Cards in the muck

Two stories from the WSOP make, I think, for an interesting contrast.

Here's the first, as reported here by PokerNews:

This is Why You Never Muck Your Hand Before the River

After a jack-high flop, two players are all in. The first player to show flips over pocket aces and his opponent tosses his cards into the muck. The dealer retrieves his card out of the pile and turns over two kings.

The players with aces was furious, saying the cards can not be pulled out, but after a floor person ruled that in an all-in both hands must be shown, the cards stayed out of the muck as the remainder of the hand was played out.

The turn was a complete blank, however....

The river brought a king.

This is a rules question that I hadn't considered before. Here's the relevant rule, from the 2009 WSOP rule book:

56. All cards will be turned face up once a player is all in and all action is
complete. If a player accidentally folds/mucks their hand before cards are
turned up, the Tournament Staff reserves the right to retrieve the folded/mucked
cards if the cards are clearly identifiable.

So it is definitely correct for the dealer in this case to pull the cards out of the muck and show them, assuming that they were clearly identifiable (an assumption I'm granting here). But are they still live? The rule does not specify that. The purpose of the rule is presumably to prevent collusion, and that end is served equally well* if the hand is live or dead. Put another way, nothing in this rule explicitly or even implicitly counters the usual rule that when a player puts his cards face down into the muck, his hand is dead.

I think that point needs to be clarified in future editions of the WSOP rules, as well as in the Tournament Directors Association rules, from which this one is derived. (The TDA rule has only the first sentence quoted above, not the extra part about retrieving cards from the muck.) It seems to me most fair and most consistent with other long-established rules and procedures that if the player puts his cards into the muck, or pushes them toward the dealer face down and the dealer puts them into or on top of the muck, they are dead. Whether they can be retrieved to be shown, as required by the anti-collusion rule, is a separate and situation-specific question, but there seems to me to be no reason to violate the usual practice about mucked cards. They should be dead, whether or not they are or can be retrieved for showing the table.

Had I been the floor guy, I would have done what they did, except add the caveat that the hand was dead, and was being shown only for purposes of fulfilling the anti-collusion rule. If and when the guy with the kings then protested because he ended up with the best hand, I'd tell him, "That's what you get for being so stupid." And I'd give him a dope slap on top of the lecture. And then I'd have every other player at the table give him a dope slap, too. Maybe everybody in the entire Amazon Room. He deserved no less for his monumental idiocy.



The second story happened during Cardgrrl's run to the money in Event 36. It was the evening of Day 1, and I was standing at the rail next to her table. The big stack was Seat 3--a guy who looked so much like Jack Black that (1) I'll call him that, and (2) at one point another railbird excitedly called a friend on his cell phone and said, "I'm watching Jack Black play poker!" (He was not kidding. But he was wrong.) There were two or three limpers. Action got to Jack and he put in a substantial raise. Fold fold fold fold.

Jack showed Jd-Jh. There was no doubt what they were; even from the rail at the far end of the table, I could see them. At this point, I tuned out, went back to the book I was reading, and another 30 seconds or so passed before I became aware that there was more to the hand than I had noticed. The floor was being called. As it turned out, neither Jack nor I had noticed that Seat 1 was still in the hand, and had not decided what to do when Jack showed his cards. (His cards were unintentionally somewhat hidden by his chip stacks from Jack's vantage point.)

As Cardgrrl related the critical points to me later, Jack had done his courtesy show, then turned the cards face down and took his hand off of them, but did not push them forward. The dealer immediately grabbed the cards and put them in the muck while saying said, "Your hand is dead." It was only then that Jack became aware that Seat 1 was still live.** [Edit: See comments. I misunderstood. Cardgrrl says that the cards were still face up when the dealer grabbed and mucked them.]

The dealer was clearly wrong--so wrong it's hard to know what he was thinking. Nobody these days (as far as I know) uses a rule that says that your hand is dead if it is shown prematurely. The 2009 WSOP rules explicitly provide (rule 52): "A player exposing his or her cards with action pending will incur a penalty, but will not have a dead hand." How does the dealer not know this???

