Poker pro Phil Ivey has lost his latest legal bid to force London’s Crockfords Casino to return the £7.7m he won ‘edge sorting’ at baccarat.

On Thursday, the UK Court of Appeal voted 2-1 to reject Ivey’s appeal of a 2014 lower court ruling that said Ivey and his female accomplice had cheated the casino by unlawfully influencing a Crockfords croupier into manipulating the cards to Ivey’s advantage.

Ivey and his partner Cheung Yin Sun – aka the ‘Queen of Sorts – won their seven-figure sum over two days of baccarat play at the Genting-owned Crockfords in August 2012, but the casino smelled a rat and decided to keep Ivey’s winnings while refunding his original £1m stake.

Casinos are known to indulge the whims of their high-rollers, so when Ivey asked to use a specific deck of cards at Crockfords, the casino said okay. But Ivey and Cheung were using the asymmetrical patterns on the backs of irregularly cut cards to identify high-value cards, then asking the dealer to reorient these cards before feeding them back into the card shoe.