Chip rack on the table

Treasure Island tonight. There's one player who's steaming something fierce because he lost a huge pot when the river card made his straight and his opponent's full house. Now he's raising every pot. At some point he put his remaining chips in a rack and set the rack on the table, as if he were about to leave, but then they just stayed like that.

Finally a dealer told him that the chips in the rack were fine if he was going to be leaving within the next few hands, but if he was going to be staying, his chips had to be on the table.

Now, if a dealer told me this, I'd say, "Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't know," take the stupid chips out of the rack, and be done with it. It's one of those things that nobody could possibly really care enough about to make a fuss over. Unless, of course, you're just a misanthrope to begin with and can't stand having anybody tell you what to do, even over the tiniest point.

You guessed it, this guy was just that sort. He argued that his chips were on the table--just that there was a rack under them. The dealer told him again that he needed to remove the rack. So he tried going halfway and taking out just one stack. No, all of them, the dealer said. A couple of other players who were obviously TI regulars had encountered this before and chimed in, confirming that it's a consistently enforced house rule. This idiot kept arguing and fighting about it. Finally he gave in and said that he would remove his chips after the current hand was over. Instead, though, he got up and left. Maybe he thought to himself, "This will teach them not to boss me around!" But nobody really cared that he was gone.

Not all casinos care about having chips out of the rack. I've played in some places where they're positively anal about it, and won't even let you start racking up during your last few hands--you have to have actually stopped playing. Other places say that you just have to keep one stack of chips out on the table. And in some it's common to see most of the players playing directly out of the rack the whole time they're at the table.

It seems to depend on what the casino's reason for the rule is. In some places the motivation seems to be security; that is, they're worried that somebody might hide a card under the rack, to be put back into play when the situation is favorable. (At one place in Wisconsin where I used to play a lot, any player having a rack on the table would invalidate the bad-beat jackpot. This motivated players to police each other even more carefully than the dealers did. "Wait! Don't start dealing the hand yet! There's a rack on the table!") In rooms in which cash plays, there's a legitimate concern that somebody could stash a few $100 bills under the rack, and an opponent might seriously underestimate how much an all-in bet or call could cost him. Some places seem to emphasize the efficiency aspect--it just plain takes longer for most people to remove a few chips from a rack than from a stack on the table, so everybody playing out of racks slows down the game substantially. And although I've never heard this expressed directly as a reason behind the prohibition, it's obviously quite a bit harder to estimate at a glance how many chips an opponent has when they're laid flat in a chip rack, rather than standing in stacks.

But this is really about more than what rule a particular card room has in place on this point, or the reason(s) for it. It's about the kind of antisocial personality that would argue such a small point so vehemently and for so long, instead of just shrugging it off and complying. It's unimaginable to me that somebody could care so deeply about playing from a rack that he'd want to cause a dustup about it--and if you really just cannot function as a poker player unless your chips are laid out in neat rows in an acrylic rack, well then for God's sake call and ask what the house rule is before you choose where to play. In this city you've got 50+ places to choose from. Give your business to the place that will let you use your precious rack, if you must; don't try to buck against the rule where you are, even if you don't like it.

I know, though, that for this kind of demented individual, we could quote Roseanne Rosannadanna: "If it isn't one thing, it's another." That is, he was itching for a fight over something, anything, to make himself feel better (in some perverse way) after having had a big loss. If it wasn't the chip rack, it would have been talking about the hand in progress, or whether he had to post both blinds after being away from the table for a while, or acting out of turn. Or he would have pounced on a dealer for making some small error, or yelled at the cocktail waitress for not getting his order quite right. I think it's clear that his ego was bruised, and he would have taken the opportunity to contend over any little point on which he could assert himself, as a salve to his wounded self-image.

It's frightening how many people there are in the world so eager to lash out over anything, with the least provocation. Fragile egos are terribly dangerous to society at large. If nothing else, it's really annoying to have to share a poker table with such deranged jerks.