At the very least, he could have handled the mucking differently--for example, by tapping the cards on the muck, then showing them to everybody, just in case somebody at the other end of the table hadn't seen them in the courtesy show, or just drop them on top of the muck rather than shoving them in. He also could have done it with sufficient delay that Jack would have time to react and protest before the cards disappeared.

So now what decision should the floor make? I think two options are reasonable. First, because the cards were clearly seen by multiple witnesses, he could fish them out of the muck, give them back to Jack, and allow Seat 1 to decide what to do. If he calls (or reraises), Jack is playing the rest of the hand with his cards face up, a pretty serious handicap. Second, he could keep Jack's hand dead and in the muck (with an apology for the dealer's erroneous action) and return to Jack the amount of his raise, awarding to Seat 1 the rest of the pot (i.e., the blinds plus the other limpers' money). With either option, Jack gets whatever the standard penalty is for prematurely exposing his hand (one hand? one orbit? I'm not sure).

But no. The floor guy compounds the error. He not only refuses to retrieve the cards and let Jack play out the hand, he awards the entire pot to Seat 1. I'm sure that the reasoning behind this is that Seat 1 is the only guy with a live hand left, so there is nobody else the pot can go to. But Seat 1 is getting an undeserved windfall here; he is picking up the amount of Jack's raise when he had not yet decided whether to match it. You can't win chips when you did not put into play and at risk an equal number of them. Suppose Jack's raise had been all in? Would Seat 1 then get a free double-up, when he had only limped in and hadn't yet decided how to act on the raise? Or suppose Jack's raise had been all-in, and he had fewer chips than Seat 1. Would Jack be out of the tournament, when Seat 1 hadn't called that bet? That makes no sense at all--especially when the problem was caused by the dealer's flagrantly erroneous action.

As some sort of weird compensation, though, the floor guy gave no penalty. The conversation took place far enough away from me and in a sufficiently noisy environment that I could hear only pieces of it, but he said something about losing the pot serving as sufficient penalty.

Bad dealer. Bad floor decision. Just bad all around.


Do you see the contrast between these two scenarios? In the first case, the tournament staff was willing to fish cards out of the muck and make them live again, even though nobody had seen them, and even though the player unambiguously had voluntarily thrown them away. (It isn't clear from the story how the retrieval was done. Perhaps the dealer just dropped them on top of the muck so there wasn't any doubt, or perhaps they asked the player what the cards were, then found them--which is a bad idea, if that's what happened.) But in the second, the floor refused to retrieve the cards even though (1) everybody had seen exactly what they were, so there was no possible mistake to be made in the retrieval, and (2) the mucking had been the dealer's error, rather than the player's own foolish/rash/careless/mistaken action.

Yes, the situations were different, but you can see how grossly inconsistent this is.

The general principle is that cards touching the muck face down are dead. There can be exceptions, and the cards can be retrieved and declared still live under unusual circumstances, but (1) the cards have to be clearly identifiable, and (2) there has to be a compelling fairness reason for doing so. Both conditions were present in the Jack Black story, yet the tournament staff didn't do it. In the first story, though, the second condition was definitely not present, and we don't really know if the first was--yet the tournament staff did fish the cards out and declare them live.

It's a bizarre contrast, if you ask me.



*Or equally badly. Does anybody really think this rule prevents chip dumping? The player who gets caught in an apparent dump only needs to say that he made an ill-timed bluff if he was the aggressor, or a bad read if he called his stack off.

**I think Seat 1 had an ethical duty to speak up as soon as he realized what was happening--i.e., as soon as Jack showed his cards. I don't know why he didn't. But I grant that sometimes things like this catch people off-guard, and it takes them a beat or two to figure out what's going on and react, and by then it's too late. So I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt. But if he was deliberately holding his tongue hoping to gain an advantage (more advantage than he already had by seeing his opponent's cards), he was behaving badly, and shame on him.