Please! Let's Cut out the Sympathy Crap for Master Casino Cheat Phil Ivey!

Yes, he IS a cheat!

Last week a US District Court ruled that Phil Ivey must return the $10 million he won at the Atlantic City Borgata casino through his edge-sorting technique...or I should say "he cheated" instead of he won.

Ever since, all the gaming-guru writers who are ex-advantage players are crying over what they write is an unjust decision against Phil Ivey. They claim that Ivey simply took advantage of the casino's ignorance to the fact they had received defective playing cards from the manufacturer and let them into play, and therefore Ivey and his partner, Cheng Yin Sun (who masterminded the scheme with financial backing from Ivey), did not cheat the Borgata casino. They further support this claim with statements alluding to how the casino makes so much money because of its built-in advantage with all the table games, that they shouldn't complain when someone comes along and beats them. They should just "lick their wounds and move on."

Gimme a break!

This is total bullshit!

What these advantage-player writers are not mentioning is that Phil Ivey and Cheng Yin Sun MANIPULATED the deal of the game by having the dealers abandon their proper procedure to deal the cards the way Ivey wanted so that he could see the defects in the cards and use them to his advantage.

That alone is an indisputable definiton of casino cheating, not to mention the forethought and planning of Ivey's casino-cheat crimes.

Look, I for one am not very sympathetic to casinos and enjoyed ripping them off as much as Ivey did, but let's call a spade a spade and stop spouting this crap that Ivey got ripped off by the court system.

Had Ivey been able to edge-sort WITHOUT having the dealers change the way they deal, then and ONLY THEN would his edge-sorting attack on the casino not be cheating.

So--I call on the advantage-player community as a whole to stop supporting a cheat who is not one of them.