Dumbest floor decision I've seen in quite a while

Last night I was at the Riviera. I was in seat 10. The guy in seat 1 was not careful about protecting his hand. As many players are prone to do, he looks at them by just resting them on one long edge perpendicular to the table. Because I am in the same plane as he is, I can often see his bottom card. I have warned him about this. He is apparently a slow learner.

So a bunch of us are in a hand. Flop is A-K-Q. Misses me completely. I check and plan to fold. (I have the mighty 2-4, in fact, playing it on its holiest day, hoping to get a good story to tell here, but I think this is one of the rare instances where I have to let it go.) Slow Learner (SL) checks his cards again, and I get a glimpse that his bottom card is an ace. He bets $10 as I'm telling him, "Sir, I just saw your bottom card again."

There's a guy named John in seat 7. He's a dealer at the Venetian. I've played with him before. I actually like him a lot. He's a good player but pretty straightforward, friendly, funny, always well-behaved. He tells the dealer that if I saw SL's card, then everybody else has a right to see it, too. (He's in the hand.) The dealer is stymied by this request. John asks for the floor to make a decision.

Floor person comes over and the situation is explained to her. She tells me that I have to tell the table what I saw. My first thought is, "And if I refuse, do you have a penalty in mind that you think would apply to me?" I can't imagine what it would be. But I just don't really care here, since I'm going to fold and be out no matter what. So I say, "I saw an ace."

Simultaneously, the floor person is making SL show her his cards, apparently so that she can ascertain whether I'm being accurate. So now she asks, "Which ace?" I say, "It flashed too fast for me to see the suit." I suppose I could have added that I know it's not the ace of spades, because what I saw in my glance was a single, small, central pip, and the ace of spades mark would have been larger. I didn't bother with that additional piece of information.

The floor person said, "Well, if you can't tell me the exact card, then I can't make him show it." She said this directly to me, as if challenging me. Hey, lady, this isn't my fight! You asked what I saw, I'm telling you. If that isn't good enough for you, tough! Do what you want with the information.

So it was left at that. At the end of the hand, SL showed down the ace and deuce of diamonds.

This is a really strange floor decision. I can't think of any reasonable basis for requiring a player to announce to the table what he has seen of another player's accidentally flashed cards. I could be lying, or maybe my eyesight ain't so good and I'm simply mistaken. I'm sure that possibility is the thinking behind her checking SL's cards to see if I'm right.

But that opens up an obvious path for an angle shooter. Suppose the flop is all diamonds. I have the king of diamonds. My opponent bets into me. I want to know if he has the ace of diamonds. I'm in a position to possibly see his cards. So I announce that I have seen his cards, even though I haven't. The floor comes over and requires me to declare what I saw. I lie and say that he has the ace of diamonds. Now only one of two things can happen. Either the floor confirms my lucky guess that that's what he has, and shows the card to everybody, or says, "No, sir, you must have been mistaken," and the hand plays out, with me having gained an extremely valuable piece of information. Of course I wouldn't do that, but this city is filled with unscrupulous players who would, if they knew in advance that the floor is going to rule the way this did woman last night.

The only rational floor response, I think, is to tell the table, "Seat 10 claims that he saw a card of Seat 1. There is no rule that requires him to share this information. In fact, doing so would violate the rule against discussing the hand in progress. I remind you that he may be lying about having seen the card(s), or he may have thought he saw something he didn't. There is no remedy available for this unfortunate incident. Everybody please remember to protect your cards from being seen by other players in the future."

In most cases, I dislike situations that are handled differently depending on whether a player's action is deemed to have been deliberate or accidental, because that's not always easy to determine, and angle-shooters can become adept at faking things. But I don't see any good way around it here. If a player voluntarily shows his cards to another who is still in the hand, then clearly everybody else has a right to that same information before play continues. If, however, one person gets an advantage by seeing an accidentally unprotected card, in a way that isn't open to everybody, I don't think there is any immediate remedy, and you just have to play the hand out with that player having the advantage. You obviously can't automatically expose one or both cards in question, because that makes it too easy for an angle shooter to claim to have seen something that he really didn't. Adding the precaution of the floor trying to verify the assertion of what was seen introduces the hypothetical angle-shooting problem I mentioned above. Also, I must question again what this floor person intended to do if I refused to disclose what I saw. Is she going to penalize me, when I did nothing wrong? Is she going to try to torture the information out of me--maybe bring in the boys from Gitmo with a waterboard to make me talk?

There's also the problem that last night's decision in a way punishes me for having been honest. It made me the bad guy, as if this were all my fault, and put me in the situation of having to talk about the hand in progress. Put another way, SL slipped and revealed a card to one player (me), but I was asked to reveal it to eight others, arguably a far worse sin. That just doesn't make any sense to me. If this were to happen again at the Riviera, I wouldn't say anything about it until the hand was over, because I don't want to be put in that awkward situation again. Nice job, Riviera--you have caused a player to decide to be less open about breaches in game integrity.

This is actually the second time that I have been seen an opponent's card(s) in the middle of a hand, announced that fact, and been asked to tell everybody what I saw. The first time was at the Rio a month or two ago. This was just the dealer telling me that's what I had to do. I meant to write up that story when I got home, but then forgot all about it. It was so weird I thought it was just an anomaly. (Funny part of that story: The card I had seen was a 6, which was bottom pair on the flop. The player holding it folded after the dealer had me say what I had seen, because he was facing a large bet. Another 6 came on the turn. The table erupted with laughter, except for the player who had folded, who slammed his fist on the table.)

In thinking this over, I suppose there is really no reason for me to tell somebody that I'm seeing his cards in the middle of the hand. I can just wait until it's over. There is not much to be gained by passing on that warning as the hand is playing out--the damage has already been done. With two recent cases of my announcement causing complications for the hand, I guess it's easier on everybody if I just shut up until the end of the hand. My motivation in both cases was to try to say something in the very moment that the player is flashing, so that he can see what he's doing wrong with his cards. But in the future, I'm going to wait, lest the table be visited by another stupid floor decision that makes the situation worse.


*sigh* On rereading, I see that I have once again freely intermixed present and past tense in my story-telling. But once again, I'm too lazy to go back and fix it. Apologies again for my sloppy writing.