Tick tock, tick tock

Before I had a blog, I wrote about my poker experiences in emails to a friend back home. Here's one from September, 2006:

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I forgot to tell you about an incident the other night at Golden Nugget. The guy in seat 10 was a real asshole--slowing down the game, criticizing other people's play, thinking he was funny by pretending to push all-in, then folding, etc.

In a hand I wasn't involved in, another player raised this guy's bet by $100. The guy took forever deciding whether to call or not. Finally, I asked the dealer for the clock. Any player at the table who thinks somebody is taking unreasonably long can call for the clock, which gives the player one minute to make a decision. If he does nothing by the end of that minute, his hand is automatically declared dead (i.e., it's the equivalent of folding).

In practice, it's rare to need to use this, because the vast majority of people are pretty reasonable in taking time to make decisions. When somebody has an unusually difficult call to make, the others are understanding about letting him take the time he needs. It's only when somebody is repeatedly slowing things down that he'll likely get the clock called. And even then, just the act of calling for the clock usually is enough to prompt the recalcitrant player to act. I've only called for it a couple of times, and I've never seen it actually get down to the end of the one minute.

So I call for the clock. The supervisor comes over with an electronic stopwatch, and calls out the time as the seconds elapse. One player at the table has never seen this process, so asks the supervisor what happens if the player doesn't act. The supervisor explains that the hand is dead--so even if the guy in seat 10 didn't understand that before (and, of course, every player is responsible for knowing the rules and procedures without them being explained to him personally), he is now informed of the consequence.

30 seconds. 20. 15. 10. Then 5-4-3-2-1, and the beeper sounds. The guy still hasn't done anything. The dealer reaches over, picks up the guy's cards and throws them in the muck.
At this point, the asshole really yells up a storm. "Hey, what the hell are you doing? I want to call!" Then he addresses the supervisor. "He picked up my cards when I was going to call!"
Fortunately, the dealer and the supervisor held the line and enforced the rule. Hand is dead. The guy, of course, keeps griping for several more minutes.

The player to my right thanks me for calling for the clock. Seat 10 is annoying everybody.
Why do some people have to be jerks?

Compare this to a guy at the Hilton recently. He hadn't played in a casino before. He was faced with an $80 raise. He wanted to see what his stack would look like if he called the bet and lost, so he counted out the $80 and set them in front of his cards, then looked at what was left, and said, "Nope, I don't think I can call you." But, of course, the act of putting the chips out constituted a call, and the dealer gently informed him that he had already called and couldn't take it back. It was obviously an honest mistake. The guy just said, "OK, I'm sorry, I didn't know. My fault. Do what you have to do." He lost the hand, bought more chips, and said, "Well, that's one way to learn what the rules are," and laughed at himself.

Why can't everybody be good sports like that?