Poker gems, #452

Lou Krieger, in Poker Player newspaper column, May 7, 2012 (vol. 15, #23), page 6.

For some, tilt has ended otherwise promising careers--even some WSOP main event champs, who were not able to control their emotions at the table--and many big-money winners who have gone completely broke, due to an inability and an unwillingness to deal with being on tilt. In other words, the willingness and commitment to get up from the table when stressed, and to take a short walk every hour or so, has cost some players millions--everything they earned and every dollar they had--while a simplistic little remedy might have prevented it all.

...When it comes to managing tilt, you are the one in charge. If you are unable to deal with it, the fault is entirely yours.

Too tight?

I'm about halfway through Winning Omaha/8 Poker by Mark Tenner and Lou Krieger. It's OK, but I'm wondering if it is practical to play the way the authors suggest, or whether it could even be profitable to do so.

Maybe I should put the caveats up front: I'm far from an expert in the field. In fact, it's precisely because I always feel that I'm just making it up as I go along when I play the O/8 portions of my almost nightly HORSE tournaments that I wanted to read something to give me a more solid grounding in the game. I therefore have no vast fund of experience against which to judge their advice. Yet I'm still finding myself skeptical that it makes any sense.

Let's begin with their starting hand requirements. On pages 82-84, they identify seven classes of playable hands:

1) Any A-2.

2) A-3, if the ace is of the same suit with any of the other three cards.

3) A-3, if the remaining two cards are 10-pointers (i.e., would count a 10 in blackjack--10s, jacks, queens, and kings).

4) Ace with two other "prime cards," which they define as aces, deuces, treys, fours, and fives. Exception: Do not play any A-5-5-x hand.

5) Suited A-x if two of the cards are 10-pointers.

6) Any four prime cards with no ace. (I assume that they would exclude trips or quads, though this is not explicitly stated.)

7) Any four Broadway cards, unless you are dealt trips. (Presumably quads, too, though again this goes unsaid.)

They have more details about which of these are stronger than others, which features within each category make a hand more or less favorable, which ones are weak enough that you shouldn't play them from early position or after a raise, etc. But that's the basic formula.

Incidentally, I note that this list, while tight, nevertheless was not completely consistent with their earlier dogma, quoted here, about not playing hands containing the dreaded sevens, eights, and nines. For example, A-2-8-9 obviously fits into their category 1. The list also violates their other earlier-stated dogma, quoted here, about avoiding "three-legged stool" hands. For example, A-2-3-9 fits category 4, but has an obvious "dangler" (and violates the other rule at the same time). On p. 81, they write--in italics, even--"[D]anglers are the kiss of death in Omaha starting hands." I have so far found no attempt to reconcile this assertion with the list of starting hand requirements that clearly allow for some dangler hands.

After studying this list for a while, I got to wondering what percentage of hands one would play if restricted to these rules. I attempted to work it out mathematically, and came up with 81,882 total hands, which amounts to 30.2% of the 270,725 possible starting hands. However, I was highly unsure of whether I had this right, because I found no easy way to account for hands that fell into more than one category. For example, Ad-3c-Kd-10s fits into both categry 2 and category 3. Ac-2c-3h-10d fits into categories 1, 2, and 4. Because I couldn't be sure how much double-counting was in my total, I had little confidence in my conclusion.

*******
A digression. Long ago I read somewhere (can't even vaguely remember where it was now) about a college physics professor who assigned his class to determine how long it would take for the center of a one-pound roast to reach 180 degrees in a 350-degree oven. One student reasoned that beef was mostly water, and therefore used the known thermal properties of water to make a theoretical calculation. Another went out and bought a one-pound roast, stuck it in an oven with a meat thermometer, and waited for the target temperature to be reached. A third student called his mother, an experienced cook, and asked her for the answer.

The philosophical question raised by the story is which student would make the best physicist? The field needs theoretically minded researchers. But it also needs good experimentalists. And, finally, it needs those with the insight to perceive shortcuts.

