Going south (and not for the winter)

After hanging out in poker rooms for not too long, you learn that one of the rules is that you can't take chips off the table until you take them all off when you're getting ready to finish your session. For example, you can't buy in for $200, win a big $600 pot, and put that profit in your pocket, keeping just the original $200 on the table to play with.

From the point of view of the other players, after you've had a nice win they want to have a chance to win their money back. From the point of view of the casino, more chips in play means bigger pots, higher rakes, and more players eager to join a table where there's lots of money to be won.

Those new to live play, however, sometimes don't know this. It's not terribly common, but maybe once a month or so, on average, I see somebody taking chips off of the table. It's usually quickly clear that they have no idea that this is against the rules and considered unethical. For the most part, as soon as somebody explains to them the rule and its purpose, they comply (or occasionally decide to leave, if they have made a big score and want to lock it up).

But I can recall at least two instances in which people rebelled. At Binion's once, a guy had had an amazing run and had accumulated something like $1300 in chips, which is pretty rare in a $1-2 game. A couple hundred of them had been mine. I was disappointed when he got up to leave. But I was surprised when he came back maybe 15 minutes later and bought back into the game for only about $200.

Most casinos have a one-hour rule, meaning that if you're gone for an hour or more you can re-enter the game for whatever minimum/maximum buy-in everybody else does, but being gone for less than an hour means that you have to put back into play whatever amount you left with, if it's over the maximum. This is to prevent people from getting around the rule by leaving and immediately returning, which would effectively be no different from just pocketing chips right at the table.*

Binion's has enough tables and traffic that it's easy for somebody to leave and come back soon thereafter without anybody noticing anything unusual. But when this guy came back to the same table he had just left, we all certainly noticed. I quietly walked over to the supervisor and told him what had happened. He was absolutely perfect about it--I wish I could remember his name and give him credit. He didn't embarrass this player at the table, but just asked to speak to him in private.

Well, their "private" didn't last long, because the troublemaker quickly became very loud and agitated. He didn't deny having taken away a large amount in chips, nor that he had been gone just a short time. Rather, he insisted that the floor guy was just wrong, that there was no such rule. This is a syndrome I've seen many times, and it always perplexes me: players (particularly out-of-town visitors) telling the room supervisor what the general rules of poker are, or, even more mysteriously, as in this case, telling him what the house rules are. The guy insisted that the same thing had happened the night before, and the shift supervisor there said there was no problem with his actions. Both I and the supervisor talking to him were extremely dubious that such a conversation took place.

Anyway, this imbecile kept arguing the point for maybe ten minutes. It was just nutty. He had several easy remedies: Come back in with the same amount he took off the table (he said he couldn't, because he had given it to his girlfriend, and she went somewhere else with it); sit out for the remainder of the hour; or just walk across the street to the Golden Nugget and play there instead. He could even have spent the hour playing a limit game at Binion's, because if you switch to a different game or different limits, it's as if you're starting out fresh, and what you won previously does not have to be put into play. I never did figure out why this guy got so agitated over something for which there were so many easy solutions, or why he instead chose the harder--impossible, actually--route of trying to convince the floor person that Binion's had no such rule. Well, other than the fact that he was a complete psychopath. That would kind of explain it.

The other time was at the Hilton. A tourist tried to give his friend something like $150 in chips to place a sports bet for him. I caught the dealer's attention to point out quietly what was happening, and the dealer informed him that he couldn't do that. The player wasn't happy about it, but didn't make much of a fuss.

But then just a few minutes later, when I looked up after being involved in a hand, I noticed that the guy was gone, and there were a lot fewer chips at his seat. Obviously, he had surreptitiously taken them away. I pointed this out to the dealer, and when the guy came back the floor person confronted him. He couldn't pretend not to have known the rule, since everybody had heard the dealer explain it to him. The guy admitted it, but still protested that he thought there shouldn't be such a rule. He finally agreed to put all the rest of what he had on him into play by buying more chips, but it was only about $50. (This appeared to be sincere--he emptied his wallet and pockets, and it didn't at all look to me like he had prepared to put on such a performance. He pretty clearly thought nobody would notice what he had done.) The rest of the money was now tied up in his sports bet, and he couldn't exactly get it back. The floor person accepted this, after explaining the situation to the table and asking if anybody objected. The dude was a really bad player, so we were happy to have him come back for whatever he had, even if it wasn't as much as he had disappeared with.

I've heard the term "squirrelling" applied to players who slip high-denomination chips off the table in knowing violation of the rule. (It's hard to do that with a large volume of low-denomination chips.) I had never heard the phrase "going south," for the same conduct, until the first time I watched Season 1 of GSN's "High Stakes Poker" (the re-viewing of which today triggered this post).

