She didn't believe me

A couple of weeks ago I was at the Venetian playing, when a player mucking his cards accidentally flashed them. I got only the quickest glimpse, close to the absolute minimum with which I could actually discern the faces. One would have to have been looking in just the right place at just the right time--but as it happened, I was.

I immediately told the dealer, "Those flashed," so that she could expose them before they got mixed into the muck and became unretrievable. The usual response in that situation is that she would simply turn them over for all to see so that the information is shared equally, and that's the end of it.

But this dealer seemed instantly suspicious that I was lying about having seen the cards. She asked, in a tone that I thought expressed doubt, "What did you see?" I said, "A four and a nine, one red, one black." (I hadn't been able to make out the exact suits.) She checked the cards, then, apparently satisfied, exposed a four and a nine, one red, one black.

This bugs me. (Anyone surprised to discover me annoyed at some trivial event at a poker table? Anyone?)

The implication is that this dealer has some threshold of accuracy to which I must rise before she decides that I have seen enough to warrant exposing the cards. Suppose I had seen, e.g., just that there were two clubs, but couldn't tell the ranks. Would she then make a judgment that that wasn't close enough to justify sharing the information? Or what if I couldn't tell at a glance between two very similar pip configurations, e.g., whether a card was a 7 or an 8, but I knew it was one or the other. Would she peek down at a 7 and decide that since I really didn't know for sure no showing was to occur? What if I could see only that there were two face cards, but I couldn't determine which they were. Would that pass her little test? And what if I'm honestly mistaken, thinking I saw a jack when it was actually a king? Will she expose them, or decide not to, and leave me embarrassed at having been wrong (and thus less inclined to speak up the next time it happens)?

Maybe the worst facet of this peculiar behavior on her part is how it opens the door for an angle shooter. Imagine that I have K-K. Of course, the worst fear in that situation is that somebody has an ace and will make a higher pair when an ace hits the flop (which it always does, right?). It would be useful to know if somebody had thrown away an ace. So a guy in early position mucks with just a tiny wobble in the cards--not enough that I really saw anything. I tell the dealer, "Those flashed." She asks me what I saw. I tell her, "I'm pretty sure one was an ace." She checks the mucked cards. Now she will either turn over the ace if there was one, or be forced to report, "Nope. No ace there." The former situation is highly valuable information to me, the latter less so, but it costs me nothing to take the shot.

I suppose the rejoinder to this is that even in the standard operation of the rule (i.e., just claiming to have seen flashed cards is enough to get them exposed without quizzing the player) can be exploited by an angle shooter who just wants a free look at any two random cards by claiming to have seen a flash. However, (1) the potential information gain is less than in the scenario I described above, and (2) he will have to just be doing it in random situations where he might plausibly claim to have seen something, rather than exploiting particular situations where he needs some specific information, and (3) over time the dealers and other players will start to notice the pattern if he's doing it more than seems credible.

This is quite similar to the problem I described earlier this month of getting quizzed about exactly what I saw when another player's live cards have been held in such a way that I can see them. I don't like being grilled to test either my eyesight or my honesty, and I think that doing so is intrinsically problematic for the current hand as well as serving to discourage players from speaking up when they get a partial glimpse of information that isn't available to the entire table.


Addendum

A couple of hours too late, I have realized what would have made a much better title for this post: "Don't quiz me, bro!"