Poker superstar Phil Ivey is in the news for all the wrong reasons. Until recently, he was glorified in headlines for taking down tournaments, winning audacious prop bets and playing the nosebleed Texas Hold ’em cash games in Macau and Manila — where million-dollar swings fail to raise eyebrows.

Now, though, he and professional gambler Cheung Yin Sun, who also goes by Kelly, are being accused of using undeniably advantageous — but legal — means to win some $22 million in two casinos. The game in question is baccarat, which is ordinarily much more luck-driven than poker. Most stunning of all, this week a federal judge in New Jersey ordered them to return $10.1 million in profits to Atlantic City’s Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa.

Even though Ivey and Sun earned their fortune by outfoxing the casino without breaking any laws — if they had cheated, Borgata would be pressing criminal charges — a federal judge ruled that they should give back their sizable winnings.

The pair employed an advantageous playing technique known as “edge sorting,” in which Sun used her highly trained eyesight to spot inconsistencies on the backs of cards. Those inconsistencies allowed her to accurately predict their denominations. It was all skill, and she did not touch any cards.

The judge’s decision is a slap in the face to anyone who’s ever risked a dollar at a casino table and been disingenuously wished “good luck” by a dealer — much less endured the fake sad-face when they lost and the real sad-face when they won. As for Ivey and Sun, they brilliantly outplayed the casino without using nefarious means.

Nevertheless the judge presented a complex rationale for his decision. According to the Associated Press, he accused the pair of “voiding a contract that was tainted from the beginning and breached as soon as it was executed.”

In other words, he maintains that any person gambling in a casino is obligated to find no advantages that may turn the game favorable for them — never mind that there is no actual contract except for the house’s implicit one: When you sit down to gamble here, the odds we created are so tilted against you that over an extended period of time you will lose, and you cannot do anything to turn those odds in your favor.

Such a ruling suggests that if a dealer happened to be accidentally revealing his bottom card, through ham-handed sloppiness, to the person at one corner of the table, that player would be obligated to look away. Of course, nobody would.

The Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa in Atlantic City, N.J.AP Photo/Wayne Parry

As stated more succinctly by Ivey’s lawyer, “What this ruling says is a player is prohibited from combining his skill and intellect and visual acuity to beat the casino at its own game.” He added that the case will be appealed.

What’s lost in all of this is that Ivey and his brilliant partner Sun never cheated and never did anything all that sneaky. The play was executed right under the casino’s nose. Considering that this went on for about 100 hours of play, spread across multiple visits to Atlantic City, Borgata executives should have recognized what was happening before allowing millions of dollars to be dropped.

It was transparent enough that when fellow high roller Don Johnson — not the actor but the blackjack icon who has won millions from Atlantic City gambling dens — happened to stroll past Ivey and Sun playing, he sensed something was up, asked to join them at the table and got shooed away by Sun.

Somehow, over the course of all those hours, Borgata’s supposedly sharp gaming supervisors had no clue. Preventing the play would have been easy enough. There could also have been a request that Ivey and Sun not play together at the table, or the betting limits could have been made so low that playing would not have been worth it. Or different cards could have been used.

But Borgata never took those steps. Instead the crybaby casino — which happily took $696 million from its customers in 2015 — waited until it lost an eight-figure sum and demanded to get its money back. Naturally, if Ivey and Sun had lost while pulling off their play, the casino would not have offered a refund.

Even some in the gambling industry are less than thrilled with the outcome and what it says about sore-losing operations. Bill Zender, a veteran gaming consultant who works for casinos around the world and rarely sides against the industry, makes an exception in this case.

“The decision against Sun and Ivey sends the message that if somebody beats a casino out of its money, the casino, which can be as stupid as it wants, will sue to get its money back,” Zender tells The Post.

“Who will want to gamble under conditions where you may get sued for winning?”