Should You Practise Edge Sorting or Not – Pros and Cons
Whenever you play a casino game, the odds are stacked against you. In other words, you’re more likely to end your gaming session with a loss than a profit. Many people use strategies and special techniques to boost their chances of winning. One of these is edge sorting.
What Is Edge Sorting?
There are many different strategies and techniques that people use to increase their odds. This blog post looks at edge sorting, which is mostly used in baccarat, where you predict which of two hands gets the closest to 9.
So, what is edge sorting? It’s a technique to determine whether a face-down card is of low or high value. They do this by looking at the backs of the cards, observing any differences and using these to their advantage.
Edge sorting is a type of advantage gambling. This is where you exploit certain characteristics of a game, including its physical components, to gain an advantage over the house or the other players.
Advantage gambling includes a range of techniques that are legal. However, casinos tend to frown upon these and have the right to ban players who use them. This is because casinos see advantage gambling as a form of cheating.
Edge Sorting Explained in Detail
Edge sorting in baccarat involves asking the dealer to rotate high-value cards 180 degrees and looking at card backs to determine whether the top card of the shoe is of high value or not.
Someone practising edge sorting asks the dealer to rotate high-value cards 180 degrees and will often use superstition as an excuse for the request. A dealer unaware of edge sorting might agree to this (especially if the player’s a high roller).
The backs of playing cards are meant to be perfectly symmetrical. In other words, they look exactly the same when you rotate them. However, they’re often not symmetrical because of irregularities in the printing process.
Let’s say a card back has a diamond pattern. One end of each row could have a full diamond, while the other could have a half-diamond. This would be enough for someone to tell when a card has been rotated.
The average player wouldn’t be able to spot something like this. However, someone who’s familiar with edge sorting and knows the back pattern of the card being used would notice this.
Edge sorting is essentially a way of marking certain cards (i.e. high-value ones). By doing this, you can tell whether the next card to be drawn is high-value or not and bet accordingly.
Is Edge Sorting Possible in Online Baccarat?
The simple answer to this question is no. Using the edge sorting technique when playing online baccarat is impossible. This is because getting the game to rotate cards isn’t possible.
Having said that, playing online baccarat is still worthwhile. What’s great about online casinos is that many of them, including the best baccarat sites, have demo versions available to play.
With these, you can play baccarat and other games without having to spend any actual money. This is ideal for beginners who want to learn the ropes or anyone who wants to brush up on their gameplay or test a strategy.
Baccarat isn’t the most common type of table game you’ll find at online casinos. However, there are still plenty of sites that have the game listed (both animated versions and live ones).
The Legality of Edge Sorting and a Famous Case
As mentioned earlier, advantage gambling isn’t technically illegal, so practising edge sorting won’t land you in jail. This is because you don’t touch or interfere with the cards in any way; you just look at them in detail.
However, you stand a high chance of getting banned from a casino if you’re caught trying out the edge sorting technique.
There was a high-profile case involving top poker player Phil Ivey and his partner Cheung Yin Sun. In 2012, the duo won USD 9.6 million playing baccarat across four visits to Borgata Casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
In the same year, the two players won £7.7 million from playing punto banco, a baccarat variant, at Crockfords Casino in London. The casino agreed to send them their winnings but ultimately decided not to.
Ivey ended up suing Crockfords, though the courts sided with the casino and he and Sun never received their winnings. The courts determined that while the two hadn’t explicitly cheated, they didn’t have a claim to the money.
This was because they had admitted to edge sorting, asking the dealer to rotate certain cards under the pretence of being superstitious. Both Ivey and Sun were honest about edge sorting and didn’t think they had done anything wrong.
Borgata Casino found out about the case and wanted Ivey and Sun’s winnings back. In 2016, a Federal Judge ruled that the two players had to pay the casino the entire sum of their winnings back.
Two years later, the court ruled in the casino’s favour and gave it permission to start going after Ivey and Sun’s assets. Apparently, the casino found that Ivey had no money at all in his New Jersey bank account.
Ivey had clearly been prepared for this. However, when he won USD 129,410 at the 2019 World Series of Poker in 2019, Borgata Casino immediately confiscated his winnings. It’s uncertain how much of the money has been paid back.
Is It Worth Practising Edge Sorting?
For edge sorting to work effectively, you need to find a table where cards with imperfections are being used. Also, you need to have a dealer who will agree to rotate cards (many of them won’t).
Finding a table where you can carry out edge sorting is a challenge. Most casinos are aware of edge sorting and do everything they can to prevent people from using the technique.
They train their dealers to be on the lookout for players trying to edge sort and tell dealers not to rotate cards for any reason. It’s not just casinos that have caught on to edge sorting; card manufacturers have too.
They take extra care to ensure their design process is as accurate as possible. Each playing card should be indistinguishable from all others, no matter how it’s rotated.
Mistakes will happen from time to time, but printings with imperfections of any kind are becoming less frequent. Sets that have imperfections will become even harder to find than they are now.
To sum up, it’s not worth trying to use edge sorting. Even if you found a table where you could practise it, there’s a high chance the casino would ban you.
