Almost three weeks ago, near the beginning of the World Series of Poker 2008, I put up this post about a player in one of the tournaments who had to learn the hard way about using a card protector to prevent the dealer from accidentally picking up and mucking one's cards.
Some people just refuse to learn. Yesterday it happened again. Here's the story, as reported by the hard-working live bloggers at PokerNews:
A Bit of a Kerfuffle
From time to time a calming influence is required at the table, and
today that person was Clonie Gowen. With one player yelling at the dealer for
accidentally mucking his cards, Gowen quoted the TD [Tournament Director] rules
in which players are responsible for the protection of their own hands and
cannot blame the dealer if they are subsequently pulled into the muck. The
player seemed to accept this and the situation was quickly diffused without the
need for a tournament director to step in.
Now, Clonie Gowen is hardly the optimal person to turn to on questions of rules, after admitting on national television to cheating in a poker tournament and advising others to do the same (see here). But this time she was absolutely correct. Players never seem to think about this until it's too late, but what do they imagine the solution should be, once their cards have been accidentally mucked? Allow them to dig through the muck until they find what they claim their cards were? Just announce what their cards were? Those are so obviously rife with potential for angle shooting and outright cheating that it's laughable that anybody would seriously suggest such idiocy as the proper recourse, once the mistake has been made.
One might argue that the whole hand should be declared moot, as is done when a fouled deck is discovered, and all bets returned to the players, as if the hand had never occurred. But why should the other player(s) be penalized because you failed to take the extremely simple expedient of dropping a chip on your cards?
By odd coincidence, I saw the same thing happen during my cash game at Bill's Gamblin' Hall and Saloon last night. The player in seat 9 (to the dealer's immediate right) looked down to respond to a bet his opponent had just made on the turn, only to discover that his cards were gone. None of us had noticed it happening. They were mixed into the muck and unrecoverable. He was livid (although he calmed down after his opponent, in a very nice gesture, showed him that he was way behind in the hand anyway, and the dealer's mistake apparently saved him a lot of money). But he hadn't protected his cards, and the second rule on the list on the wall at Bill's poker room says--as does every other list of posted poker rules I've ever seen--that players are responsible for protecting their cards at all times.
C'mon, folks. This is really, really easy. Dealers make this mistake not every day, but with a predictable enough regularity that not using a card cap is like driving without a seat belt--just begging to get hurt.
Among poker players who habitually leave their cards unproctected, there are only two types: Those who have had a hand accidentally killed or fouled at an inopportune moment, and those who will. The World Series of Poker is probably not the place at which you would want to move from the latter category into the former.
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5 comments:
Can I just ask the question - If you used a card protector and the dealer still (somehow) managed to accidentally muck your hand - (i.e they weren't totally concentrating on the job in hand etc.) would the player have any comeback, or would the cards still be dead and the hand played to its conclusion.
It's almost unthinkable that that would happen. Not absolutely impossible, I suppose, but vanishingly rare. I've certainly never seen it nor heard of it happening. If it did, I expect management would make whatever effort they could to retrieve the hand, but if it was unrecoverable, that player would still be out of luck, with a dead hand. If I were management, though, and that happened, I would attempt to take that player's bets out of the pot before awarding it, and give him a refund. At least that's my first impulse.
While I agree with you that Clonie Gowen has cheated in the past, I don't think that a cheater is any less knowledgable about the rules than any other player. In fact, I would speculate that cheaters know the rules better than most.
Great blog. I usually get grumpy if I don't get my daily dose of the Poker Grump.
Shane Scott
You are making things up about Clonie Gowen, so that people will read your stupid blog.
She told a story of playing in Tunica at a Casino, where there was an extra Ace in the deck, she reported it to the dealer. She was being cheated.
Are you so jealous of her lifestyle that you need to make things up about her.
Clonie has never cheated anyone. She doesn't do drugs. She doesn't throw up her food. She doesn't talk about people, she treats people with respect.
You are such a creep to write things about people you don't know.
LEAVE HER ALONE!
In the post to which I linked, I detailed what she said that she did and what the standard poker rules require of a player.
Yeah, she told the dealer--AFTER taking the pot. That is cheating. (Nice little half-truth you wrote there, leaving out the critical piece of information.) What is required of a player in that situation, both by rules and by ethics, is to inform the dealer as soon as one discovers the fouled deck. At that point, all bets are returned to the players that made them. Nobody gets the pot.
If you have some specific reason to claim that either (1) the rules of poker require something different of a player than what I wrote, or (2) that Gowen actually conformed to what the rules require, despite her own words to the contrary, I'd be interested in hearing about it. Absent such, though, I stand by my assertion that she cheated. She also encouraged other players who find themselves in a similar situation to cheat exactly the same way that she did--claim the pot, THEN inform the dealer. I find that despicable. If you don't, then I think that your ethics are as defective as Gowen's.
Incidentally, I put a copy of that blog post on the Full Tilt forum in which questions could be addressed to their pros. I also submitted it to Gowen's own web site. Both were so that she could address and refute what I had said, if she wanted to do so. She did not respond in either forum. Also, as far as I know, she never responded to essentially the same points made by others when the situation was discussed on twoplustwo (and probably other forums, though I didn't check them). If she has a legitimate defense and/or explanation, she sure does not seem to have made any effort to put it out to the public.
I never said anything about her using drugs or being bulimic or gossiping. Are you hallucinating these things?
It is an odd accusation to say that I am a creep for writing about a person I do not know personally. First, she has made herself a public figure by any reasonable definition, and public comment/criticism goes along with that choice. Second, doesn't you writing negative stuff about me make you a "creep" by the same definition?
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