Advantage player — pro or cheat?
Where the line really runs, and who gets to draw it.
Earlier this year, two men from Connecticut made around $3 million through bonus hunting at online casinos and sportsbooks. Unfortunately, I could not exactly cheer for my fellow grinders, because to pull it off, they had to buy personal data for about 3,000 people on the dark web. Accounts were registered in those people's names without their knowledge to claim welcome bonuses. Now the enterprising young men, both 29 years old, are facing 45 charges, with the money laundering counts alone carrying up to 20 years each.
Bonus hunting in itself is not a crime. Nor are matched betting, card counting, jackpot hunting or any other way of playing with a positive mathematical expectation. In most jurisdictions, this kind of play does not break any laws, only the rules of the platforms. Anyone right now can sign up for every available online casino and sportsbook, collect all the welcome bonuses, free bets, and cashbacks, and it would be completely legal.
So legal, in fact, that a whole industry has grown up around matched betting. Take outplayed.com, for example, a site that teaches people how to systematically extract bonuses from every operator through matched betting, which means placing bets on opposite outcomes with different bookmakers to lock in a guaranteed profit from the bonus. Outplayed has been covered by the Guardian and the Telegraph, and student-finance sites like Save the Student openly recommend it as a risk-free side income. The profit isn't a theory, it's arithmetic — you cover every outcome and keep the value of the bonus.
And yet, within the industry, players like that are routinely written off as abusers, cheats, and grifters.
The most famous example is card counting in blackjack. This method has been known for over 60 years, ever since Edward Thorp beat the dealer. Everything about it has been studied inside and out, movies have been made, books have been written, and the legal framework is clear: counting cards with your own mind, without using any software or devices, is completely legal. But when it comes to winning players, casinos have their own rules. Players get thrown out, accused of cheating, physically intimidated1, and the rules of the game are changed on the spot2.
Online, it is exactly the same. I have seen players branded cheats all over forums and social media, and I have run into it personally.
I have been accused of using prohibited software in situations where I was not using anything at all, or where I was using an autoclicker, which is not prohibited. At the same time, you would be hard pressed to find a clear description with examples of banned and allowed software in casino terms and conditions. “Prohibited” in practice means whatever the platform finds convenient to decide after the fact, once you have already won. Once, when I won my very first jackpot, I was accused of “malicious activity” and had 220k frozen for six months.
It is very convenient: they do not have to prove that the player broke any rules, they just seize the money and the player has to prove their innocence.
Here's a case from my previous post. When players noticed patterns in what was supposed to be a random jackpot, they won a lot of money, and their accounts were frozen as a result. For the casino the math is easy: worst case, it just hands the money back.
The gray area starts when you use accounts of friends, relatives, and people close to you to get around limits and restrictions. Just about every bettor or bonus hunter has run into this.
One of the most prominent examples is Tony Bloom, a former poker player who now owns the Brighton football club and founded the analytics company Starlizard. According to a Guardian investigation into court filings, his syndicate placed bets through third parties for years to get around bookmaker limits. Bloom denies any wrongdoing.
Another example comes from the autobiography of the famous bettor Billy Walters. His own bets were constantly cut by bookmakers, so he teamed up with golfer Phil Mickelson. Mickelson lost heavily, which is exactly why bookmakers let him bet big — and Walters used those high-limit accounts, placing bets through them and copying Mickelson's style and timing so no one would notice the switch. When this came to light, no charges were ever brought over the scheme itself.3
I have personally been in this territory many times, getting bonuses, cashbacks, and other promos through friends and splitting the winnings. It is terrifying to even imagine how much I could have made if I had registered 3,000 stolen or fake accounts. Online, there are also a few documented cases where people who mass-registered accounts faced no legal consequences at all4.
Between the gray and black zones, there are a few more shades where you can be found guilty in a civil sense but not face criminal charges. Take the famous case of Phil Ivey, who used edge sorting — reading tiny asymmetries on the backs of the cards, then getting the dealer to keep rotating and reusing the ones he wanted.5 The UK Supreme Court unanimously ruled that this constituted cheating. As Lord Hughes put it:
It may be that it would not be cheating if a player spotted that some cards had a detectably different back from others, and took advantage of that observation, but Mr Ivey did much more than observe; he took positive steps to fix the deck.
Ivey was never convicted of a crime. There was no criminal case, no charges, and he was never arrested. But he was found to be a cheat in the civil sense, and on that basis, he lost in the courts and walked away with nothing.
The black zone starts with data manipulation. Once you use stolen personal information or create fake users, you risk becoming the subject of a criminal case.
Personally, I think the fix is obvious. If you don’t like that people can count a six-deck shoe, pull blackjack off the floor — don’t drag players into back rooms. If you don’t like that someone only plays when a bonus puts the edge on their side, then don’t offer the bonus at all. Nobody is forcing casinos to hand out free money.
And there’s a reason they won’t stop. Bonuses do real damage, especially to problem gamblers — the ones who can no more walk past a free bonus than an alcoholic can turn down a free cocktail. That’s the whole point of them. Which is why I doubt any of this changes: the bonus isn’t a mistake the casino wants to fix. It’s the bait.
So here is the bottom line. If you take advantage of something you spotted — a dealer's hole card, an anomaly on the backs of the cards, a pattern in a jackpot — you are an advantage player. If you manipulate the game into handing you that edge, you are a cheat. Count cards in your head, you are an AP. Use computers for that, and you are breaking the law. If you register with every possible online casino and sportsbook to collect every bonus, cashback, free spin, and free bet, you are an AP. If you buy data on the dark web to do it, you are a criminal.
So the line between a pro and a cheat does exist, and it is quite specific. It is just not always drawn by the law or by ethics. Casinos hate APs and advantage play. To them, you are a cheat either way.
In October 2024, Jordan Kerr, a blackjack player, was sitting at a table in Horseshoe Baltimore when he was asked for his ID. He refused and started heading for the exit. Security surrounded him, took him to a back room, and held him there, threatening to call the police. Spoiler alert: the police never showed up because no crime had been committed. Kerr is now suing the casino and its owner, Caesars, for 3 million dollars.
A Harvard study, “Casino Countermeasures: Are Casinos Cheating?”, describes, among other tactics, preferential shuffling. As soon as the deck becomes favorable to the player, the dealer reshuffles it, effectively changing the rules of the game. The study’s conclusion is that some of the casinos’ countermeasures are essentially no different from classic card sharping and should be judged as such. In practice, though, casinos rarely suffer the consequences, unlike the players.
Walters was later sent to prison, but in an unrelated case — for insider trading, not for betting through someone else's account.
Take Ozric Vondervelden, for example. For over ten years, he and his team mass-registered accounts to claim bonuses. They did not steal or fake any data. When that chapter ended, he founded a consultancy (first Lovelace Consultancy, then Greco) and now gets paid to teach casinos how to catch people doing exactly what he used to do.
In 2012, Ivey and Sun won about 9.6 million dollars at the Borgata in Atlantic City and nearly 8 million pounds at Crockfords in London using edge sorting, which means reading microscopic asymmetries in the patterns on the backs of playing cards. They never touched the cards and used no devices. But to make the technique work, Ivey convinced the dealer to turn certain cards, citing a superstition, and asked for a specific deck.