Table jumping

I saw a flagrant table-jumper at the Venetian today. He moved himself from another table to an empty seat next to me, stayed less than one orbit, apparently didn't like us, spent some time craning his neck around looking for another spot, and soon took off, only to plant himself at an open seat at some other table. Who knows how many times he moved himself in pursuit of the perfect situation?

In every poker room that I know of, you have to get permission from the floor to move from one table to another. There are sound reasons for this. For one thing, they need to keep tables balanced in terms of numbers of players. Without this rule, if a table got somewhat short-handed, there could be a mad dash as the remaining players tried not to be the one left without a place at some other table, as in musical chairs. For another thing, somebody else may have already requested to move to a certain table when a seat next became available, and it's unfair for an interloper to move in and swipe it.

In small poker rooms, it's pretty hard to get away with this, because everybody--players, dealers, and floor--notices the move. But at larger rooms like the V, there is so much constant movement that a player can get away with it if the room staff aren't following the procedures that prevent it.

In a room that has a centralized seat management system, like the V, new players are sent to whichever table of a certain game type has the most open seats. The person at the desk will announce, "Player in on 25," so that the dealer knows that a new player is coming. When today's jumper first arrived at our table, the dealer should have called the floor, because there had been no preceding announcement of a new player coming. He would thus have been caught, and directed back to where he had come from.

There are two related problems at the Venetian. The first is that, in my experience, about one time out of three that I am sent to a table upon arrival, I get there only to find that there is no open seat. I then have to waste time going back to the front desk, get their attention, explain the problem, and get reassigned. It will not surprise my readers to learn that this annoys me greatly.

The second problem is that they are horrible, horrible at honoring table-change requests--literally the worst in the city. If you just want to move to any other game, it's usually not a problem, because they have so many to choose from that there's a seat open almost all the time. But if you request to move to a specific table, because you know it's fishy, or because you have a friend there you'd like to sit with, my experience is that you have less than a 50% chance that your request will be taken care of when a seat at that table becomes available.

As far as I can tell, they do not enter these table-change requests into the computer, as is done in most other large card rooms. Instead, the floor person assigned to that section of the room either tries to remember the request or scribbles it on a scrap of paper. (And, by the way, just finding the right person to make the request of is a chore. Sometimes the guy manning the computer at the desk will take the request, other times he will direct you to the floorperson. Not just any floorperson will do; you somehow have to figure out which specific one is responsible for your table, and nothing makes that obvious to the casual observer.)

As you might imagine, these things get forgotten. Shifts change, floormen take breaks or get assigned to other sections of the room, scraps of paper get lost, etc. Furthermore, since the person at the front desk doesn't consistently know about the request, he is apt to send a new player there when he sees an empty seat, before the floor guy notices. It's just an awful mess of a system. It completely baffles me, because the Venetian does so many other things right--nearly everything, in fact--that the idiocy and unreliability of the table-change system stick out like a sore thumb.

These problems are surely interconnected. The reason the open seat has vanished by the time I get there is that a table-jumper was allowed to sneak into it, and one reason that people jump tables without authorization is that they have learned by sad experience that trying to go through the proper channels is an exercise in frustration and futility. These problems, then, cause vicious cycles of exacerbating each other.

I have enough experience in how poker rooms run to be able to identify such problems, but not enough to know exactly how to go about fixing them. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the basic approach would have to include stressing to dealers to be watchful for table-jumpers and alert to calling the floor if somebody joins the game without being announced, using the computerized system to handle table-change requests, and making it more transparent to players how to make such requests.


(Cute photo above found here.)