Stories from the Palms

The three souvenir chips above are the ones I nabbed tonight playing at the Palms. The first two, Gwen Stefani and No Doubt, are shown here as a shoutout to my good friend who is a fan of Ms. Stefani and her former band. The third one is a special chip the Palms issued for the Fourth of July, 2008. It was a nice surprise to pick up a chip that has only been in circulation for a few days. (Click on the photo for a ridiculously enlarged view.)


There were a couple of incidents worth grumbling about here during this poker session.

1.

I was not involved in this hand, but was following the action trying to deduce what cards the two players involved had. One of the players was definitely not a PokerStars prodigy. He was mid-60s, with a heavy German accent, and I've seen him around town a few times before. He played the hand (the details of which don't matter) in a very peculiar way, alternating on every street between passivity and aggression, and I couldn't easily put him on a hand. It turned into one of the biggest pots of the night.

This man finally was facing a very large bet on the river. He looked very unhappy about it. He picked up his hole cards and showed them to the two players on his left (not visible to me or his opponent, who was next to me on the other end of the table from him). One of them reacted strongly, making a face and saying, "Oh, wow." (This is a good reason, kids, not to show your cards to another player during a hand. No matter how good your poker face is, you can't control how others will react, or what they will give away.) This heightened my curiosity. He finally decided to fold.

As the dealer was pulling in his cards, I said to her, "Show those, please." The man nearly had a fit. He went on a tirade about how disrespectful I was being. "Have some respect! HAVE SOME RESPECT!" The dealer had somehow not paid attention at the crucial moment, so she had missed the fact that this guy had deliberately flashed his cards to two other players, but when I told her that, those other players confirmed it. That should have been the end of it, because of the universal "show one, show all" rule. But this guy just escalated his protest at having his cards revealed. Finally, the floor was called over. It took her a while to get the salient facts, but once she did, the decision was simple: Of course any other player can ask to see them.

The guy was so angry at me for making this request that he picked up what was left of his chips, cashed out, and stormed off.

He was apparently confusing two different rules. The only one applicable here was "show one, show all." Information is the most valuable commodity at a poker table. Once he revealed his cards to two other players, it became perfectly legitimate for anybody else to ask to see them. This is not a breach of etiquette, either. Anybody flashing his cards to another player, especially in a hand as unusal and a pot as large as this, has to expect that somebody else will ask to see them. That is what usually happens. In fact, I maintain that it is rude to try to show them selectively, as he did. I think that the spirit of the rule imposes an affirmative obligation on a player. If I show one, I should lay my cards on the table for all to see--players shouldn't have to ask the dealer to exercise their right. (I suspect mine is a minority view on that narrow point, however.)

A completely different rule pertains to "called hands." That is, if on the last round of betting there is a bet and a call, then other players may have the right to ask to see the losing hand, even if the player holding it would rather toss his cards unseen into the muck. This is one of the most controversial rules in the book, and its implementation varies wildly between casinos. In some, only a player who was in the hand all the way to the end can exercise the privilege, while in others anybody at the table can, and in still others one has to be able to convince a floorperson that there is a basis for suspecting collusion, the prevention of which was the original reason for the rule. In some places, the hand about to be revealed gets killed by the dealer first, so that it's ineligible to win, should the player have accidentally misread his hand, while in others this does not occur, and in still others it occurs unless the player asking to see the hand is the guy who apparently won the pot. The rule is also different in tournaments than in cash games. It's all potentially very confusing.

Michael Wiesenberg recently summed all of this up in a column for Card Player magazine--see here. He wisely notes, in addition to the myriad of variations on the rule, that there is also an associated etiquette:

Even though the rules permit requesting any called hand to be shown, you'll find
that in public cardrooms, players rarely ask. Doing so is often considered a
breach of poker etiquette. It's easy online. At the end of any hand in which you
had cards, you can just click on the button that presents the hand history. No
one knows that you looked. In live play, though, you'll soon make a nuisance of
yourself and annoy the others at your table if you keep asking. Reserve doing so
for a hand in which you had demonstrable interest, such as one in which you were
driven out by a large bet on the river and the winning hand is worse than yours
and you want to see if you had the bettor beat. And even then, exercise your
right sparingly.

Well said, and good advice.