********

So, finding myself stymied by the theoretical approach, I decided to try the experimental. Yesterday I logged onto PokerStars and found an insanely loose $0.02/$0.04 limit Omaha/8 cash game, ten-handed, with 49% to 77% of players seeing the flop (according to the stats in the lobby, which I checked periodically). Over the course of about two hours, I played exactly 100 hands, checking each one against the Tenner/Krieger list. Only 10 of them would meet the criteria. (Specifically, one each from categories 2 and 7, two each from categories 1, 4, 5, and 6, and none from category 3. However, I did not check carefully for multiple qualifiers, just chalking the hand up to whichever criterion I first noticed it would meet.)

(Incidentally, since nearly every hand went all the way to a showdown--this being a no-folding group of players--I also kept track of how many non-qualifying hands would have turned into winners. The 90 "don't-play" hands would have won four scoops, 14 half pots, 2 quarter pots, and, one time, would have chopped the low three ways for one-sixth of a pot. The obvious implication is that despite the questions I'm raising in this post about how tight is too tight, it's clear that the great majority of "reject" hands as classified by Tenner and Krieger really are dogs, with only remote hopes of winning.)

Ten percent was way under what I had estimated mathematically. Even with a fairly small sample, that was too far off for comfort. It was also taking too long. So I broke out a deck of cards and dealt myself another 100 Omaha starting hands. I found five in category 1, eight in category 2 (of which three would also have qualified in another category, but I lumped them all here), two in category 8, and none in categories 3, 4, 5, 6, or 7. That's a total of 15 "playable" hands out of 100, with 85 rejects.

This combined sample is now big enough for me to believe that the listed guidelines would actually result in playing about 10-15% of starting hands. I think that I must have messed up the math somewhere in my first accounting, but it's too much of a chore to go back and try to learn what went wrong.

I don't think there's anything intrinsically wrong with recommending a starting hand spectrum that tight--especially for beginners, as this book is explicitly aimed at. In fact, the authors trouble themselves to point out that more experienced players can profitably play a somewhat wider range of starting hands, because they are less likely to get trapped with good-but-not-quite-good-enough hands in a large pot. Fair enough. I certainly believe that to be true for hold'em, so I find it perfectly plausible for Omaha as well.

But the authors' obsession with avoiding second-best hands extends past their starting requirements, and this is where I began to wonder whether their full set of guidelines were really feasible.

They are positively fanatical about getting away from straight draws and even made straights if you don't also have a solid low to accompany it, or in the face of a possible flush. It's not hard to see why: straights can be beaten by higher straights, flushes, and full houses, and even if they hold up you may end up with just half of a pot. So I see the underlying wisdom and reasoning.

Still, their straight and straight-draw rules strike me as draconian and timid: When three low cards flop and you don't have the nut or second-nut low to go with your straight draw, fold it. If two low cards flop, draw to the nut straight only if making your straight won't produce a possible low, unless you have a strong low draw, too--and even then you should play it passively, checking and calling, rather than aggressively. With no low cards on the flop, don't play a straight draw unless you have at least seven outs to the nut straight or you have additional outs such as top two pair or top or middle set. Non-nut straight draws with bottom two pair or bottom set should be mucked. If the flop has two suited cards, you must have at least eight outs to the nut straight to continue, and play it check-and-call. A straight draw with two suited cards and two low cards on the flop should be mucked, unless you have at least the second-nut low draw to accompany it. If you flop a straight with three low cards on board, check/call with three or fewer opponents, and muck against four or more; with two low cards, also just check/call. If you flop the nut straight with no low cards on board, never raise without a redraw. If you flop the second-nut straight, fold unless you have at least six outs to the nut straight or a full house. Muck the nut straight with three suited cards on the flop; just check/call when two suited cards flopped.

