Poker pro Phil Ivey has accused Atlantic City’s Borgata casino of using booze and babes to give itself an edge over gamblers.

Ivey and the Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa have been locked in an 18-month legal feud over Ivey’s use of edge-sorting at the Borgata’s baccarat tables. The Borgata sued Ivey in April 2014, claiming that his use of a particular deck of cards gave him an illegal advantage that led to the casino losing $9.6m over four mini-baccarat sessions in 2012.

Ivey has freely admitted using the ‘edge sorting’ technique, in which an irregularly cut deck of cards allows sharp-eyed observers to identify high-value cards without seeing the card face. Ivey lost a similar lawsuit against London’s Crockfords casino, which was allowed to keep the £7.8m Ivey and his female partner Cheng ‘Kelly’ Yin Sun won the same year as his Borgata bonanza.

Ivey believes that edge-sorting isn’t illegal, particularly since the casinos agreed of their own free will to (a) allow Ivey to use a particular deck of cards and (b) instruct casino dealers to follow Cheng’s instructions to rotate certain cards before they were reloaded into the card shoe so that their irregular patterns would be more easily identified the next time they appeared on the table.