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Comment by zos_kia | Hacker News Reader

There is a woman who found a way to game casino black jack and made millions out of it before getting caught. It's nearly impossible to replicate but it involved spotting imperfections in the way print sheets are cut up into individual cards.

I don't remember her name but she was an associate of poker legend Phil Ivey, and there's a whole documentary on YouTube about it. It's pretty fascinating what greed and a ridiculous level of risk tolerance can achieve.

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Cheung Yin ‘Kelly’ Sun. The tactic is called edge sorting [1], they played Baccarat and had the dealers turn certain cards 180 degrees "for luck".

Here's a great doco about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEkl2yAdoHw

Lots of coverage around the gambling news sites too:

https://highstakesdb.com/news/high-stakes-reports/phil-ivey-...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_sorting

I thought this sounded familiar, and yeah it was covered here in the past https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13226725 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7631091

You are absolutely right, sadly i can't edit my original comment anymore. Also that's the exact documentary i got it from, thanks for posting it.

>It's pretty fascinating what greed and a ridiculous level of risk tolerance can achieve.

I feel like it's less greed when they're gaming back casinos that already have a house edge.

Counting cards ,being able recognize cards, it seems like anything where a person might use their brain to deduce what's next is "cheating"

Greed and cheating needn't be realted. The players are following this strategy to make money, presumably more than they should want. Whether they're taking it from moral or immoral sources should be a separate issue, imho.

> The players are following this strategy to make money, presumably more than they should want.

I’m not sure I understand this. Why should there be a limit to the amount of money someone wants?

I say greed with absolutely no moral implications here ! But when you watch the doco it is pretty apparent that this kind of hunger is compulsive.

Its greed from a game theory perspective. She could have walked away at 5 million and gotten away with it.

They were actually changing the deck in way that survives shuffling, not just looking at the differences.

They were using the offset on the printing as a way to tell orientation of the card. Since auto shufflers never rotate the cards, any rotation they added would persist allowing a way to tell good from bad cards in future hands.

Yes that is why I mentioned it was nearly impossible to replicate. The final optimized method involved a lot of social engineering, which required to have very high standing in the casinos. She had to request, under the guise of superstition, a specific setup with a specific style of dealer, who never changed decks, and to be authorized to call out certain cards as "lucky" which the dealer would flip themselves.

It also required deep pockets, as just playing the shoe enough to sort it could take a few hours of regular gambling. That's the crazy thing, this elaborate setup just got them a few % edge on the house which they milked relentlessly.

Reminds me of Michael Larson’s breaking of Press Your Luck.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_Your_Luck_scandal

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