards and he abided willingly, supposedly on behest of the casino to accomodate a whale. They did nothing under the table.

Like most people on here IANAL, but this ruling doesn't seem right, where "right" is the letter of the law.

I think the wording of the law is very broad, and "marked cards" is only one of the conditionals listed. Since you seem to be taking a very strict definition of "marked cards", other conditionals of the law were also met:

> Knowingly to deal, conduct, carry on, operate or expose for play any game or games played with cards, dice or any mechanical device, or any combination of games or devices, which have in any manner been marked or tampered with, or placed in a condition, or operated in a manner, the result of which tends to deceive the public or tends to alter the normal random selection of characteristics or the normal chance of the game which could determine or alter the result of the game.

Specifically, it seems like the cards were "placed in a condition" and "operated in a manner" which "alter[ed] the normal chance of the game" for Ivey and Sun.

> they're either marked or not

They were marked when Ivy's assistant asked to turn the 9s around 180 degrees.

The design on all the cards was identical; it's not as though face cards had a different pattern on the back. The design just happened to be very slightly asymmetric so that turning the 9 cards served to mark them.

If you were not able to turn the cards, the asymmetric back would provide no information.

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