But even after typing in all of the above, I have to say that it's all completely irrelevant to the situation I was in tonight. This was not a called hand, so no variant of this rule had any bearing on the matter. I belabor it in order to make clear that the associated point of etiquette, nicely explained by Mr. Wiesenberg, is equally inapplicable. And that seems to be what the gentleman in question was missing. He somehow thought that that etiquette point also carried over to the "show one, show all" rule. It does not. No way, no how.

As I wrote here on the same subject back in November, 2006, in one of my earliest blog posts,

I have heard only one person ever express the opinion that it's bad form to ask
to see a player's cards after he shows them to another player, under the classic
and universal "show one, show all" principle. That was Phil Hellmuth, in one of
last year's WSOP events. I recall that another pro at his table stated strong
disagreement that there was anything wrong with the request.

In fact, looking back on that post (which I had kind of forgotten until just now), I think what I wrote there is what I would tell the older man who got so angry at me tonight:

Dude, you were out of line. If you don't want anyone to ask to see your
hole cards, it's pretty simple: just don't show them to anybody. But if you
choose to flash your aces to your buddy, you've got to expect that somebody else
is going to ask to see them, too, and if you can't deal with that, just go back
to your home game.

Pardon the extended discourse on this point. It's awfully rare that I'm publicly accused of having violated poker etiquette, so when that happens, I feel a need to explain and defend my actions.

I did try to calmly explain exactly this to the man tonight, but he twice interrupted me with yelling, over and over again, "HAVE SOME RESPECT!", so I gave up, rather than risk infuriating him further.


2

A bunch of young men had just started up a new game at the next table over. Within the first couple of hands, a big nastiness erupted. Apparently one of the players wanted to put in a double straddle (for explanations of the regular straddle, see here and here) and have it be live--i.e., that, like with the regular straddle, the double-straddler would gain the last option of raising before the flop. He was told that this would not be allowed.

He was incensed about this decision, far more than could be considered rational or even sane. He insisted that he had played in poker rooms all over Nevada, and every other establishment allowed this, except for the Palms.

Well, that's just pure BS. I can document having played in all of the poker rooms in the Vegas and Mesquite area (with the exception of a couple that I'm not entirely sure are even still open)--see here for the list. In most of them, at some point somebody has asked about the double straddle, which is popular in many home games. I have never found any poker room that will treat it as live. They all allow it, but only as a dead raise in the dark (meaning that the player does not have the option of raising again before the flop after putting in his initial raise).

Maybe it's different if you request a private game for a group of friends, and you're paying by the hour for the table and the service of the dealer, but that's not what this guy was claiming. Some places might also allow it if everybody at the table agrees (though again I've never witnessed this happening), but that's likely to happen only if all of the players know each other, so that it's nearly like a private game anyway. At any public poker table with a random assortment of players, there will almost always be at least one who objects to a live double straddle, because it can effectively push a game to be much bigger in stakes than everybody is comfortable with. If you basically try to turn, say, a $4/$8 game into a game with a $16 big blind, players won't want that. If they felt like playing with a big blind of that size, they would have sat down in a $15/$30 game to begin with!

Anyway, this guy was so bothered by this limitation on his fun that he picked up his chips and left, taking a couple of his friends with him. He had threatened that his leaving with his buddies would result in the newly-started game breaking up, but they just filled the seats from the waiting list, and it continued without them.

If being allowed a live double straddle is so crucial to one's enjoyment of a poker game, wouldn't it be wise to call around and find where it might be permitted before settling on a place to play? I don't know where those three guys went, but I'm highly confident that they didn't get any more satisfaction on their request at any other poker room in town.

It's so stupid to make a big fuss over such things. Sure, go ahead and ask, but if the dealer tells you it's not permitted, and the floor person can't or won't make an exception to the general house rule, you say, "Well, OK, thanks anyway," and move on with your life. At that point, no amount of talking, arguing, cajoling, demanding, stomping your feet, explaining what you have seen happen at other places, or raising your voice is going to get you what you want. So either live with the game as it is being spread, or calmly, politely stand up, say good-bye, and find a place more to your liking.

People can be such idiotic boors.

3

I'm pretty sure that I made a mental note of a third story to write about while I was at the poker table, but now it's 2:45 in the morning, and I'm having a hard time keeping my eyes open. My powers of recall are not exactly at their sharpest. So I guess I'll have to either come back and add an addendum to this post later, or do a separate post, or maybe the story will be lost forever. Couldn't have been too earthshaking, I guess.