Hard Rock

Last night I played at the Hard Rock for the first time in over three years. I was last there on May 23, 2009, to be exact. I never did particularly well in their "Poker Lounge." My experience was that they attracted too high a ratio of grinders to tourists. It's now been a couple of years since they shut that down and moved the room to a new wing of the casino, and this was my first time to try it out.

Why did I go? Well, I don't like there being poker rooms that I haven't seen--even ones that are merely remodeled or relocated within a casino. Also, I learned recently that an old friend from my Hilton poker room days, James Klosty, is now the Hard Rock poker room manager, and I hoped to see him. (He wasn't there, unfortunately.)

Finally, I am in the process of gradually liquidating my poker chip collection. The Hard Rock has probably issued more different commemorative chips than any other place in town. If not the absolute most, they are certainly in contention with the Tropicana, Rio, and Palms for top honors. Of course, I could just take the ones I don't want anymore to the cage and cash them in--but what fun is that? I wanted to play with them. I removed 26 ($130 worth) from my collection, leaving just six that I especially liked. (Two or three years ago I decided I had a completely ridiculous number of Hard Rock chips and that it was a Sisyphean task to try to acquire a complete collection, so the 30 that were left before last night's purge were already a culled set of favorites from a previous cashing-in event.)

As you might guess from the above photo, I pocketed another four to bring home. Which is not wholly within the spirit of the chip-reduction project. But it's still a net reduction of 22, so moving in the right direction. Besides, who could resist a poker chip featuring the Mona Lisa wearing Groucho Marx nose and glasses? Or Abe Lincoln in sunglasses? I love the elegant design of the Friday the Thirteenth chip. And surely everybody likes either Bob Seger, or the tailfins of the 1959 Cadillac, or both, right?

The Hard Rock parking garage is as maddening to negotiate as it ever was. But that actually worked out in my favor. I lost my first buy-in at around 11:20 p.m., and felt too tired to keep playing, so I tried to leave. But I couldn't. My car was on the 7th level, and there was a traffic jam all the way down to the exit. I had badly timed my bust-out to coincide with the end of the Fiona Apple concert. It was hopeless. If I got in my car, I would just sit in it, idling, inching forward, for probably an hour. I decided I'd be better off putting in another hour of poker. So I went back to the poker room, got in a different game, and in 90 minutes not only won back my lost buy-in, but an additional $195 on top of it.

The play was much softer than I remember it being in the Poker Lounge. The room is not as comfortable now, though. It's just a cordoned-off area of the casino floor, so there's a ton of noise and cigarette smoke, both of which annoy me no end. This means that I'm now going to be torn between remembering that the games seem easy to beat (if my one-night sample means anything, which it may not) and remembering the headache that the atmosphere gave me.

Will I go back again? I'm not sure yet.

Making a stop at the Station(s)

Last night I played at two of the Station casinos--Texas Station and Santa Fe Station--each of which I had previously visited just once. I nabbed a bunch of short stories and observations about each.

The image above, incidentally, is not from North Las Vegas (where both of the above-mentioned casinos are located). Rather, it is Claude Monet, "Gare Saint Lazare: the Train from Normandy," 1877, a painting that one may see at the Art Institute of Chicago. About ten years ago that museum had a mind-blowing show, pulling together roughly 150 Monets--the largest assembly of his paintings in one place since the artist's death. I was privileged to see it. Best art experience of my life.

Texas Station

My friend James Klosty used to be a shift manager at the Hilton, then moved up to be the poker room manager at Fiesta Henderson. He sent me an email recently telling me that he had moved yet again, and is now in the same position at Texas Station. So I decided to go see what he has done with the place.

This is a small poker room--I counted nine tables. It's too smoky for my taste, with an ineffective half-wall on three sides, exposing players to smoke and noise from the surrounding main casino floor. Last night, a Friday, between 7:00 and 9:00, there were four tables in action, two $2-4 limit and two $4-8 limit hold'em games--nothing in the no-limit category. That alone will severely restrict my interest in returning. The games were pretty typical for a locals-oriented poker room. Most of the players plainly knew each other, and the dealers knew most of the players. There's a series of weekly freeroll tournaments going on now--qualify with ten hours of play--and a lot of the seats were filled with players punching the clock.