In one of the episodes, Freddy Deeb left the table to go smoke a cigarette. As he left, he hiked up his pants. Johnny Chan saw something that he thought was Freddy slipping chips into his pocket. On the tape it's pretty clear that he's just tugging on his pants, though he hand is right near the pocket. The producers later verified through their ongoing chip counts that no money had been removed, but the players didn't know that at the time. When Deeb returned, it caused five minutes of heated argument.

The strange thing about how the incident ended is that the floor guy they hired for the show (Bob Thompson) never resolved the question of whether Deeb had, in fact, removed chips from the table. Maybe he just thought (correctly) that it was extremely unlikely that Deeb would do such a thing, so the accusation didn't deserve actual investigation. (It does seem highly improbable. Even without cameras rolling and producers monitoring every pot to track who has how many chips all the time for the broadcast, Deeb is supremely confident in his ability to keep winning; he's not afraid of losing his profit, and if, for whatever reason, he felt like locking up a win, he would just quit the game.) If I had been in charge of settling the matter, I would have asked the table, "Does anybody claim to have actually seen Mr. Deeb remove chips when he left?" If the answer was no, then I would say, "All right, then, no more talk about it. It's done." If somebody claimed to have seen something, then it could be investigated.

Incidentally, this was another thing wrong with the poker in the awful movie "Lucky You" that I now realize I forgot to include in my previous list of criticisms (see http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/08/why-do-poker-movies-have-to-be-so-awful.html). On their first date, the two main characters go to Binion's poker room. She stakes him, because he's broke and she just got her first paycheck in Vegas. (Today's helpful hint: Borrowing money to play poker may not be the best idea for a first date.) He scores a pretty good win, with her watching all goo-goo-eyed at his prowess. Then she has to leave to go to work, but he's going to keep playing. He picks up a couple of stacks of chips, representing her share of the profit, and hands them to her. The writer of the script did at least have the decency to insert a line of Eric Bana's character asking the other players if anybody minds, and nobody does. That's where it became unbelievable. In the real world, somebody absolutely would protest the removal of that much of his stack from the table.

I used to be so paranoid about not violating this rule that if I received in a pot some sort of unusual, commemorative chip mixed in among the regular ones, and I wanted to add it to my collection of special-issue chips, I would ask the table if anybody objected to my keeping it as a souvenir. After doing this a few times and getting only "what kind of a dork are you?" looks, I realized that nobody is quite that obsessive about the rule. Since nobody would or could possibly object to, say, giving a cocktail waitress a $5 chip as a tip, it's a bit crazy to think that anybody would care about removing the same amount of money as a souvenir.

That said, after I had come to realize that I really didn't need to seek the other players' approval to stash away one chip, I got "caught" (I put that word in scare quotes, because I wasn't trying to hide anything about it) by a dealer at Caesars Palace. He assumed I didn't know the general rule. I told him I did, but I didn't think anybody would mind one commemorative chip. He agreed that it's unlikely anybody would care, but in the future I should ask anyway. I didn't argue the point, but I think his is a minority view. I have since then politely ignored his advice and have continued to give myself permission to put the occasional souvenir chip in my pocket without asking anybody, and without feeling guilty about it. If anybody has even noticed, they haven't said anything about it.

Some poker rooms will also allow a player to use chips from the table to buy into a tournament that's going to be starting soon. This isn't unreasonable or unfair to the other players, since the person in question is presumably going to be taking all of his chips away pretty soon to play in the tournament.

But in general, if you have some reason to want to remove, say, more than 5% of what's in front of you, you should definitely ask the dealer if it's OK. He or she can then tell you the rule, or poll the other players, or have the floor person make a decision. If you're told you can't do it, for heaven's sake don't be a dickwad about it. Find some other above-board (i.e., not squirrelling) way to accomplish whatever it is you need to do, or just end your poker session right then. There's always another game going on somewhere else, or at the same place later, that you can get into.

And above all, don't argue about it. You will lose the argument, sour everybody that's exposed to your stupid ranting, and just end up looking like a jerk in the process.


*I wish that casinos would push the time limit up to, say, three hours. There is at least one regular at the Hilton who routinely locks away any decent-sized win by leaving and watching sports for one hour, then coming back and starting out afresh. It's seriously annoying--and unfair--to the other players. Three hours would be enough that much of the table composition would have changed, and it wouldn't feel as if somebody is just skirting the usual convention. The casino I used to play at most in Wisconsin had a three-hour rule, and I was suprised, when I moved here, to learn that most places have only a one-hour rule.