You get the idea. Basically, they're trying to get you to recognize situations in which you could get trapped for a lot of bets which will prove to be the second-best hand, even if it is the best hand on the flop.

No doubt there is a lot of hard-won, painful, expensive experience speaking here. But it leaves me wondering what fraction of hands one would end up actually playing to the river under their guidelines. And I haven't even gotten to their chapters on playing the turn and river, where I assume there will be yet more advice to muck, muck, muck just about anything short of the mortal nuts. I get the feeling that, especially in a limit game, the very few pots eventually won will not be large enough to justify the large number of times one is folding out of fear of running into a better hand or winning just half a pot. I certainly don't know this to be so, and I am given pause in my criticism by the authors' vastly greater experience. But offhand it just doesn't strike me as right. My limited experience--admittedly against really bad opponents--is that it often does not take the nuts to win. When you have many opponents willing to go to the mat with 10-high and jack-high flushes, it seems OK to chance it with the king-high flush rather than always living in fear that the nut flush is lurking.

I am also concerned by the number of situations in which they advocate completely passive checking-and-calling play, rather than taking the initiative. That obviously goes against the most basic and universal advice of good poker: being selectively aggressive, and putting your opponents to the decision, rather than reacting to their actions.

All in all, I am left wishing that I could watch one or both authors play through an extended session and see whether they actually play as snugly as they are laying out in their book. My hunch says no. But I could be wrong. Lord knows that has happened once or twice before in my life.

Poker gems, #236

Mark Tenner and Lou Krieger, in Winning Omaha/8 Poker, p. 45.


If you aspire to become a winning player, realize that all you have control over is the quality of decisions you make at the poker table. Many of your opponents will blame and even berate the dealer for a run of bad cards. Some bemoan their fate, complaining that they, of all people in the universe, have the worst luck of all. That's nonsense. You know it and we know it. And they probably know it too. But for many players, it's easier to place the blame anywhere but squarely on their own shoulders, where it rightfully belongs.

Poker gems, #235

Mark Tenner and Lou Krieger, in Winning Omaha/8 Poker, p. 42.

Patience in Omaha/8 means becoming a bit of an extremist. You'll play hands at both the big and small edges of the spectrum, but if you're playing correctly you'll throw away hands in the middle range. Imagine Omaha/8 as though it were a game with the sevens, eights, and nines removed from the deck, and that you'll play only cards dealt from that smaller but vastly improved pool. If you can hold that image in your mind, you'll do OK in the long run....

Play patiently, and don't play hands that include the dreaded seven, eight, or nine. While you'll win some of the time with those cards--actually, you'll win some of the time with any cards--in the long run you'll bleed to death at the table. Be selective, be patient, and, in Omaha/8, throw those problematic mid-range cards away.

Poker gems, #234

Mark Tenner and Lou Krieger, in Winning Omaha/8 Poker, p. 41.


Because you have four starting cards in your hand, representing six unique two-card combinations, you should play hands in which all four are coordinated in some meaningful way. Many of your opponents will be playing hands that include danglers, misfit cards that add little to a hand. Suppose you've been dealt Q-J-T-3. The three ten-pointers are components of a playable hand, but the trey is almost useless. You've got a three-legged stool with a dangler. Now, three legs might be sufficient if you were milking a cow, but they're not good enough to milk money from an Omaha pot.

Two more books get it wrong

Back in January I wrote about some published sources that have significant details wrong in their descriptions of one of the most famous hands in poker history, Johnny Chan versus Erik Seidel at the conclusion of the main event of the 1988 World Series of Poker.

I just found two more.

Richard D. Harroch and Lou Krieger, in Poker for Dummies, have a chapter on bluffing. In a sidebar on p. 140 they discuss Chan's "reverse bluff" with the nuts:

Chan had won the World Series the previous year and had been on a roll ever
since. Here he was, 12 months later, with a chance to win back-to-back titles.
But he'd need some magic to accomplish it. Seidel, a former commodities broker
from New York, left Wall Street for the life of a professional poker player; and
now he had a big chip lead on the defending champ.