Texas Station's poker room is far from the worst of the lot, but, frankly, there isn't much there that would make me interested in visiting it again.


A variation on "I knew he had..."

One of the more annoying stupid things that people say at the poker table is "I knew he had..." (fill in: the straight, the flush, aces, or whatever). Of course, people only say this after their hunch is confirmed. It's pretty easy to be right 100% of the time when you only reveal your "prediction" after the evidence is in.

That's why it was refreshing last night to hear the very rare admission of an error. I won the biggest pot of the night with 7-8 of hearts in the hole when the flop came 4-5-6 rainbow. The betting had been capped with five players before the flop. My bet on the flop got three callers, two on the turn, and one called the river. The woman to my right said, after the hand, that she "knew" I couldn't have 7-8, because she "knew" that I wouldn't call all of that aggressive pre-flop betting with such a holding.

There have been only two or three times that I've noticed a player using the phrase "I knew" when describing what proves to have been an erroneous conclusion. Of course, nobody ever really knows what another player is holding--which is precisely why I find the whole "I knew he had..." post hoc boast to be so stupid and annoying. One's best guess or deduction does not constitute knowing in any meaningful sense. So I appreciated this young woman's honesty. Whether consciouly or not, she showed that what frequently and casually gets labeled as certain knowledge of what an opponent has is usually highly tenuous and fallible.


Applause for a unique rule

During a short stint at a $2-4 table while waiting for a $4-8 seat to open up, the player to my right asked the dealer to give the cards a scramble on the table before putting them into the Shufflemaster. This is a topic I've addressed before, here and here. I've never seen a dealer refuse the request--until last night.

To my great surprise, the dealer said, "I'm not allowed to do that. I have to call the floor." She called over the floor person, and was told that house rules do not permit giving the cards an extra "wash" before putting them in the Shufflemaster.

I wanted to stand up and cheer. Finally, a poker room that implements a rational policy that prevents stupid players from wasting everybody's time with a pointless gesture. Hoorah!

The only way this could be made better would be to have the rule specify that the dealer must administer a dope slap to the idiot player making the request, simultaneously asking "How stupid are you anyway?"


Somebody failed junior-high English

I spotted this sign just outside the Texas Station poker room last night. Notice the erroneous apostrophes in "10's" and "Ace's." Oddly, it's "Aces" in one spot and "Ace's" in another--apparently the sign writer wasn't sure, and so made one each way, figuring it was better to be half right and half wrong than to risk getting it wrong twice. Notice also that he manges to correctly make the plural of "flush" and "player" without inserting superfluous punctuation.

I'll never understand why so many people insist on using apostrophes to make a few randomly selected nouns plural. (There's an entire blog devoted to this pervasive problem. See here.)

Sante Fe Station

After I had had my fill of limit hold'em, and there was no sign of a no-limit game getting started, I left Texas Station and proceeded up Rancho Drive a couple of miles further northwest to Sante Fe Station. I had been to this place only once before. That was on opening day of "Lucky You." I took a friend out there to see the movie and try the then-new "Salt Lick BBQ" restaurant (pretty good, but mostly indistinguishable from about a thousand other barbecue places). There was a little down time before the show started, so I played maybe 30 minutes of limit hold'em while waiting.

Last night was surprisingly different. The place has 14 tables, and 12 of them were full, with waiting lists for everything. I had not anticipated it being so busy. They had only one cocktail waitress for the entire room, which just isn't enough for 12 tables. It took 45 minutes to get a lousy bottle of water.

As with Texas Station, this is primarily a locals casino. Many of the players clearly knew each other. Play was the standard weak/passive that one usually observes in such places. Easy to beat if you just pick your strong spots, and avoid bluffing, because you're surrounded by calling stations. (Hey, it just occurred to me--maybe that's why they named the casino chain the "Station" casinos!)

"All of a sudden..."

