Don't argue with the floor person

One of the advantages of knowing poker rules pretty thoroughly--even the obscure ones that only get called into play on rare occasions--is that I'm never surprised about how some unusual situation is going to get resolved. If I'm involved in the hand, I don't have to divert my attention from the task of winning it, and if I'm not involved, I can just sit back and watch, without feeling the need to inject my opinion (because I know that my opinion doesn't matter). Players without formal training in poker rules, and without lots of table time logged (i.e., those who have learned to play on the Internet or in home games) tend to get blindsided by rules they don't know about, and it takes them off their game. Their reactions can be pretty funny and revelatory.

Here's an example of what I mean.

At least a few times a day in every poker room in the world, a dealer burns and turns too early. That is to say, the dealer mistakenly thinks the action is complete on a betting round when it actually isn't, and puts the next card face-up on the table. So then we have a problem. Whoever hasn't yet had the option to act on the flop can't very well be allowed to make that decision knowing what the turn card will be, when nobody else had that information.

There's a standard procedure for this situation, because, like I said, it happens with some regularity. The dealer really could handle it alone, but everywhere I've played the dealer is required to call the floor person over, who then instructs the dealer what to do. (Actually, this is one of the flaws in the system--to a novice, it looks like the floor person is making up a solution to the problem on the spot, when, in reality, they're going over a well-worn script.*)

At Planet Hollywood the other night, only two players were contesting a pot on the turn. Player A checked, B bet, and A check-raised without verbally announcing the raise--he just threw out a bunch of chips. The dealer noticed too late that the number of chips A put out was a raise rather than a call, and had the river card (a queen) out on the board before B was given a chance to respond to the check-raise.

Floor guy comes over, explains what's going to happen: The queen is taken back, reshuffled with the rest of the cards still in the dealer's hand (called the "stub," for those who want to impress their friends with their poker vocabulary). Player B is then allowed to make his decision about Player A's raise as if he hadn't seen that queen hit.

Well, B doesn't like this at all. He asks, "How is that fair? It wasn't my fault the last card got put out early!"

Now, this protest does two things, as far as I'm concerned. First, it tells me that this guy doesn't know casino poker very thoroughly, because he has obviously never encountered this situation before. Second, it tells me and everybody else at the table that he was indeed on a draw, and the queen was exactly the card he wanted (in this case, completing a fairly obvious straight draw). Of course, he could be putting on an Oscar-nominated performance, trying to sell his opponent on the idea that he needed that queen, when he already had a lock on the hand, but it sure looked like genuine frustration to me.

It was clear to me that he believed the floor person was just pulling an idea out of thin air as to how to resolve the situation, and that maybe he could persuade him to come up with some other solution that didn't involve retracting the queen. My speaking up would have just poured gasoline on the flames, but I really wanted to tell him, "Look, pal, arguing about it isn't going to get you anywhere. What he's telling you is absolutely standard, by the book, and if he were so inclined, he could even take you into the poker room manager's office and show you the procedure book, where it's written down just the way he's describing it. You might as well save your breath and everybody's time and just accept that that's how it's going to be."

The ending of the story was actually pretty funny--to everybody except poor Player B. He finally folded, but just had to get some nasty verbal shots in at Player A, saying that if they hadn't treated him so unfairly as to take back that queen, he would have won the pot. "You just got lucky that the dealer screwed up!" Then Player A, as he's scooping up the chips, quietly turns over his hole cards, revealing that he had flopped a full house! Player B had been drawing dead, and unquestionably would have lost all his money if the hand had played out with him hitting his straight on the river. It was a beautiful thing to see, the angry SOB suddenly cowed into silence by being shown how utterly misplaced his rage was. I admit it--I laughed. I couldn't help it.

Anyway, despite that delightful ending, the point is this: Don't argue with the floor person. I've seen them called over for dozens of disputes, maybe hundreds by now, and I've never once seen a player argue his way into a different decision. Occasionally there is some pertinent fact that doesn't get conveyed right at first, which properly changes the decision when brought to light. But if you're just trying to argue about what you think is fair, or what you do in your home game, or what you just know the rules of poker require, you're tilting at windmills. Even on the rare occasions that a floor person makes an incorrect decision (and it really is rare), they're stubborn as an ox about it, and you might as well argue with a brick wall. All it does is reveal that you're out of your element and you're out of control.

Of course, as usual, the people who really need this message are not readers of my humble words of advice.

Just for fun, here's an interesting video of a controversial hand at a recent big-money tournament: http://www.cardplayer.com/tv/29329. The reason it's interesting is that both Chau Giang and J.C. Tran, among the best professional players in the world, both misunderstand the applicable rules, as demonstrated in their interviews here. The dealer was exactly right (except that she probably should have called the floor over before doing anything--but she would have been told to proceed exactly as she did, for sure), and the tournament director explains the rule correctly. Point being that even many highly experienced players don't know all the rules, so even when pro players think that the floor person is wrong, it's often the players themselves who are wrong.** (Note also how the weaselly, low-life scumbag jerk that got away with murder here lies through his teeth about what happened.)



*I don't blame casinos for requiring the floor person to take over, for two reasons. First, some dealers get flustered at having made the mistake, and compound the problem by making additional mistakes, so it's helpful to have somebody watch the next steps closely. Second, even when the situation is handled exactly by the book, it's volatile, and at least one player is often left fuming, so it's good to have the floor guy already there to deal with it, rather than having the dealer take all the heat. My point isn't that they shouldn't get the floor involved, just that the solution to the problem is so standardized that an experienced dealer could just follow the recipe by himself.

**Not always, though. There have been stories coming out of the WSOP the last couple of years about floor decisions that really do sound like bizarre rules were being made up on the fly. And at the World Poker Open at the Gold Strike casino during season 4 of the World Poker Tour, the tournament director made a bone-headed decision (that a player who announced a raise wouldn't actually have to raise) in front of the cameras. But in ordinary casino poker, any floor person is far, far more likely to know the correct rule or procedure than the average player.