Weird rule at Planet Hollywood

After seeing the lamest show in Vegas, I walked next door to play some $1-$2 NLHE at Planet Hollywood.

At one point, there was a raise to $12, then an attempted reraise to $22. The dealer told the reraiser that he had to make it $24, to double the previous bet. This is a type of error I've seen dealers make many times before, because they have a mental slip and forget that the initial raise was by an interval of only $10, so a raise from $12 to $22--i.e., another $10--is, in fact, legal.

So I said to the dealer, "$22 should be a legal raise." The dealer responded, "No, he has to double the previous bet." I pointed out that the first raise had been $10, so this interval was legitimate.

This is where it got interesting. Every other time I've had this exchange with a dealer, at this point he or she realizes his or her error and straightens things out. But yesterday I learned that Planet Hollywood does it differently. They actually have a house rule that a raise must be double the previous bet, not just a minimum of the same increment as the previous raise had been.

This dealer was by no means inexperienced, so he clearly wasn't saying this because he was first day on the job and didn't know his stuff. I told him that I had never heard of any other poker room using this rule. He said, "This is the only place in the world that does." The fact that he recognized that it was highly unusual--unique, even--strengthened my impression that he was speaking the truth, and didn't just misunderstand the standard rule.

So I asked him a hypothetical: After the flop, the first player bets $10, the second player raises to $20, now what is the minimum reraise? The standard rule would be that a minimum reraise would be to $30, adding to the prior bet the same increment that it had been over the bet it was raising. But the dealer said that at PH, the minimum reraise in that situation would be to $40, because every raise must be at least double the previous bet. And if the third player raises to $40, the next minimum reraise would be to $80.

I was convinced that he really did know what he was talking about here, but just to be doubly certain, I checked with the floorperson as I was cashing out. He confirmed what the dealer had told me, down to the fact that, as far as he knew, PH is the only poker room in the world that uses this bet-sizing rule. I asked whether there was any advantage he could think of over the standard rule. He admitted that he knew of none. So I asked the obvious question: Why do you do it this way? He said that he could only guess that whoever it was that originally implemented it had had brain damage as a child, because the rule caused confusion without conferring any advantages. It sometimes causes problems when somebody announces "raise" without realizing there had already been a raise, because now that person is committed to a larger minimum raise than if they used the standard rule.

I'm a big proponent of poker rules being standardized and uniform as far as possible, to prevent surprises and misunderstandings. This is one that I just don't get. The PH staff clearly understands that it is non-standard, and they can't offer any justification for using it. So why do they keep it, rather than changing their rules to match how everybody else operates?

I am perplexed.