Rabbit hunting

Did you know that there are one or two things about poker than annoy me? Oh, you did? Well, here's another.

Commonly when a player folds to an opponent's bet before the river, he is curious what would have happened if he had called instead. So he asks the dealer to deal out the rest of the hand. Usually this is a player who was hoping to hit a straight draw or a flush draw, and wants to know if his miracle card would have come to win him the pot.

I have never asked for this, and can't imagine that I would ever do so. Maybe I'm an alien life form, but once I've folded, I just don't care what cards come (if others continue in the hand) or would have come (if it's over with). It doesn't affect me either way.

Frequently when the dealer indulges the rabbit-hunting request, the player involved gets all worked up, kicking himself for not making the call, or expressing great relief for having folded. I hear them say things like "Dang, I should have called," or, conversely, "Glad I folded." This is insane. It makes no sense to retrospectively judge a decision on the basis of information that wasn't available at the time the decision was made.

If you have some sort of decision resting on the flip of a coin, pick heads, and it comes up tails, do you chastise yourself for not somehow knowing how the coin would land?

Suppose you buy a lottery ticket once a year on your birthday, always playing 1-2-3-4-5-6-7. If you see on the news that that exact set of numbers hit on a non-birthday week, do you berate yourself for not magically having divined that this was the week for your numbers?

Of course not. Unless, of course, you're just plain nuts.

Poker is a game of incomplete information, by design. You can't change that. If you could over time improve your ability to guess what cards are yet to come by practicing with the rabbit hunt, then it would make some sense. But that's not happening.

A correct fold is not made incorrect by the fact that you would have hit the two-outer on the river, nor is a bad call made correct by that outcome. The decision was either right or wrong, reasonable or unreasonable, based on what information you had at the time.

If you feel better or worse about your decision based on stuff you could not possibly have known at the time, then you're an idiot.

Most casinos officially prohibit dealers from rabbit-hunting. I can guess a couple of reasons for this. First, it wastes time during which the table could be making money. Second, when there is a high-hand and/or bad beat jackpot, and playing out the hand after it's over generates what would have been a jackpot, you just know that one or more players are going to raise a stink, saying that they should get the money anyway. It's easier just to sweep the cards away and not risk that situation arising.

Unfortunately, many dealers will cave in to a player's request anyway. I hate that. Everybody who has taken Psych 101 in college knows that the way to keep the rat pressing the bar incessantly is to give positive reward for him doing so at random intervals. (Parents of small children can see the same phenomenon by occasionally giving in to a request for candy from the checkout area of the grocery store.) It is not a coincidence that most casino games are set up the same way. When dealers occasionally give in to the rabbit-hunting request, it serves as the reward that then generates dozens or hundreds of more such requests. The only way to extinguish the unwanted behavior is for it to never, ever get rewarded.

Recently I discovered rabbit-hunting taken to a new level of absurdity. See that second image above? (Click it for a larger view.) That's from the Carbon Poker site, on which I recently opened an account. I was surprised to find that they offer an electronic rabbit-hunting option, which I've never seen online before. If you're the last one to fold to a bet, or the one who made a bet that nobody called, you can click the button labeled "Rabbit" and the site will deal out the rest of the hand. (It exposes your hand in the process, so you may not want to take the option, if you prefer to keep your cards secret.) Even if all of the action was pre-flop, you can see the entire five community cards with a rabbit request.

If rabbit-hunting in a casino, with the deck in the dealer's hand, is stupid, the same request in Internet poker is stupid squared. That's because there is no guarantee that the cards the site shows you are the ones that actually would have been dealt, had the hand played out. Most online poker sites use a randomizing algorithm that does not select a card until it is needed. When one is called for, the software makes the selection based on a bunch of "seed" data that it collects right that instant. In other words, if the request is made a millisecond earlier or later, you'll get a different output from the randomizer, and a different card shows up on your screen. (See http://hardboiledpoker.blogspot.com/2006/07/doing-what-if-shuffle.html and http://hardboiledpoker.blogspot.com/2006/07/doing-what-if-shuffle-sequel.html for more details.) Assuming that Carbon Poker joins the majority of sites in this regard, what you get from the rabbit hunt is virtually certain not to be what would have actually happened if the action had been continued.

So if there is any smidgen of rationality in wanting to see the cards that the casino dealer would have put out, it is pure illusion when done online. This is officially the stupidest thing I've seen offered to online poker players.

Look, folks--make the best decision you can. Once the hand is over, let it go, both emotionally and in reality. Don't bother seeking information that became irrelevant the instant you mucked your cards. It just gets you all worked up for no reason, and irritates everybody else whose time you're wasting pointlessly.

Addendum, January 27, 2008

Short-stacked Shamus emailed me to point out a similar post he did over a year ago (see http://hardboiledpoker.blogspot.com/2006/10/rabbit-season-duck-season.html), which I had overlooked when browsing his archives--even did the Elmer Fudd illustration thing. Damn. Try to be original.... He points out that Absolute Poker has had this as an option in the table set-up for a long time. Sure enough, it's there. I had never noticed it, even though I used to play on Absolute frequently.