The funny line of the night came from a guy named Joe. Four players were in the hand, and nobody bet at it the whole way. The board ended up showing a straight, which nobody could beat, so the pot was chopped four ways; each player got his $2 back. Joe was at an end seat, and raised his hands like a catcher in baseball, encouraging the dealer to throw the two blue chips his way. She obliged. But at the last nanosecond, the player sitting next to Joe deftly reached out and single-handedly nabbed the two chips in mid-air--a very nice interception. He was just kidding around with his friend, and after pretending to pocket the chips put them down in front of Joe where they belonged.

Joe pointed to his buddy and quipped, "All of a sudden, he became my ex-wife!"


Whiner

I watched one guy win a small pot when he had pocket 8s and the other two 8s came on the flop. His lone opponent had nothing and folded to a small bet on the turn. He whined for five minutes about how he couldn't get paid off, and that it was his unluckiest day in poker.

The only thing worse than a player who whines when he loses is the guy who whines when he wins. (See here for a similar story.)

Don't trust your life to 911

As I was leaving Santa Fe Station, I passed through the intersection of Rancho and Lone Mountain Road, where I saw a very drunk guy stumbling around. He randomly staggered between the sidewalk and Rancho. Cars come along pretty fast on that stretch of this major street, and I was worried that he would stumble out at the wrong time and get hit. So I called 911 on my cell phone to report the situation, and hopefully have the cops take him somewhere safer to sleep it off.

I'm aware that calling 911 from a cell phone doesn't necessarily get you to the right people for help on the first try, because the systen isn't really set up to know where one is calling from. I'm used to having to specify where I am and what service is needed before being transferred to the appropriate call center. So when the call was answered, I quickly explained the location and problem, and heard, "One moment please while I transfer you." OK, that's cool.

Second call answerer. I go through it again. This time I am surprised to hear the "wait while I transfer you" again. A third person answers. I ask, "Do I really have to explain this for a third time?" She says she isn't aware of whatever I may have said to previous people. I'm annoyed, but I rattle off the information yet again. She asks which part of the intersection. I say the southwest corner. She then asks which of the two roads I'm traveling on (Rancho), and which direction. How can that matter, since I'm past it now? But I oblige. Then she wants a detailed description of the man in question--race, age, hair, shirt color and style, pants color and style, etc. After about three of these questions I'm getting seriously irritated, and finally cut her off with this: "Look, if your officers get to the intersection of Rancho and Lone Mountain Road and see a drunk guy stumbling around in the roadway, it's probably the same one I saw. And if he has left and there's a different drunk guy stumbling around into the road, then they can help him."

She apparently took the hint and stopped asking for further information. I still can't see the point of asking for all of those details. I mean, isn't it obvious that if they arrive at the intersection specified and see somebody wandering in the street drunk, that's probably the man in question, regardless of what color shirt he happens to be wearing?

I'm sure glad I wasn't trying to report a rape or murder in progress. It would have been done and the perp long gone before I (1) got transferred to the right agency, and (2) finished answering all of their pointless questions.

Let's have a Fiesta!

I had only played poker at Fiesta Henderson once before tonight (on May 25, 2007, to be exact, according to my records). There wasn't much to impress me--all locals, only two tables going on a Friday night, and those were a $2-4 game and a $3-6 game.

But there's a new sheriff in town. Fiesta hired James Klosty just before the Hilton poker room closed, and he also took with him Ken Franco, who had been a shift supervisor at the Hilton. So I thought I would check in to see how they were doing, and what they might have done with this little room.

The good news

I have to say I was favorably impressed. I was surprised at all of the promotions they have going, because I usually expect to see announcements of such things in print. Tight advertising budget, I gather. But they have progressive high-hand jackpots (capped at $599 for quads and straight flushes, uncapped for royal flushes, with the club royal currently over $2000), a progressive bad-beat jackpot (aces full of tens beaten by four-of-a-kind or better; currently at over $20,000); and a weekly $1500 freeroll tournament for just ten hours of cash-game play. James told me that they give more back to players through these promotions than any poker room on the Strip, and that's quite plausible.