At this point in the tournament, the blinds were $10,000 and $20,000. Chan
was first to act on each betting round. The flop was Qs 10d 8d.

Chan checked. Seidel bet $50,000. Chan called. The turn card was a complete
blank, and both men checked. The fifth and final card was another blank. Chan
checked.

Seidel held a queen in his hand, giving him top pair, albeit with a weak
kicker. He thought for a moment that Chan might have a queen with a better
kicker. But by checking on the turn and on the river, Chan passed up his final
chance to bet!

Seidel then pushed all of his chips into the center of the table, certainly
a sizeable enough bet to cause Chan to release any slightly better hand in the
event that Seidel had misread him. Seidel thought his all-in bet would prevent
Chan from calling with hands such as a queen with a better kicker, or two small
pair.

Seidel had, in fact, misread Chan. And not by a little, but by a lot. Chan
smiled as he turned over his hand. Chan had flopped a straight with the Jc
9c.

Here are the errors:

1. Seidel did not have the chip lead; Chan did--by about 4:1, in fact. That's why when he won this hand, the tournament was over. If Seidel had the chip lead, how do Harroch and Krieger explain the fact that the tournament was over when Seidel lost the hand? It's true that when heads-up play began, Seidel had a chip lead on Chan ($1.2 million to $470,000, according to Michael Kaplan and Brad Reagan's Aces and Kings, p. 111.) However, by the time the final hand came up, Chan was way ahead.

2. The 10 on the flop was the 10h, not 10d. This can be seen clearly in the video clip from YouTube, included in the addendum to my original post.

3. Chan was not "first to act on each betting round." He had the button.

4. Chan did not check on the flop. The action was that Seidel checked, Chan bet $40,000, Seidel check-raised an additional $50,000, and Chan called.

5. Chan did not check on the river; the action was Seidel moving all-in, followed by Chan's call. Thus, Chan did not "pass up his final chance to bet," as Harroch and Krieger claim (with an exclamation mark for emphasis, even).

I'm also pretty sure that Seidel had not yet set out on the life of a poker pro at this point; the WSOP was kind of a lark for him. Kaplan and Reagan report Seidel saying that it was doing so well in this tournament that made him realize that "maybe I could make a living from poker" (p. 111).

Let me also take this opportunity to point out yet another error in David Apostolico's report, one that I overlooked in my previous post on this subject. He said that the queen on the flop was the queen of clubs. Nope. It was, as Harroch and Krieger correctly report, and as can be seen clearly in the video clip, the Qs. Seidel was holding the Qc.

When re-checking some of the above, I noticed that yet another published source has the action wrong! Kaplan and Reagan, in Aces and Kings, p. 111, repeat the Smith/McEvoy/Wheeler error, discussed in my original post, of saying that Chan checked on the turn, followed by Seidel moving all-in. This in spite of them acknowledging earlier in the same paragraph that Chan had the dealer button! If Chan checked the turn on the button, that necessarily means that Seidel had checked first (which is correct). So how can they then say that Seidel moved all-in on the turn after Chan's check? In theory, that anomaly might be explained by Seidel making his all-in move in the dark, after Chan's turn check but before the dealer had put out the river card. But as the video clip makes clear, that's not at all what actually occurred.

I remain astonished that so many prominent poker writers, with the correct facts so readily available, will get things so many things wrong when describing a hand that just might have been viewed in video replays more times than any other hand in poker history. It really makes one wonder about the accuracy of the reporting on plays for which it is not so easy to check up on the authors.

Poker gems, #121

Richard Harroch and Lou Krieger, in Poker for Dummies, p. 107.

If you never bluffed at all in Omaha/8, you'd probably be better off.

How long is "the long run"?

