No dog in the fight

I saw something kind of unusual Sunday afternoon at Caesars. I was in seat 8. The guy in seat 10 was a real tool, always complaining about something--his cards, his bad beats, somebody else's bad play, whatever. You know the kind of person--never happy unless he's griping about something.

The player in seat 1 was the table donator. He was drunk, playing every hand, and playing them badly. In the hand in question, seat 9 was driving the action. He was a decent player and a perfectly nice guy. He had flopped top set and was betting it for good value all the way against seat 1. On the river, he bet again--$50, I think it was. Seat 1 was pondering whether to call. He pushed his cards a little bit forward, and the upper right corner of them ran under some of the cards in the muck. At least 90% of his cards (counting by surface area) were still outside the muck, so there was zero question about identifying which were his. But his action was ambiguous. I couldn't tell at first whether he had intended to fold or whether he was just clearing some space in which to count his chips. But he immediately started counting out chips in the space he had made (his chips were just a big jumble, not even in stacks, which is why he needed some space to work with them). The dealer recognized the ambiguity of the situation, and asked the guy whether he was folding. He said no, he was just making space to count his chips. (He was clearly drunk enough to have difficulty with coordination of fine motor skills, and also drunk enough not to realize what he had done with respect to the cards touching the muck.) So the dealer moved the player's cards back an inch to get the corner of them out from under the muck cards, moved the muck more towards the middle of the table to prevent a recurrence, and let him continue.

Now the tool in seat 10 starts kibbitzing, first sort of under his breath and no nobody in particular: "His hand is dead. His cards touched the muck." He repeated this ad nauseum, getting a little more forceful and agitated about it with every iteration.

While this was going on, the drunk guy finally made the call and showed something pathetic like second pair/bad kicker. Seat 9 showed his winner, and the dealer was starting to push the pot.

But no--seat 10 wouldn't let it go. It didn't matter to him that everybody else at the table--including the only two players affected--were content with things. He finally told the dealer not to push the pot and to call the floor. The dealer made a couple of attempts to get him to drop it, because it was over and he's not involved anyway, but he insisted on the floor being called.

Floor guy came over, heared the jerk's complaint, asked the dealer what happened. At this point, another thing happened that I haven't seen before: the dealer lied to the floor guy, and said the player's cards came close but didn't touch the muck. He must have just wanted to be sure that the ruling would be that the hand was still live, because I think everybody at the table knew that those cards had, in fact, been in direct contact with the muck. Seat 10 went ballistic at this. The floor guy shut him down, said that he was taking the word of his dealer, the hand was live, the bet was called, and the pot went to seat 9.

Mind you, nobody else was saying a word during this whole incident. Everybody else either didn't care, didn't want to get involved, or thought the right outcome had been achieved anyway, so let's move on with life.

Of course the dealer should not have misrepresented what happened. But more fundamentally, the guy in seat 10 should have stayed out of it.



The second story is one Cardgrrl related to me during her trip here in April. It's secondhand, and it's been a while, so some details may be garbled, but I think I can convey the essential points.

She was playing at Imperial Palace, not involved in the hand. An Asian woman for whom English was a second language was playing and involved in the hand. She was being sweated by a man presumed to be her husband. He was seeing her hole cards as she played. There was a large pot and a showdown on the river. The woman appeared to be about to muck her hand without showing it, when the man sitting with her said, "Flush." She looked again, then tabled her hand face up, and took the pot with a flush that she had apparently not realized that she had until her husband pointed it out to her.

Now, this is unquestionably a gross violation of the principle that each poker player must make all decisions in a hand without outside assistance. That includes the last decision one has to make in a hand: whether to show one's cards or muck them unseen. Her husband's violation of this rule should not only get him a warning, but should result in him being immediately expelled from the room. No more sweating for that day. Mike O'Malley wrote a Card Player magazine column about this exact problem back in February. You can (and should) read it here.

But should her hand be dead? That's one of the questions O'Malley addresses, and, as he explains it, different facilities handle the situation differently. Some poker room supervisors cited in the article would kill the hand, others would not. I get the sense that the majority view is not to kill it.

Anyway, in the hand that Cardgrrl witnessed, a player at the table who was not involved in the hand began protesting--quite loudly and insistently and obnoxiously, as I understood it--that the woman's hand should be dead, and continued pressing the point even after the floor had ruled otherwise. He was apparently livid about the situation, even though it did not affect him at all!

I find this kind of behavior most peculiar. Doesn't life present enough difficulties directly in one's path that must be dealt with head-on? Do you really need to go searching out battles other than your own?

There are times that it is both acceptable and right to speak up about a rules problem when you're not involved in the controversy. I think this is especially true when a less experienced player is getting shafted in some way because he doesn't know some fine point of rules and procedures. If you're sticking up for somebody who needs an advocate to keep his interests protected, I think that is honorable. But that was not the case in the Caesars situation, and apparently not so in the I.P. story, either. Even if it were so in the latter, he would have fully discharged any ethical duty he might have to protect a less experienced player by simply getting the floor called over to make a decision.

It's also perfectly OK, when a hand is over, to ask the dealer and/or floor about the situation in the hypothetical, if you think you should know the general rule or house rule for future reference. But if you're doing that, you can wait until the pot is awarded and the next shuffle started, so that it's clear that you're not attempting to change the outcome of what just happened.