Another one will be starting soon. Since details haven't been made public, I'll just give you a hint of it: 20 seconds to grab as many chips as you can from one of those plexiglas drums that they usually use for drawing random names or numbers for prizes. That's unlike anything I've heard of a poker room doing before. Might be interesting.

The room itself is a bit noisier than is my preference, but it's nowhere near as bad as, say, Bally's or the MGM Grand. Cigarette smoke wasn't bad enough that I noticed it while playing, though there was a little adhering to my clothes after I left. Sort of middle-of-the-road on that front. It would be even better if they didn't allow smoking at one end of the room.

They have a coffee machine and water cooler for players, so that you don't have to wait for (and tip) a waitress. I like that, especially since it took nearly 45 minutes from the time I asked for a bottle of water until it arrived (before I noticed the water cooler on the other end of the room). They will serve meals while you play, which often isn't so at the smaller poker rooms.

I was surprised at how busy the room was: four full tables at 4:00 on a Friday afternoon. Two were $2-4 games and two were $3-6 games. By about 6:00 a no-limit game started, and I migrated over to it. It was an unusually tight game, one of those where you have to pick up the table and shake the chips off of it to make any money. There were four pretty good players there, ones on whom I had little if any edge, which also surprised me. They weren't just textbook tight, but mixed things up nicely, good at sniffing out bluffs and making fairly thin value bets.

In the $3-6 limit game they had a feature I've never seen or even heard of before: "overs" buttons. Here's the definition from the best poker dictionary I know of (http://www.poker1.com/mcu/pokerdictionary/mculib_dictionary_o.asp):

overs button (n phrase) A button designating a player who will play at a higher limit when only those who have such an arrangement remain in a pot. Two or more players in a 20-40 game, for example, might agree that when either only they are in a pot or when others fold causing only them to remain, they will play 100-200. Each player so agreeing gets an overs button.

I always like learning new things about poker--especially now that I'm experienced enough that it's tempting to think I know all the tricks.

At F.H., the overs button transforms the game to no-limit whenever only players who have chosen to have one of the buttons are left in a hand. Since I almost always prefer playing no-limit to fixed-limit, I immediately agreed to take an overs button, and was one of four at the table who did.

But after thinking about it for a while, I surrendered it back again. I don't think it's strategically sound, at least for my style of play. Starting hand selection is different enough for low-limit and no-limit that I'm not thrilled with the idea of changing in the middle of a hand. It also seems sort of perverse that you can only charge an opponent $3 on the flop for him to be able to catch his flush or straight draw on the turn, but he can then charge you whatever he feels like to call if he hits it (because on the early streets, there is probably at least one player without an overs button, so the game is limit, but on the later streets it's more likely that the field will have been narrowed and the only players left both agreed to the "overs").

I was very glad I reliquished the button when I hit a series of rivered bad beats; I could see if opponents really made the hand they were representing for only one large bet. Of course, the other side of that argument is that if we had been in a no-limit situation, I might have been able to make it too expensive for them to draw. Still, I think I'd rather play either limit or no-limit for any given hand, not change it up in the middle of a hand. I don't mind casinos offering this variant, though, since nobody is obligated to participate; basically, every player has veto power over whether it will be in effect for any hand he's in.

The gripes

I consider it my self-appointed mission to complain about things in the world of poker, so I would be untrue to my calling if I didn't blow the whistle on things I think F.H. should do better.

They only have Card Player magazine, as far as I could tell. More variety is better.

There are no signs pointing guests to the poker room. It's on the second floor, an escalator ride up from the main casino floor. But even the sign directly above the base of the escalator--the sign that tells you all the things to be found on the second floor--doesn't mention the poker room! This is really shoddy. People shouldn't have to ask where anything is in a casino; it's not that hard to make good signs and maps. There's no reason for this, other than cheap and/or lazy and/or indifferent casino management. If you're not going to spend money promoting the poker room in print, for heaven's sake at least help people who are already there find the place!

