VegasRex on squirreling

I've been catching up on VegasRex's second blog, "The Real Las Vegas." Earlier this month he put up a post about what he calls the "30-minute rule." (I believe it's actually a one-hour rule in most poker rooms.) The rule says that whatever money or chips you initially put on the table plus whatever you win in the course of a game must be kept in play until you cash out. Furthermore, when you cash out you can't sit down in the same kind of game for less money than you cashed out until at least an hour has passed.

The purpose of the rule is to prevent players from stashing away their winnings while keeping smaller amounts of money in play, a practice variously known as squirreling, ratholing, or "going south." I wrote about this before here.

Rex's post is, I think, the first time I've seen somebody argue against the rule. His basic point is that when he has won a pot, that money is his and he should be free to do with it what he wants, including stuffing it in his pocket and continuing to play with the minimum buy-in for that table.

I think the flaw in the argument is that chips in play don't fully belong to you until and unless you cash them out. They are always in play, subject to being taken by other players, which is not true of the cash in your pocket. They are part of the structure of the game as long as they remain on the table. You are therefore not free to remove them, except under the conditions and rules that govern the game. This is different from, say, roulette, where the amount of chips you have in play has no effect on other players' decisions and strategy. Also, unlike in other table games, players judge how good or juicy a table is by how many chips they see in play (and thus are available to be won), so the house has incentive to keep as many on the table as possible. The rule actually works to the advantage of the best players, because the weaker players who get lucky once in a while have to keep those chips vulnerable to being reclaimed when they get outplayed later.

So I disagree with Rex on this point, but it's an interesting and uncommon point of view, and thus worth reading.