Phil Hellmuth acting badly--again? Say it ain't so, Jen!

I cannot tell the facts or give the commentary any better than California Jen already did, so just click on over to Pokerati and read.

In the comments, Jen says that Hellmuth is like the abusive boyfriend, always trying to bring flowers to make up for his misdeeds, and the WSOP is the woman who can't leave him.

Perhaps.

But the analogy that comes to my mind is this ultra-great scene from the 1979 movie "Kramer vs. Kramer." Hellmuth is the little boy. The WSOP is Dustin Hoffman with his repeated insincere and ineffectual warnings. The analogy breaks down, though, because I don't believe that the WSOP will ever tell Hellmuth he is a "spoiled rotten little brat," call him "you little shit" and throw him in his bed crying for his mommy--though they clearly should do just that.



(By the way, is there something wrong with me, that I always think of things in terms of movie scenes?)

Oh, and as another BTW, while I'm on the subject of the guy I most love to hate, I greatly admired how Clonie Gowen handled him on Monday night's "Poker After Dark." He guessed out loud about what she was holding, and was WAY off. But instead of showing him, or telling him he was wrong, she lied, and acted all impressed at how good he was at reading her. She even asked, with magnificently faked sincerity, how he knew. This naturally stoked his ego so much that he had to go into a little lecture about how he had figured it out. What a maroon! Now that she has planted the seed, it will be interesting this week to see if she manages to find a way to use it against him.

He shoulda listened to the Grump, redux

Almost three weeks ago, near the beginning of the World Series of Poker 2008, I put up this post about a player in one of the tournaments who had to learn the hard way about using a card protector to prevent the dealer from accidentally picking up and mucking one's cards.

Some people just refuse to learn. Yesterday it happened again. Here's the story, as reported by the hard-working live bloggers at PokerNews:

A Bit of a Kerfuffle

From time to time a calming influence is required at the table, and
today that person was Clonie Gowen. With one player yelling at the dealer for
accidentally mucking his cards, Gowen quoted the TD [Tournament Director] rules
in which players are responsible for the protection of their own hands and
cannot blame the dealer if they are subsequently pulled into the muck. The
player seemed to accept this and the situation was quickly diffused without the
need for a tournament director to step in.

Now, Clonie Gowen is hardly the optimal person to turn to on questions of rules, after admitting on national television to cheating in a poker tournament and advising others to do the same (see here). But this time she was absolutely correct. Players never seem to think about this until it's too late, but what do they imagine the solution should be, once their cards have been accidentally mucked? Allow them to dig through the muck until they find what they claim their cards were? Just announce what their cards were? Those are so obviously rife with potential for angle shooting and outright cheating that it's laughable that anybody would seriously suggest such idiocy as the proper recourse, once the mistake has been made.

One might argue that the whole hand should be declared moot, as is done when a fouled deck is discovered, and all bets returned to the players, as if the hand had never occurred. But why should the other player(s) be penalized because you failed to take the extremely simple expedient of dropping a chip on your cards?

By odd coincidence, I saw the same thing happen during my cash game at Bill's Gamblin' Hall and Saloon last night. The player in seat 9 (to the dealer's immediate right) looked down to respond to a bet his opponent had just made on the turn, only to discover that his cards were gone. None of us had noticed it happening. They were mixed into the muck and unrecoverable. He was livid (although he calmed down after his opponent, in a very nice gesture, showed him that he was way behind in the hand anyway, and the dealer's mistake apparently saved him a lot of money). But he hadn't protected his cards, and the second rule on the list on the wall at Bill's poker room says--as does every other list of posted poker rules I've ever seen--that players are responsible for protecting their cards at all times.

C'mon, folks. This is really, really easy. Dealers make this mistake not every day, but with a predictable enough regularity that not using a card cap is like driving without a seat belt--just begging to get hurt.

Among poker players who habitually leave their cards unproctected, there are only two types: Those who have had a hand accidentally killed or fouled at an inopportune moment, and those who will. The World Series of Poker is probably not the place at which you would want to move from the latter category into the former.

Clonie Gowen is a cheater

I was just watching "Poker After Dark" on NBC, a re-run of the "Ladies Night" special, featuring six female professional players, including Clonie Gowen, one of the best-known female players on the tournament circuit.

I was astonished to hear her relate a story of winning a pot even though she held the ace of spades, and, before the hand was complete, another player mucked his hand face-up, and in the process showed another ace of spades. Her clear obligation in this situation is to alert the dealer. The floor person will be called over, the hand is dead, everybody gets their money back, and the next hand goes on as if the one in question never occurred (with a new deck of cards, obviously). But instead of doing that, Gowen quietly took the pot, then told the dealer to replace the deck (apparently without specifying why that should be done).

This is cheating, pure and simple.

I just posted the following question in the "Ask the pros" section at Full Tilt Poker (where Gowen is one of the resident professionals) and on Gowen's own site, in the "Ask a question" feature. My guess is that it will be pointedly ignored in both places, and possible deleted. But it needs to be asked anyway.

******

On “Poker After Dark,” you told the story of winning a pot (in a tournament, I presume) even though you had become aware during the play of the hand that the deck was fouled (because there were two aces of spades present). The standard rules of poker clearly prohibit this. For example, Bob Ciaffone’s “Robert’s Rules of Poker” says, under “Irregularities”:
“4. If two cards of the same rank and suit are found, all action is void, and all chips in the pot are returned to the players who wagered them (subject to next rule).
“5. A player who knows the deck is defective has an obligation to point this out. If such a player instead tries to win a pot by taking aggressive action (trying for a freeroll), the player may lose the right to a refund, and the chips may be required to stay in the pot for the next deal.”
Roy Cooke’s “Rules of Real Poker,” p. 105, says:

“14.12. Fouled Deck…. When a fouled deck is discovered, all betting will cease and all money in the pot shall be returned to the players in the hand. If this information is available to only one player and that player attempts to win the pot by initiating action, that player shall forfeit all rights to the pot and all chips in the pot shall be divided among all active players at the time the fouled deck is discovered.”

Similarly, Paymar, Harris, and Malmuth, in “The Professional Poker Dealer’s Handbook” (2nd edition, p. 23) say that “a duplicate card…immediately fouls the deck, and all monies are returned to all players who received cards at the beginning of that hand…. If a player knowingly tries to win the pot with a fouled deck then he has a dead hand and forfeits all rights to the pot and all monies involved.”

In short, by every standard that I can find, you cheated. Worse, you openly advised people listening to your story to do the same--be sure they get the pot pushed to them before telling the dealer to replace the deck.

Were you to claim that you did not know such rules existed, I would find such an assertion implausible. At the very least, a player of your experience absolutely should have known to call over a floor person to make a decision on what to do, rather than keeping the information—and the pot—to yourself.

How can you justify cheating? Why do you advise others to cheat?