I ran into yet another dealer who couldn't resist alerting everyone to a potential jackpot situation. It's been a bad month for this nasty habit (see http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/12/another-dealer-injecting-himself-into.html; http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/12/not-talking-about-hand-in-progress.html; http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/12/whats-up-with-dealers-this-week.html; http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/12/another-dealer-who-cant-keep-out-of.html). This time it was a dealer named Ron. When there was both a pair and three parts of a straight flush on the board, he told the table, "We're in bad beat territory!" With the bad-beat jackpot as high as it is, this kind of announcement can severely distort the action, if there happens to be a player who didn't know about the jackpot or didn't notice the possibility on the board. Maybe somebody has the quads and got so excited he didn't see the possible straight flush, until the dealer points it out. This is just not right. Grrrrrrrrrrrr.

Our no-limit table had chronic problems with the Shufflemaster, so bad that eventually it devolved into just hand shuffling. Apparently it wouldn't have helped to switch the machine out or move us to another table, because, we were told, all the other machines were just as faulty. C'mon--it's just lame to have equipment not work on such a widespread basis and have no means of backup. Similarly, the drop box for the rake kept getting jammed. If this is a one-time thing, no big deal, but I was led to believe that it's a long-standing, ongoing problem. Well then, get it taken care of, so that the game doesn't get stopped over such a silly little thing! Such things aren't serious enough to turn an otherwise pleasant poker session into a negative one, but they shout out the message that the casino doesn't care very much about the game or the poker room's patrons. I suspect that malfunctioning equipment in other parts of the casino wouldn't get neglected for weeks on end.

For reasons that aren't at all obvious to me, Kem brand cards (the most commonly used in Vegas casinos) that are printed with green-colored backs seem subject to wear a lot faster than their other colors. And sure enough, the green deck at our no-limit table had scads of cards with whitish rubbed-out patches. If there's just one such card, it can easily be replaced. But maybe a third or half of this deck had unique markings. I didn't think that anybody was paying attention to them, but if somebody cared to take the effort, he could easily and quickly learn to distinguish several cards by the wear patterns on their backs, and thus gain an advantage over opponents. This was not subtle; it was obvious, and surely every employee of the poker room who handled that deck noticed it. So why didn't any dealer take the initiative to replace the deck? A standard part of starting up a new table is supposed to be inspecting the backs of the cards, precisely to find such defects. Poker rooms should take decks this badly worn out of play permanently, rather than wait for a player to complain about the cards being identifiable.

Nevertheless, even with these faults, it's a nice little room. For me the biggest obstacle to frequenting it is that it's such a long drive from my downtown apartment. There's not much to be done about that fact. But if it were closer, and if the action were consistently there at times I'd want to play, there's nothing about the room or its management that would deter me from becoming a regular, and there's much to like about it, even for a grump.

Card on the floor--a sad but true story

In a recent post (http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/12/tropicana-poker-room-with-no-rules.html) I told the tale of a player who accidentally flipped a card on the floor at the showdown. In my view, both the dealer and the floor person handled the situation very poorly.

As I was writing up that blog entry, I was reminded of another dropped-card story once told to me by James Klosty, one of the shift managers at the now-closed Hilton poker room. James is not only an exceptionally fine dealer and floor person (recently hired as the poker room manager at Fiesta Henderson), but a great storyteller. I emailed him and asked him to recount his experience for the blog, even though readers will be deprived of the animation that goes with hearing the story in person. He kindly obliged. Thank you, James.

I hope it illustrates that when there are clear rules, they have to be followed and enforced, even when the outcome seems harsh for a given situation.

****************

12/16/07

Ladies and Gentlemen:

I have known the Poker Grump for quite some time now and cannot think of a better writer of the game of poker then him. So, when he asked me to write a little piece pertaining to the rules of the game I was flattered. Who the heck am I? Nobody, really. However, I have been in the poker business for over 15 years and have seen many rules enforced correctly and many butchered beyond belief. No matter what anyone says, poker rules are and should be nothing more than common sense. What is best for the game and what is fair to all players involved should be the only things considered. Most card room managers and floor people govern to feed their own egos. As a card room manager myself I do my best to make sure all players are treated equally and fairly. Once we start making rulings that benefit ourselves and ignore the needs of our customers as a whole we are doing the game of poker a grave injustice. When I read the experiences of the Poker Grump it is hard for me to imagine how some of these places stay in business. Anyway, I am not here to preach the gospel. The Poker Grump has asked me to share an experience of mine which pertains to a recent article of his. Here goes:

November 1998.

