How to fold

You would think that with all of the infinite complexities of poker, the one thing everybody would be able to get right is the single easiest part of the game: folding.

You would be wrong.

Online, of course, all you have to do--in fact, all you can do--is click the button. A few sites give you the option to show your cards as you fold, but only when you are the last one out of the hand, so that there is no way you can queer any action yet to come. Just about the only way you can screw up the process is by just sitting there, not doing anything, and timing out--which is extremely rude, because it wastes everybody's time for no good reason. Well, there is one other way you can get it wrong: you can type in chat about what you're folding, when there are still players actively in the hand. But that will typically get you scolded by another player, and if it gets reported to the site, you'll at least get a warning not to do it again.

But in a casino, the number of wrong ways to fold vastly exceeds the number of right ways, and it seems that the universe of poker players manages to find and employ every single one of the wrong ways, every day.

By far the most common problem with folding is exposing the bottom card inadvertantly. Anytime you lift the cards off of the table even a couple of inches, there's a good chance that you're flashing. If I really watched every player's cards, I could see at least one card inadvertantly exposed on nearly every deal. That's how ubiquitous the problem is.

On most hands, knowledge of one discard won't change anything. But you never know when it will. If I see a 7 flash by, and the flop is 7-7-K, then I know that I don't have to worry about the bad kicker in my 7-5 hole cards, because I have the only 7 left in the deck. That's an extremely valuable piece of information.

It becomes tiresome to inform the dealer every time I see a card flashed as it's being folded, so I've gradually raised my threshold for doing so. First, I have to be planning to stay in the hand; if I'm going to fold myself, my illicit information isn't hurting anybody else. Second, the violator has to be a chronic one. If it's somebody who isn't usually flashing, I let it go. But if he's doing it a lot, clearly he needs to be informed that there's a problem. Third, I have to see the card pretty clearly--be able to identify it specifically. If I just get a vague sense of a bunch of red dots, or that it's a picture card without further detail, I don't speak up.

One might question the ethics of this position, but it's seriously a problem to speak up every single time I see a flashed card, because it's happening all the friggin' time! I'm not thrilled about the decision to let it slide the majority of the time, but the rigid alternative is socially extremely awkward--being the only person at the table who ever mentions it at all (I can count on one hand the number of times I've heard another player volunteer having seen a flashed discard), and doing so on nearly every deal, if I were really strict about it, well, it's just an untenably nittish role to play. So I live with my compromise, for good or ill.

The next wrong way to fold is the loft: the guy who thinks it's somehow cool to toss his cards way up high, hoping they'll land right in the muck. These goofballs appear to take great pride in the accuracy of their arcs. But, obviously, this exposes at least the bottom card, and often both, to anybody at the table who cares to take a peek in mid-air. What surprises me most about this is how few dealers say anything about it. It should be an immediate warning, with the floor called over on a second offense, and an invitation to leave for the day the third time around. Usually, though, nothing at all is said or done. Grrrrrrrrrrr.

A third wrong way to fold is to flash your cards to another player before you toss them in. This is especially egregious if the other player still has a live hand to be played. But it's wrong even if you're showing them only to a player who folded before you. Information is the most precious commodity at a poker table, and by both rule and convention, it must be equally available to all. Hence the "show one, show all" rule. If you flash your cards to your buddy in the next seat, every other player has the right to see them, too, in order to help form a picture of what range of hands you tend to play versus fold. (If there is still action pending in the hand, the correct procedure is for the dealer to kill the mucked cards, then set them aside, to be revealed to the table after the hand is completed.) I don't often exercise this privilege, but once in a while there are two friends sitting in adjacent seats, who show each other their cards every time around. In those situations, I will indeed start exercising my right to see what they're throwing away, and--surprise, surprise--after about three times in a row, they catch on and stop doing it.

A fourth wrong way to fold is to flash your cards to the dealer. This is usually confined to the players in the 1 and 9/10 seats. The first problem with this is that the dealer doesn't care. He's cranking out hundreds of hands a day to mostly complete strangers, and cannot possibly have any emotional investment in whether you're getting the world's worst run of bad cards, or the most horrendous bad beats. What's more is that even if he did care, he can't show any reaction to what you are revealing, lest it leak improper information to the other players yet to act. Finally, it's pretty hard to show your cards to the dealer without them also becoming visible to at least one other player, usually in the seat on the dealer's other side.

Speaking of the dealer, it should--but cannot--go without saying that it is inexcusable to deliberately fire your cards at the dealer as if they were weapons. I don't see this every day, but probably a couple of times a month, on average. You're an idiot if you blame the dealer for whatever ill fortune you may have just experienced, and even more of an idiot if you decide to show the table where you place the fault. If I ran a card room, doing this just once would get you ejected for the day. No, you're not likely to send the dealer to the hospital for sutures or orthopedic surgery, but it's unspeakably rude and demeaning, and I simply wouldn't want players that hotheaded and volatile playing in my facility.

So there you have it--at least five wrong ways (that I can think of off the top of my head, though there are undoubtedly others) to do the simplest act that poker asks of its players. You literally don't have to (and shouldn't) even lift them off of the table. Just slide them gently forward.

When I first started reading poker blogs a couple of years ago, I had on my reading list several written by poker dealers, since I was interested in becoming one myself. I remember a post from one of them about this very subject. Unfortunately, I can no longer recall who wrote it, and I was unable to find it with several attempts at a Google search. But the post concluded with the observation that all you have to do is push your cards two inches forward. It then asked, "Is that too much to ask?"

It was a good question then, and remains so now. When all you have to do is slide your cards a few inches toward the dealer, how can so many people get it so wrong so much of the time?