Is edge sorting illegal?
A UK court has ruled that it is cheating, and the ruling drew the exact line that card counting sits on the legal side of. Edge sorting means spotting tiny manufacturing asymmetries on the backs of playing cards to identify high-value cards before they are turned over, and it requires manipulating the game to work, typically getting the dealer to rotate certain cards under a pretext. In Ivey v Genting Casinos (UK) Ltd t/a Crockfords, 2017 UKSC 67, the professional poker player Phil Ivey won 7.7 million pounds at Punto Banco baccarat using edge sorting, persuading the croupier to rotate specific cards by claiming superstition. Crockfords refused to pay, and the UK Supreme Court sided with the casino: edge sorting was cheating, and Ivey never received the money. The part of the ruling that changed the law more broadly is that the court held cheating does not require dishonest INTENT, only conduct that interferes with the game as it is meant to be played. Card counting needs none of that: it manipulates nothing and requires no cooperation from the dealer, which is why one is a UK Supreme Court cheating case and the other, per Uston v Resorts International, is a protected playing strategy an American casino could not exclude a player for.
Card counting reads what is dealt. Edge sorting changes how the deck behaves. The UK Supreme Court drew the line exactly there, and it cost the player 7.7 million pounds.
The evidence
| Technique | What it requires | Legal status |
|---|---|---|
| Card counting | Only memory and arithmetic on cards already shown | Not a crime anywhere in the US; New Jersey bars casinos from excluding a player for it (Uston v Resorts International, 1982) |
| Edge sorting | Spotting manufacturing asymmetries AND manipulating the dealer into rotating specific cards | Ruled cheating by the UK Supreme Court (Ivey v Genting Casinos, 2017 UKSC 67); the casino kept 7.7 million pounds |
How we know
The case is a civil dispute, Ivey suing to recover his winnings, not a criminal prosecution, and that matters for the holding: the court did not need to find Ivey dishonest to rule against him, only that his conduct amounted to cheating under the casino's own terms and under the relevant gambling statute. That is the opposite of instinct: most people assume "cheating" requires intending to deceive, and the Supreme Court explicitly said it does not. The comparison to card counting is the useful takeaway, not the scandal value of the 7.7 million pound figure. Counting changes nothing about the physical game; you read information the casino already dealt into view. Edge sorting only works because Ivey got the croupier to physically rotate cards under a false pretext, which is manipulating the equipment through a person rather than reading it. That distinction, passive information versus active interference, is what both rulings actually turn on once the specific facts are stripped away, and it is a cleaner test than "is this too clever to be fair", which is the framing most retellings reach for instead. Scope, stated rather than implied: this is a UK civil ruling. It has been influential and widely cited but is not binding in the US, where advantage-play law varies by state and mostly runs through property and contract law rather than a single doctrine like this one.