I was a shift manager at the Napa Valley Casino in California. Back in those days Omaha hi/lo split was the game of choice. I walked into work to see three Omaha games, one of which was a $15-$30 game. In it was a heavyset gentleman who seemed to be rattling off chips like they were going out of style. It was nothing too odd, as you see this kind of thing anywhere you go. But as the hours passed the trips back and forth to the cash machine became more common. Once he had reached his limit, phone calls to his buddies for loans started happening. If you were to look up the word “stuck” in the dictionary, a picture of this guy's face would be the clearest definition you could get.

The end of my shift was approaching and this guy must have gone through at least a few thousand. I counted down my bank, signed my paperwork, wished all the players a good evening and went home.

I returned to work the next evening only to find this same guy sitting in the same seat. He had not moved since the night before. He was now even more stuck as well.

After being on shift for about an hour a young lady stormed through the door. She had a baby in one arm and suitcase in the other. She walked up to the guy who was stuck (let's call him "Stucky" from now on, OK?) and said, “Listen here, Stucky. You want to play cards for the rest of your life? Well then say goodbye to your son.” She dropped the suitcase at Stucky's feet and yelled, “Don't come home. I have changed the locks and you will be hearing from my lawyer soon!” She then walked out the door. Stucky started screaming at her as she was exiting. “That's just fine with me, woman!” he yelled. He never left his seat. He didn't chase after her. He felt no remorse.

The end of my shift was approaching. Stucky was now stuck more than a few thousand, plus had lost his wife, his son, and his self-respect--although I am not sure he had any of that to begin with. I counted down my bank, signed my paperwork, wished all the players a good evening and went home.

I returned to work the next evening and, that's right, Stucky was still sitting in the same seat. His five o'clock shadow was now almost a beard. He didn't smell that great and his clothes were more than wrinkled. And then, about ten minutes after I had finished my first cup of coffee for the evening, it happened.

Stucky was sitting in the five seat and I was standing behind him deciding if I should intervene in his life and talk some sense into him. As I was contemplating this, I saw that Stucky had just flopped nut-nut in this $15-$30 Omaha hi/lo game. He had six-way action and could quite possibly win his first big pot in two days. It managed to stay six-way action after the river card hit. Stucky's hand was going to hold up on both the high and low sides. There must have been close to a few grand in the pot. I was excited for Stucky. Stucky was excited as well. So much so that when it was time for the showdown, Stucky stood up. This could have been the first time his rear end left that chair in three days. As he stood up, one of his cards slipped out of his hand and slowly floated its way down to the floor. My chin hit my chest and my eyes rolled to the back of my head. I knew what was coming next. The dealer yelled, “Floor!” That was me--the floor.

With my head down I calmly walked behind the dealer and said, “What happened?” I knew what happened. I saw the whole thing. I guess I was hoping that the dealer would tell me something different. He didn't. Stucky reached down, picked up the card off the floor and opened his hand on the table. I looked at him sympathetically and said, “I'm sorry, sir, but your hand is dead.” Stucky flipped out and started coming at me. The other players at the table jumped into action and stopped him from tearing my head off. After all of Stucky's energy was gone, he gathered his things and left.

I guess the moral of the story is that players have to assume accountability for their own faults. No matter what the circumstance, if one or all of your cards leaves the table because of player error, the hand is dead. No ifs, no ands, and no buts. This rule is not open to interpretation. As unfair as it was to Stucky, it would have been just as unfair to the other players not to make that ruling.

Anyway, this story is a true one. My head is still attached to my shoulders and I would make that same ruling again, no matter how painful it was.

Thank you, Poker Grump, for allowing me to share this story.