One often hears it said that poker is a skill game because, over the long run, the luck evens out. That's true, at least in a theoretical sense. But just how long does "the long run" have to be for the luck to even out?

I recently read (though I can't remember where, and I'm feeling too lazy to search for it) an interview with Gus Hansen in which he estimated that perhaps 90% of his success in a given session could be attributed to luck, but over the course of a year, that number would be more like 2%. That sounds nice, and it roughly matches my personal, subjective sense of what's going on, but it's not very scientific.

I'm reading Poker for Dummies by Richard Harroch and Lou Krieger. It is actually a fine introduction to the game. Their chapters on stud and Omaha are the first pieces of strategic advice I've read on those games, and they have already helped me with both starting hand selection and deciding when to jam versus keep the pot small in the low-stakes HORSE tournaments I've been playing every day lately.

But of even more interest, and the part that is of relevance to this post, was this short snippet, from pp. 35-36:

We used a computer to simulate 60,000 hands of $20-$40 Hold'em. That's
about one year of play if you treated poker as a job and went at it eight hours
a day. The objective was to determine how long it would take to get into "the
long run," that elusive zone where luck is filtered out and only skill
determines who wins and loses.

Because identical player profiles were loaded into the computer, the
long-run expectation was zero. With identical profiles, each player should
neither win nor lose. They should have broken even in the long run.

Nevertheless, there were four losers and five winners. Seat 9 lost $3.18
per hour while seat 6 won at the rate of $1.99. That's a difference of more than
$5 per hour--and it was clear they never got into the long run, even after a
year of simulated play.

The authors then discuss extending the simulation to 50 years of play, and still differences remained, though smaller: up $0.60 per hour for the big winner and down $0.35 per hour for the big loser. They conclude from this experiment: "Maybe the best you can expect over a lifetime of poker is that only 1 to 1.5 percent of your results would be attributable to luck."

This reminded me of a startling assertion that Mike Caro made in one of his Bluff magazine columns last year:

Here’s where people get confused. They think that because luck evens out in
the long run, and skill prevails, that over their career of playing poker,
they’ll get almost exactly the same opportunities as everyone else. This just
isn’t so. A lifetime isn’t long enough for the cards to break
even.

Sure, if you play 10 hours a day for 50 years, you’ll get approximately the
same proportion of top pairs, flushes, full houses, straight flushes, and
everything else that others get. Some folks call it the law of averages or the
law of very large numbers. But it doesn’t tell the whole story. You need to
consider which games you’re playing when you hold that royal flush and how many
players are throwing big money against it. Are you competing for big limits at
the right times? Were you on vacation when the billionaire came to town and
dumped millions into your game?

And what about tournament winners? A top pro can go years without winning a
tournament and another with similar skill might win four times in one year. That’s luck, and – trust me – it won’t even out in 25 years of play. Skill matters a lot, but not enough to definitively determine who’s best – which is another reason I seldom play poker tournaments. I already know I’m best and if I simply declare it, some folks will believe me. If I play hundreds of tournaments and don’t win, they’ll begin to wonder. See?

Life isn’t fair. Some people spend a lot of time in hospitals. Some
businesses fail for unforeseen reasons. Your life equates to a single session of
poker. Luck won’t even out for you. But the more you steadfastly make
good decisions, the better you’re likely to do with the cards you’re dealt.

That's from the March, 2007, issue, posted here, with emphasis added.

So if you're playing several times a week, not doing anything different than your usual winning ways, yet experience a couple of months in which you lose, lose, and lose some more, can it really be due entirely or largely to a nasty streak of bad luck lasting that long?

Oh, yeah.

Poker words, #2

Just a day after expressing my concern that I didn't come across new poker words often enough to merit an ongoing series of posts here, I happened upon another one. Lou Krieger, in his column on stud/8 strategy in the May 12, 2008, Poker Player newspaper, writes, "Even if another low card arrives on fourth street, it's not uncommon to strike out by catching three bananas, or high cards with a rank of nine or higher."

