Another ethical dilemma

I lied about the previous post being the last story from the Palms session last night. I intended it to be, but after clearing my head with a good night's sleep, I realize that I have another story to tell.

I was in the big blind with K-2 offsuit. Nobody raised, and five players took the flop. Nobody bet it. Turn card likewise got nobody taking a crack at the pot, which is highly unusual for this many players. The river was a deuce, giving me a pair. Again, it got checked around. A couple of people announced "No pair here." I flipped over my hand and said, "I hit the deuce on the end." A couple of players mucked without showing.

Frankly, I had basically tuned out of the hand along the way, because there was no way I was putting even another dollar in, and I thought there was almost no chance that I would turn out to have the winner, even after hitting the river card. So I just wasn't paying attention at the end. I saw a couple of people muck, saw the dealer kill another couple of hands, then announce "Pair of deuces with a king," and start pushing me the pot. I thought that was quite funny. I threw up my arms in a gesture of victory and mock-shouted a big "Yes!"

But in the process of being silly, I apparently missed something--as did the dealer. A very quiet, soft-spoken player on my immediate left had had 6-2, which gave him two pairs. The dealer had misread his hand as being just a pair of deuces with a 6 kicker, overlooking the 6 on the board. She had killed his hand, and he hadn't held on to his cards and hadn't spoken up quickly or forcefully enough. I didn't see his cards--not because he didn't table them properly, but just because I wasn't paying attention.

The player to my right agreed that the one on my left had hit two pair and had the winner. But his cards were in the muck and couldn't be identified. With another player vouching for him, the dealer apologized for the error and said something like, "Don't worry about it--I'll get you the money."

That was OK with me. I get the pot, and the house will compensate the player who should have gotten it. But then the guy to my right whispered to me, "You should give him the pot, because if you don't, the dealer is going to pay him out of her tips."

Oh. Well, that changes things. I don't recall what, exactly the dealer had said, but when this guy whispered that to me, I realized that he was probably right, and my initial impression of what the dealer planned to do was erroneous.

Technically, the pot belonged rightfully to me on the grounds that the guy on my left had not (1) held onto his cards until the pot was pushed his way, and/or (2) spoken up quickly and decisively when the dealer took his cards to kill his hand. (See http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/09/what-chips-into-pot-arent-enough-for.html for another story about the same principle, as well as quotations of rules on the point.) But when there are two credible witnesses saying that the winning hand was accidentally killed, I think general notions of fairness trump technicalities of rules. If the house were going to make the compensation, then fine, I'm not going to feel badly about keeping the pot. But I'm not going to, in effect, take the money out of the dealer's tips, just because she's feeling guilty about having made a mistake.

Now my problem was that I didn't know how big the pot had been. But I realized that if I said that out loud, it would look like I was trying to make excuses not to hand over the money. I guessed that there had been five players in the pot for $3 each, so I handed three red chips to the guy on my left, along with my apology and explanation that I wasn't trying to claim an undeserved pot--I just hadn't been paying attention and hadn't seen his cards. He was very cool about it, and even handed one redbird back to me, saying he didn't think the pot was quite that big. OK, whatever. It seemed all was well between us. With such a small amount at stake, I think the effort and gesture meant more than the money on both sides of the exchange.

The dealer thanked me for giving up the pot, which I take as confirmation that she had planned to compensate the other player out of her own pocket--because I assume that otherwise she would have stopped the transaction by saying something like, "No, don't worry about it, the money will come from the house."

I don't really have a lesson to be learned from this, except that one should always pay attention to what's going on. But I already knew that, and every reader already knows that. It's just hard to maintain focus 100% of the time, and inevitably it's the times that it doesn't seem very important to be paying attention that the problems arise.


Addendum, February 26, 2008

Please read the comment from "voiceofjoe." He raises an interesting point. Let's see if I can address it adequately.

I think the first thing to establish is that the rules prescribe that the pot was rightfully mine, because the other player didn't do what is required of him to protect his interest in it.

Once that is agreed on, then the question is just one of whether I choose to give the money back. I don't think it is unethical to make my decision whether to be generous or not dependent on some factor of my choosing. If I decide to relinquish the money on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, but not on other days, I'm not doing anything wrong--I'm just being generous some days and on other days letting the result prescribed by the rules stand.

Secondly, poker rooms do sometimes take money from the till to compensate an unhappy player who lost a pot because of a misunderstanding or dealer error. I have no idea what criteria are used to determine when they do this (and I imagine it varies wildly between facilities). They are investing in good PR, good customer relations. Presumably, they don't view this as the casino being cheated, but rather an investment in making a customer feel that he is being treated well and fairly, so that he will come back in the future and tell his friends what a wonderful place it is.

If it is the dealer making the compensation, though, this isn't the case at all. She was not making the offer in order to pacify an angry customer or win his future business. She presumably doesn't really care much whether he ever comes back or not. She was simply feeling guilty, and wanted to make things right within her power to do so. I applaud the sentiment, but I think it is misplaced. Suppose the pot had been $1000 instead of maybe $15? She probably couldn't make the offer then, at least not without giving herself significant financial hardship.

I think that distinction (between the casino's motive and the dealer's) is meaningful enough that it is not irrational to accept the offer (if one had been made, as I erroneously assumed at first) from the casino, but decline the one made personally by the dealer. I certainly can't say that it's the only right way to look at it, but I don't think it's either unethical or unreasonable to see a real difference and to make a different decision based on it.

Dealers make mistakes. It's part of the live poker game, just like umpires' occasional bad calls are part of baseball. There is and should be no obligation for the dealers to reach into their pockets to make up for it, any more than an umpire should feel obligated to financially compensate the losing World Series team because his bad call at the end of the last game flipped the rightful outcome around. If the casino wants to stand behind its dealers by making up for the errors, it has every right to make such a business decision.

Finally, I don't think the comparison with the Betfair situation is apt at all, for a few reasons. First, I didn't set out to deliberately take advantage of what I knew the casino's generosity would be. Suppose I knew that a particular casino made a policy of reimbursing players in this situation. A buddy and I go there deliberately looking to create this situation somehow with a big pot, with the result that one of us gets the pot and the other gets an equivalent amount provided by the casino. That would indeed by unethical, because of the intentionality. It would be a scam.

Second, the Betfair players agreed in advance that they couldn't keep any money that was credited to them because of a software error. I have entered into no such agreement with the casino. In fact, as I said, the rules say that the pot is mine. A casino volunteering to reimburse a player's inadvertant loss is, in my opinion, worlds removed from an online site reclaiming what is, by previous agreement, rightfully theirs.

At least those are my off-the-cuff thoughts on the matter. But perhaps I'm wrong. If there's a better argument for the proposition that I should view and respond to the dealer's offer and the casino's hypothetical offer in exactly the same way, I'm certainly willing to listen to and ponder it.