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the World Series of Poker champ used a technique called “edge sorting” to get unwitting croupier to stack Punto Banco decks in his favour – good read:
http://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKSC/2017/67.html
in summary, since a 1982 case until today, an accused would only be guilty of dishonesty if his conduct was both:
A) dishonest by the standards of ordinary reasonable and honest people; AND
B) the accused realised that ordinary honest people would regard his behaviour as dishonest.
From today, the B) element is no longer required – if A) is met, there is dishonesty.
So convincing yourself that in your particular circumstances Joe Public would cut you some slack, no longer lets you beat the rap.
para 27 of the judgment:
“The judge found that Mr Ivey gave factually frank and truthful evidence of what he had done. The finding was that he was a professional gambler who described himself as an “advantage player”, that is one who, by a variety of techniques, sets out to reverse the house edge and to play at odds which favour him.
The judge found that he does so by means that are, in his opinion, lawful. He is jealous of his reputation and is adamant that what he does is not cheating. He described what he did, with Ms Sun, as legitimate gamesmanship. The judge accepted that he was genuinely convinced that what he did was not cheating.
But the question which matters is not whether Mr Ivey thought of it as cheating but whether in fact and in law it was. The judge concluded that it was, and so did the majority of the Court of Appeal.” [and so here did the House of Lords/ Supreme Court].
Very interesting, to me, at least. There are numerous shades of honesty I suppose but quite a few must be morality based. Whether or not this case is one of these I don’t know but in this judgement aren’t the law lords setting a precedent for someone else deciding what morals you ought to have?
Hi Joe
The Law Lords are concerned not with personal morals but societal morals. The subjective element, they say, (para 57) ” has the unintended effect that the more warped the defendant’s standards of honesty are, the less likely it is that he will be convicted of dishonest behaviour.”
then para 59:
“it is not in the least unusual for the accused not to share the standards which ordinary honest people set for society as a whole. The acquisitive offender may, it is true, be the cheerful character who frankly acknowledges that he is a crook, but very often he is not, but, rather, justifies his behaviour to himself. Just as convincing himself is frequently the stock in trade of the confidence trickster, so the capacity of all of us to persuade ourselves that what we do is excusable knows few bounds.
[re lab raids by anti-vivisectionists] It cannot by any means be assumed that the appropriators of animals from laboratories, to whom the court referred in Ghosh, know that ordinary people would consider their actions to be dishonest; it is just as likely that they are so convinced, however perversely, of the justification for what they do that they persuade themselves that no one could call it dishonest.
There is no reason why the law should excuse those who make a mistake about what contemporary standards of honesty are, whether in the context of insurance claims, high finance, market manipulation or tax evasion. The law does not, in principle, excuse those whose standards are criminal by the benchmarks set by society, nor ought it to do so.
On the contrary, it is an important, even crucial, function of the criminal law to determine what is criminal and what is not; its purpose is to set the standards of behaviour which are acceptable.”
and then in comes the bookie interest at Para 73:
” 73. There was in fact only one pre-Ghosh case which frankly raised the relevance of the defendant’s own view as to the honesty of what he had done.
R v Gilks had been decided as long ago as June 1972. The defendant had been handed, by mistake, as much as £100 too much by a bookmaker. He realised the mistake but kept the money anyway. Asked to account for doing so, he offered the view that whereas it would clearly be wrong to keep such an overpayment if made by the grocer, bookmakers were fair game.
He was convicted notwithstanding the judge’s direction that the jury should put itself in his shoes and ask itself whether he had thought he was acting honestly or dishonestly.
Amongst other grounds of appeal which the Court of Appeal rejected, he contended that the judge ought to have made it yet clearer that even if he did not believe he had any claim of right in law to keep the money, he would still not be guilty unless he did not have the belief he asserted that bookmakers were fair game. The Court of Appeal rejected that contention also, saying that the judge’s direction was a proper and sufficient one.
Thus the case can be said to have endorsed the (subjective) direction as to dishonesty given by the judge. It did so, of course, only to the extent that it rejected the defendant’s argument that the judge’s direction was wrongly adverse to him. The question whether the direction was too favourable to him did not arise and was not addressed.
….the facts of Gilks are a powerful demonstration of the perils of the second leg of the Ghosh test, for it means that if the likes of Mr Gilks are once truthful about their idiosyncratic view of bookmakers, they are bound to be acquitted.”
para 8 of the judgment:
“8. Cards with no pattern and no margin at the edge present no problem; they are indistinguishable. However, many cards used in casinos are patterned. If the pattern is precisely symmetrical the effect is the same as if the card is plain; the back of one card is indistinguishable from any other. But if the pattern is not precisely symmetrical it may be possible to distinguish between cards by examining the backs. ‘
seems Ivey and Sun to similar effect visited the Borgata Casino in Atlantic City:
and that “Queen of Sorts” Sun was at it before Ivey came into the picture:
https://www.casino.org/news/queen-sorts-kelly-suns-1-14-million-case-foxwoods-rejected-us-supreme-courtwhere Foxwoods convinced the Court that she “couldn’t sue Foxwoods because the Connecticut casino’s owner, the Mashantucket Pequots, has sovereign immunity as an American Indian tribe.” !
meanwhile Borgata is hedging its bets by suing its cardmaker:
https://www.casino.org/news/borgata-sues-gemaco-cards-over-10-million-phil-ivey-edge-sorting-casehttps://www.casino.org/news/gemaco-denies-that-design-flaw-led-to-phil-iveys-edge-sorting-win
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