"But it wasn't my fault!"

A few days ago at the Hilton I was sent to join a 10-seat table that then had only nine players. However, one of them was taking up two places. He was an obese, older man who had prosthetic limbs below the knees. He was on an electric scooter. But, oddly, the scooter was parked along the long side of the table, with its front half taking up the space where the 6 seat would usually be, the seat turned 90 degrees, and its occupant facing the table in the 5 spot. Two chairs had been removed from the table to make this possible. This wasn't a problem at long as only nine were playing, but my arrival required all ten seats to be in use.

It appeared to me that he could either move to a standard chair or turn the scooter so that it was facing away from the table, and basically sit facing the back of the scooter, thus taking up only one slot.

Linda was the shift manager. She was extraordinarily patient in working with a guy that turned out to be nasty and uncooperative. She offered to let him move to a regular chair. No, he wouldn't do that. She offerered to move players around so that he could sit on an end seat or by the dealer, where there is a lot more elbow room. No, he protested, because then he couldn't see the cards in the middle of the table.

But she persisted, and he finally, reluctantly, agreed to try to turn the scooter and sit facing its rear. It took a lot of manipulation, because he couldn't drive it himself while turned, so somebody had to help him, and there was another table in the way, and the whole thing turned into quite an ordeal. (I ended up in the 10 seat, on the dealer's right, because the player that had been there vacated it while things were being rearranged. But Linda obviously knew that the issue would come up again soon when somebody else arrived, so they might as well fix it now.) The guy complained about every aspect of the move: he was too far away from the table, then he was too close, then he was too much to the right, then too much to the left, then he couldn't get his legs where they needed to be under the table right, etc., etc., etc. He was being a real pain in everybody's butt.

Finally he got situated to his grudging satisfaction. During this interval, the button and blinds had passed him, so on his first hand back in action, the dealer gave him the choice to wait until the blinds came around again, or put in both blinds now.*

This guy's response was a new one: "But it wasn't my fault that I missed the blinds!" The poor dealer was stymied for a response. I assume that he, too, had never heard that particular form of protest.

I wanted to ask, "When did we go to a fault-based system for paying the blinds?" But I didn't. It's such a stupid concept. Is it one's "fault" if one has to get up and use the restroom? Maybe players should be given hall passes, like I remember from junior high school, as permission to use the restroom and not have to pay missed blinds upon one's return. Of course, if "fault" is to enter in, there will have to be an interrogation as to whether one could really wait a few more minutes, how full one's bladder actually is, how long it has been since one's last visit to the little boys' room, etc.

Anyway, after Scooter Guy disgustedly agreed to make up his blinds (he could have just waited, of course--it wasn't like anybody was forcing him to rejoin the game right then), he tossed in just the amount for the big blind. Then the dealer had to remind him that he had to pay both blinds, and that led to another round of eye-rolling, moaning, and complaining--for the additional lousy $1. Then, when the dealer brought that chip into the center of the table, instead of leaving it in front of the player,** there was another protest about that!

I'm sympathetic, to a degree. I mean, I can only imagine how rough it is to have had both legs amputated, and have poor eyesight to boot. But still, this guy could have chosen a completely different way of handling it. First of all, if I had a serious physical disability, yes, I'd expect some reasonable accommodation to be made for me when needed. For example, if I really couldn't see the community cards except from, say, the 5 and 6 seats, a casino absolutely should be willing to require other players to move so that I can sit where I can see. That's a pretty minor inconvenience and concession to make. Nevertheless, I'd like to think that I'd make such requests only when there was no other reasonable way of making things work, and I'd do everything I could to make the disruption minimal. Furthermore, I'd be pleasant, smiling, and grateful about it, I hope.

This guy was not like that. He was confrontational and uncooperative about every aspect of it, making it uncomfortable for everyone that had to help get things sorted out. Obviously the way things finally got arranged actually did work, despite him saying all along that it wouldn't, that he wasn't willing to try it, etc. He was just being a stubborn, obnoxious jerk. Linda was a saint in how she firmly but respectfully pressured him to keep trying various options until a solution was found.

My limited experience is that poker players--and poker room employees--are as helpful and accommodating to disabled players as they can be. On the national scene, for the last two years, there has been a player at the World Series of Poker who has no use of his arms, due to neurologic injury from a motor vehicle accident. He has learned to manipulate the cards and chips with his feet, and everybody accepts the minor disruptions of time and elbow room that this causes. This year, a blind player at the WSOP main event went deep (finished 193rd out of 6000+ entrants), despite the need to have somebody whisper to him what his hole cards were, what the community cards were, what the bets were and who had made them, and so forth.

Even at the Hilton, there is one regular player who can barely see her own hole cards, and has to have the dealer announce what the cards on the board are. There is another who has had his vocal cords surgically removed (throat cancer is the most common cause for this) and speaks with an artificial electronic larynx held up to his neck. Everybody understands this, and accepts his whisper (because it's a pain for him to have to grab his device when he's handling chips and cards) and/or hand signals as to a raise, call, or whatever.

Yesterday at the Venetian I shared a table with a woman in a wheelchair who, in addition to whatever her lower extremity disability was, had sufficient weakness in her hands that she couldn't push her cards forward to fold. The dealer would take her verbal instructions to fold her cards, and would count out and put in the pot for her the number of chips she directed for a bet/call/raise. As far as I can tell, nobody has ever complained about such reasonable accommodations, and none of the players with disabilities has been unpleasant, demanding, or unreasonable about negotiating what was needed to make the game run smoothly for everybody--until, that is, I ran into Scooter Guy, who, I hope and believe, is an unfortunate anomaly in the poker world.


*The button and blinds, and all the ways they get paid and skipped and arranged, are one of the most confusing aspects of live poker for players new to casinos. The easiest way to think about the blinds is that they are payment in advance for one round of poker (that is, the button making one full lap around the table). So if you haven't paid the blinds because you were out to dinner or the restroom or whatever, you can either continue to sit out until it's your turn to put in the big blind again, or you can pay both of them at once and rejoin the game immediately, in which case there is twice as much starting money as usual in the pot for that hand. In a low stakes game, the blinds are such a trivial amount of one's gains or losses for a session that it's incredibly petty to make a big fuss about them, but people do it all the time.

**Usually, a blind bet is "live," meaning that when the action gets back around to the player who put it in, the blind can either stand alone as his bet for that round (if it hasn't been raised), or it's part of his bet if he chooses to raise or call a previous raise. But when a player has to put in both the big and small blinds at the same time, the amount of the small blind has to be "dead," meaning that it is in the pot, but not part of a player's bet. Otherwise, the effect would be to raise the stakes for that hand, and everybody who wanted to play would have to call, say, $3 (the previously absent player's $2 big blind plus his $1 small blind), instead of the usual $2.