Radio show, again

I'm invited to be on "Poker, Straight from the Hilton," again this Friday, August 31, 2007, with another list of things to complain about in the world of poker. The show goes from 3:00 to 4:00 PDT. They tell me to expect to be on from roughly 3:30 to 3:45. It's on in the Las Vegas area on KLAV, AM 1230. You can also listen on the web through http://warpradio.com/single.asp?id=6224, click on the "listen" button.

Several people told me about technical difficulty hearing much of the show last time I was on. Apparently it was a glitch at the station, and affected both the radio broadcast and the webcast. I hope my presence doesn't cause a repeat of whatever the problem was.

Dealers who don't know the rules--and don't ask

Three stories.

1. I was playing at the Flamingo last night, my usual game ($1-$2 no-limit hold'em). I was first to act on the river. I bet $8. The guy to my left, without saying anything, put $13 in front of him in one motion (2 red chips and 3 blue chips). Therefore, it wasn't clear if he had intended to call and accidentally dragged an extra red chip along, or if he had intended to raise and miscounted or miscalculated what the minimum raise would be.

There are four possible rules that one could have to cover this situation: A. The dealer asks the player what his intention was, and then, depending on the answer, the player either retracts the extra amount or puts in more money to make the minimum raise. B. In the absence of a previous verbal declaration of a raise, any amount pushed forward that is more than a call but short of the minimum raise is deemed a call, and the extra returned to the player. C. In the absence of a previous verbal declaration of a raise, any amount pushed forward that is more than a call but short of the minimum raise is deemed a raise, and the player is obligated to complete the minimum raise. D. As a sort of compromise between the possibly harsh consequences of (B) and (C), you split the difference, and if the amount is more than halfway between the call and the minimum raise, it's deemed a raise; if the excess is less than halfway to the minimum raise, it's deemed a call.

Cooke's Rules recommends option D. Some casinos appear to go with D for tournaments, but either B or C for cash games (a distinction that makes no sense to me). But clearly the worst option is A, because that's what the angle-shooter would want: ambiguity, which he can then take either way, depending on what reaction he gets from other players.

So what did the dealer do here? He went with A. I asked him whether the player really had the option, and suggested that there must be a house rule settling the issue one way or the other without giving the player the choice. The dealer said that the player had to say what his intention was. I didn't believe it, but it was a small enough amount that I was going to call it anyway, so I didn't make an issue.

Later, however, I approached the shift supervisor and asked what the dealer's move should have been. If I understood his answer correctly, the Flamingo goes with B--the extra $5 should have been returned to the player and his action deemed a call, even if he claimed that his intention was to raise. The dealer was just wrong.

I won the hand at the showdown, incidentally. I still don't know if the guy really intended a raise--he had just hit one small pair on the river, so with 2 0r 3 people left to act behind him, it was a pretty stupid raise, if that really was what he meant to do.


2. I left the Pink Chicken because I wasn't making any money this time around, and went to Tuscany, a short drive away. Late in my session, I made a pre-flop raise to $12. The button reraised to $80, all in. The big blind was gabbing away with somebody and not paying attention. He had seen my raise, but missed the reraise, so he tossed two more $5 chips forward, intending to call my raise. Before anybody else could act after him, I intervened and told him of the reraise. (The dealer hadn't noticed the problem.) He decided to fold instead and took the $10 back.

The dealer told him that the $10 he had just put in had to stay in the pot. The player protested. The dealer, rather than calling for the floor, insisted that the guy put the $10 back. Player refused. They went back and forth a couple of times, until the guy on the button (who had put in the reraise, and was an off-duty dealer there) called for the floor. Floor ruled that since it hadn't affected any action behind him, the player would be allowed to take the $10 back.

This is in accordance with Cooke's rules: "[W]hen facing a raise, if a player is unaware that a pot has been raised and places enough chips in the pot to call an unraised bet only, the dealer shall advise the player that the pot has been raise, whereupon the player may reconsider and change his action, provided that no one has acted behind the player." (10.06, p. 66.) I assume that it is also in accordance with Tuscany's house rules.


