You make the call--part 1

I played at Imperial Palace tonight. When I had been there just ten minutes or so, a situation came up that required one of the most difficult floor decisions I've ever witnessed. Let me tell you about it, and you can make up your mind what you would do.


Our two contenders for the pot are Smart Local Semipro (SLS) and Drunk Maniac Asshole (DMA). Does that tell you enough about them?

Preflop action doesn't matter, except that the pot was unusually large by that stage. On the flop, SLS moved all in and DMA called. The dealer counted out SLS's chips (he had the shorter stack), matched it from DMA's chips, and made the pot right. Neither player had shown his cards yet. The dealer ran out the board, which ended up being 6-7-8-9-10, with four diamonds.

SLS showed his two black tens just about simulateously with DMA saying, "I think you've got a winner." That is, it's not completely clear to me if DMA was saying that because he felt that he missed what he needed, or because he was seeing and reacting to SLS's hole cards.

DMA then tossed his two hole cards toward the center of the table. It appeared to me that he was trying to table them face up. One landed face up, but the other hit a chip, did kind of a pirouette on its end, and spun around once before landing face down. I saw both of them clearly: an ace and a queen of different suits, neither of them a diamond. The dealer very quickly scooped up both cards, turning the face-up one down, put them either into or on top of the muck (I didn't see which, and as things played out, nobody ever asked him whether he could confidently identify which they were and retrieve them), and pushed the pot toward SLS.

As the pot was being pushed, DMA started protesting: "What are you doing? It's a split pot!" I'll forego the details of the ensuing argument, because they don't matter. But DMA was very hot under the collar.

DMA was in seat 7. I was in seat 2. The players in seats 5 and 8 both independently told the floor person, who was, of course, called to come over to make a ruling, that they, too, had seen both cards. Before I had offered my observations, they independently vouched for having seen A-Q offsuit, no diamond. DMA had not, to this point, ever vocalized what his cards had been, so it was clear to me that these two players really had seen what they claimed to have seen. Besides, if I could see the spinning card from seat 2, it's not surprising that anybody paying attention could have seen it, too. (The dealer said that he did not see it.)

The dealer, incidentally, is one that I know better than almost any other dealer in town. I'm not sure I'd call him a friend, exactly, in that we've never met or talked outside of the poker setting. But he used to deal at the Hilton when I played there, and he also played at the Hilton a lot when he was off-duty, so I may have racked up more hours at a table with him, and over a longer period of time, than with any other dealer on earth. His name is Ricky. He is a kind, gentle man, always 100% professional, unflappable, very low error rate. He is a pleasure to spend time with, whether he's playing or pitching. I have 100% confidence that is honest in how he was describing his perspective, and that he was utterly mortified at having contributed to such a horrendous mess of a situation. Throughout it, he remained absolutely calm, describing what he did and saw objectively and non-defensively.

As he perceived it, he heard DMA give what sounded like a concession speech, and the next thing he noticed was one card up, one down on the table. He did not see exactly how they got to be that way. He assumed that DMA was intentionally showing one but folding, so he scooped the cards up.

The conundrum for the floor, obviously, is whether DMA's hand is live or dead. If it's live, the pot is chopped. If it's dead, SLS keeps it all.

Here's the basic argument for the hand being dead: It is a player's responsibility both to protect his cards and to table them face up. Regardless of DMA's intention, his action was to table his cards one face up, one face down, a situation which, if uncorrected by the player, is universally agreed to constitute a dead hand. He could have just turned them face up; his decision to toss them was taking a risk that one might land face down, or on the muck, or bounce off of the table, etc. Compounding this, just before said action he had uttered words that sounded like he was conceding the pot. It is true that such concession would not be binding if he subsequently tabled a winning (or tying) hand, but it gave the dealer ample reason to assume that his one card down was a further gesture of surrender. I.e., the dealer might (and probably would) otherwise have paused to find out for sure whether DMA's intention was to muck, but the speech made that a foregone conclusion.

Although not directly relevant to the rules question, you might be influenced by this: Within ten seconds or so of the problem becoming evident, DMA was living up to the nickname that I gave him. He was on his feet, belligerent as could be, yelling, swearing. He shouted "YOU FUCKING CUNT!" to SLS perhaps ten times, loud enough that everybody for a long way around heard it. (This was in response to SLS making his case to the floor guy that DMA's hand should be deemed dead, which he did with a reasonable degree of self-control.) Security was called and was standing by in case he got further out of control, because it certainly appeared that that might happen. In DMA's favor, though, the floor guy might have been aware that the other players were secretly (and in one case not so secretly) hoping that the decision would favor DMA, because he was almost single-handedly feeding everybody else in the game, with wild play, frequently going broke and rebuying. It seemed obvious that if the ruling were against him, he would either stomp off in anger or, more likely, be bodily ejected by security.

Here's the basic argument for the hand being live: The player said that his intention was to table his cards face up. Three other players (including me) agreed that that appeared to be what he was trying to do, but he was a little over-vigorous about it and one card took a bad bounce/spin. Three players, spaced all around the table, independently witnessed what the officially-unseen card was, and there is no apparent reason to think that they are colluding or otherwise have any interest in the outcome (other than, perhaps, the consideration mentioned above about wanting to keep DMA at the table). The dealer may have been overly hasty in his action. While a literal or technical reading of the rules might suggest that the hand is dead, general principles of fairness and what is good for the game suggest that the best hand should win the pot if it is at all feasible to make that happen, and in this case that precept means a chop.

Let's add a couple of assumptions here. Assume that if they reviewed the security camera footage, it would show what the player-witnesses reported: an apparent attempt to table the cards face up, but one card accidentally spinning around and falling face down, followed almost instantly by the dealer swiping them away into the muck.

Another assumption: Sometimes in such situations, the player awarded the pot will be asked to voluntarily split it in an effort to end the controversy and preserve good feelings. I did not at any point hear the floor propose this. (At least one player volunteered that that's what he would do in SLS's place, but as far as I could tell this suggestion was disregarded.) So assume, for purposes of forcing you to make the hardest decision possible (ha!) that this request was made and refused; SLS says he did not see DMA's other card, the hand is dead, and the pot will remain his, thankyouverymuch.

So how would you call it?

Comments welcome, of course. I'll go write the conclusion of the story for Part 2, but then have it scheduled to post itself 24 hours from now, to give people a chance to decide how they would act before reading the denouement. (Pirouette and denouement in the same post. Today je suis Le Grump!)