"I can count!"

One incident from today's Golden Nugget tournament deserves retelling.

I had the table maniac on my immediate left, which was a serious pain in the neck. In the hand in question, I limped in with 10-10. He shoved from the button. His range there was very large, and I thought my 10s were in pretty good shape. But it was hard to estimate his stack, because he had accumulated an enormous number of the two smallest-denomination chips. He really liked them, for some reason, and would put in his blinds and antes with larger chips apparently just for the purpose of getting yet more small chips as change. I don't know if he has some sort of fetish for them, or likes having huge stacks as some sort of visual intimidation, or what.

Anyway, I estimated his stacks to total somewhere between 12,000 and 15,000, and that was a range that I was willing to call. So I did. He had K-9 offsuit, so I was definitely right in my judgment that he was shoving very light there, and I was definitely right to call. Sadly, he got lucky and binked a king to take the pot.

Then the dealer had to count out his voluminous stacks so we could get the pot exactly right. When she got down to the 25-denomination chips, she messed it up. She assembled stacks of 10 chips and said, "500," then put those together and said, "1000." There were several stacks of 20 chips each of these. Like I said, he was cornering the market on the cheap chips.

Even though three people were telling the dealer that she was counting wrong, when she went back, she made the exact same mistake again. She concluded that the total was 17,000 and change. (I don't remember her exact number.) At that point I had lost all confidence in her, and said, "Would you please call the floor to redo the count?"

She gave me the nastiest look I've seen in a long time and spat back, "I can count!" Uh, I beg to differ with you, ma'am. You have proven that, in fact, you cannot count, at least not correctly. But I didn't say that. I just repeated, with more emphasis, "Please call the floor." I intended my voice to convey that I knew perfectly well that when a player makes this request she is obligated to comply, and that if she did not do so, I would call the floor myself and hang on to my chips until help arrived. Apparently she got this message, and put in the call.

While we were waiting, she took another stab at it. This time the maniac was simultaneously trying to count them, and they completely got in each other's way, moving chip stacks this way and that, messing up each other's count. I just made sure that they didn't mix any of my stacks in with his until it got sorted out.

The floor guy came. I don't know his name, but I've seen him at the G.N. for years now, and he's very good at his job. In fact, he's the same one who last year bailed out another dealer who didn't know how to count, in a story I related here. When he arrived, I said, "It's an all-in and call. We need his stacks counted. The dealer got it wrong the first time, and I'd like to have an independent count, please."

The dealer glared at me again, and shot back, "I did not get it wrong!" But floor guy wasn't listening. He was already counting. Just as he had done in the previous incident, he was an absolute wizard. He flew through the stacks expertly, verbalizing the amount of each stack and his running total. It took him less than 30 seconds, and when he was done, nobody doubted that he had the number right.

It was 12,325, a far cry from the 17,000+ that the dealer had counted. I had started that hand with about 56,000 (tournament average was then only about 22,000), so it hurt but wasn't fatal. But a 5,000-chip mistake was not a tiny rounding error; it was HUGE. Some at the table were getting irritated that this took so long to sort out, but it wasn't my fault. I am resolute that I did the right thing by calling for backup, and not accepting the dealer's assertion that she had things under control. She was causing the problem; I was getting it resolved. I'm not going to give away 10% of my stack unnecessarily.

Incidentally, the floor guy also had the dealer color up most of the maniac's small chips so that future hands wouldn't take so long to get right.

Lesson: Don't let dealers intimidate you into just accepting their counts when you have any reason to think there is an error. Get the floor over to verify the amount before you hand over your chips. It's your right.