3. About two weeks ago at the Orleans, there was a huge pot--about $1000 by the end, which is about as big as pots ever get in a $1-$2 game. I wasn't in it. I was in the 10 seat. On the river, the guy in seat 8 was facing an all-in bet for something like his last $400. He stood up to think about it, and finally decided to call. He pushed forward his two tall stacks. (He was one of those guys who like the 40-chip, $200 stacks instead of the more common 20-chip, $100 stacks--a tendency that was about to cause an unforeseen problem.) He then picked up his hole cards, and attempted to drop them on the table face-up with a little forward motion.

Unfortunately, his cards caught on his tall stacks on their way down, which flipped them face down, right on top of the muck.

The dealer reached for them, picked them up, and placed them face-up in front of the player, as if nothing unusual had happened. I asked her, "Isn't his hand dead?" She said, "No, he didn't mean to muck them [which was obvious--he's not going to call, then throw his hand away before seeing the other hands], and I know it was these two." Since I wasn't involved in the pot, I didn't do or say anything more--and, to my surprise, neither of the other two players in the pot said anything about it, either. (If it had been me, I'd instantly ask for the floor person. I'll take a $1000 pot by default if I can, and not feel one smidgen of guilt about it.) As it turned out, the caller had the worst hand and lost anyway, so the outcome would have been the same. But still, cards in the muck (at least face down, when nobody else has seen them) are dead, pure and simple, end of story. I seriously doubt that Orleans (or any other casino) has a house rule otherwise, though I didn't bother asking.


The common thread in these incidents is that a dealer doesn't know a rule that he or she should know, compounded by being certain of something that wasn't so, and not asking the floor about it. As I said in an earlier post, there's (usually) no shame in not knowing something. But one should be ashamed of being confident that the rule is X when it's actually Y, and not having the humility to say, "I'm not sure what the right thing to do here is; let me call the floor person to clarify it."

Addendum, August 16, 2007:

James Klosty is one of the shift supervisors at the Hilton poker room, and co-host of "Poker, Straight from the Hilton" on KLAV, 1230 AM, Fridays at 3:00 p.m., Pacific time. (You can also listen to the show live on the web through http://warpradio.com/single.asp?id=6224, click on the "listen" button. End of free plug.) Tuesday he told me that he had been reading some of my old posts--including this one, obviously--and questioned whether my opinion was right in story #1 above. At the time, I couldn't remember the situation that had prompted the rant, so I wasn't able to provide James a very satisfactory answer. But his point was thoughtful, and worthy of an equally thoughtful reply, so here's my take on it.

James noted that his long-standing practice in such a situation is to immediately ask the player what his intention was, and go by that. A player would get to make this mistake once--after that, it's assumed he's an angle-shooter, and the bet would be ruled a call only. James is a superb and experienced dealer. I trust him to have a keen sense of BS coming from a player who is trying to pull a fast one, versus an innocent mistake. If all dealers were as consistent and reliable, this system would probably work adequately. That said, we'd still have the problem that dealers change every 30 minutes, and the next one wouldn't necessary know that the guy in seat 8 has had his one chance to have his ambiguous move deemed a genuine oversight.

Overall, though, I still think it's preferable to have a rule that clearly defines what is to happen here, and not give the player a choice. Granted, the great majority of the time there is nothing nefarious intended. But that's also true of other ambiguous actions, such as tossing in an oversized chip when faced with a bet. It is, as far as I know, universal that that action will be deemed a call in the absence of a player announcing a raise before the chip hits the felt. Again, most of the time when a player intends to raise with the oversized chip, but fails to announce it, it's an honest mistake, not an attempt to deceive, so the rule has potentially harsh consequences when it is inadvertantly violated. But we don't give players a choice; the rule clearly defines how the bet is to be treated.

I think that the situation in my story #1 above is exactly analogous, in terms of how it should be handled. That is, there should be a rule (either one standardized everywhere, the way things like the oversized-chip rule are, or ones that casinos adopt internally, which may vary from place to place) that settles the matter cleanly.

I don't so much care which of the possible rules I discuss above (B, C, or D) is implemented. But I will stick to my guns on saying that having one of those rules in place to automatically and consistently determine the interpretation of the otherwise ambiguous action is better than the practice of asking the player what his intention was--even once.