If you haven’t heard, the World Series of Poker enlisted a new card supplier for this year, Italian card manufacturer Modiano. Like most high-quality decks that serious poker players use, Modiano’s cards are plastic, a much more resilient, durable material than traditional paper cards. Modiano boasts that its cards are “thicker and heavier” than others, a set of traits that “enables Modiano cards to retain their character and shape better than other 100% plastic playing cards.”

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According to reports from the floor at the WSOP, though, that latter point may not be holding true. Players have been complaining from the moment the cards went in the air in late May that the new Modiano cards are of poor quality.

One legitimate gripe is that they can be hard to read for those at the ends of the tables, furthest from the community cards. The spades and clubs have similar, rounded shapes and the face card designs are not differentiated enough. The more important complaint, though, is that the cards can be damaged way too easily.

Poker pro David Bakes Baker (pictured) recently published a document on Google Docs explaining the problem:

Poker cards are touched many times during the hand and often checked and rechecked with a rather sharp bend. In the past, cards were made of material that retained shape even after tough bends, which is necessary to keep them indistinguishable even after hours of wear.

The current cards are fouled almost immediately after one hard bend. The edges can be manipulated at every point. I have been at tables where it was blatantly easy to see which cards had been touched by which players. Some players look at their cards at the corner, some at the side, and this translates into a change in the card structure that does not snap back immediately.

In any given card game, the best cards (whether high or low) will be touched more than the worst, as a natural part of the game. It doesn’t take a keen eye at all to tell, after a couple hours of use, which cards are good and which are bad.

From there, Baker gave examples from his experience at the 2015 WSOP. In one instance during a 2-7 game, he was dealt a bent card, one which he predicted, before even looking at it, would be low. Remember, he wrote that after a couple hours, it is easy to tell which cards are good because those are the ones that are handled more and, thus, damaged. Of course, he was correct in his guess: he was dealt a three.

In a Hold’em hand, he saw an amateur who he did not think made advanced enough plays to bluff pre-flop, raise with two bent cards. Baker predicted he had a strong hand. A couple hands later, Baker was dealt two bent cards, which turned out to be A-K.

Baker added that the ease of which players can damage the cards also means that players can easily mark cards. This, of course, leads to all sorts of problems.

Baker has also taken the WSOP to task on Twitter, engaging in a back-and-forth with WSOP Executive Director Ty Stewart (pictured). Stewart appeared to blame players for squeezing the cards so hard that they were making “paper airplanes” out of them, but after a strong negative reaction from Baker and others, Stewart claimed he was joking.

Baker also criticized Stewart and the WSOP for not only not being able to partner with a supplier that can make quality playing cards, but also not knowing ahead of time that the cards were not up to par. “I’m just wondering why the biggest card tournament in the world has trouble attracting card suppliers,” Baker said on Twitter.

Stewart replied that the massive number of decks the WSOP needs creates a problem, which is compounded by the WSOP’s use of RFIDchips at live-streamed tables. Not all card companies make RFID cards.

Stewart said that the WSOP is working on fixing the problem, but those comments came after one attempt to fix things: re-ordering cards from Modiano. The WSOP felt confident that a new batch of cards from the same company was going to be of higher quality, but the verdict seems mixed. For example, on Tuesday night, Allen Kessler Tweeted, “The cards today seem significantly better than previous version.” The saga continues.

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