That's a new one on me!

Lies and confusion about the iMEGA case

Who or what is iMEGA? According to its web site (http://www.imega.org/),

The Interactive Media Entertainment & Gaming Association (iMEGA) is a
not-for-profit corporation headquartered in Washington DC.

iMEGA was founded in 2007 as a professional association dedicated to
the continued growth and innovation of the Internet. We seek constructive
engagement with government at the Federal and State levels to ensure that the
challenges of this still nascent medium are addressed with the full
participation of the people and companies that have built the Internet into the
powerful influence on society it has become.

I first became aware of this group when they filed suit last year to prevent enforcement of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 (UIGEA). I didn't pay a lot of attention to the case, because from news reports I was quite certain that it was a dog, with virtually no chance of winning. Now that I've read more about it, I'm convinced that my first impression was correct.

The first--and quite possibly last--major decision about the case was issued on March 4. You can read it here: http://www.imega.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/imega-v-gonzales-et-al_3608.pdf. Here's the Reader's Digest condensed version: The government attempted to have the case dismissed first because, it said, iMEGA had no legal "standing" to bring the suit. To oversimplify, in order to bring a lawsuit attempting to prevent enforcement of a criminal statute, you have to show that you are actually in potential danger of being prosecuted under it. iMEGA defeated the government's argument on this point; the judge found that the association did, in fact, have sufficient standing to challenge the law, because "a plain reading of the UIGEA reveals that its prohibitions could easily apply to the to the actions of the plaintiff's member businesses."

But that was the end of their victories. The government next argued that even if iMEGA had standing, every one of their claims was legally invalid, to the point that they didn't even need to have a trial to determine any disputed facts. The judge agreed with them down the line, on every item; every claim that iMEGA made about the alleged unconstitutionality or unenforceability of the statute was shot down decisively.

It's important, I think, to note the legal standard in play: For a motion to dismiss at this early point, the judge is required to assume that all of the facts claimed in the plaintiff's suit are actually true. The legal question is, essentially, "Even if everything the plaintiff says is true, can they possibly win on the legal arguments?" Her answer was no. The case has been dismissed. iMEGA's press release says that they plan an appeal, but I'd lay 10:1 against an appeal being successful, after reading the district court's decision. The claims iMEGA makes are just horribly weak and implausible.

(I suppose I have to add the disclaimer that I think the UIGEA is stupid and bad public policy. But that doesn't mean that it's unconstitutional, or that any lawsuit brought against it should, by rights, prevail, if the suit is based on bad legal arguments, as this one was.)

Now let's look at the incredible PR spin job that iMEGA does with this whopping defeat: http://www.imega.org/2008/03/07/court-grants-imega-standing-to-challenge-flawed-online-gaming-law/. First, they say that they "applaud" the decision. Well, that's interesting, since they LOST. Their attorney spouts the nonsense that the standing portion of the decision is a "major victory." Hogwash. Standing is not that difficult to establish. And it's a purely pyrrhic victory if, after having standing acknowledged, you lose on every one of the merits of your case before you even get to trial.

iMEGA's press release next quotes their lead attorney, Eric Bernstein, as saying, "Judge Cooper’s ruling holds that, even with the passage of UIGEA, online gambling is only illegal in states where a statute specifically says it is."

No, it doesn't. First, we need to make clear what it means when a judge "holds" something or other. That word means not that the judge made some offhand comment in the text of the decision, but that a question was squarely put to and decided by the court. Court decisions can be reduced to three parts: "findings" (where there are disputed facts, the judge decides which ones to accept and reject), "holdings" (substantive decision on the disputes as to the meaning or application of law), and "dicta" (everything else). There is simply no holding in this case anything like what Mr. Bernstein claims.

As far as I can find, the closest the court came to any such statement is as a presumption (based on a plain reading of the statute) while making another point entirely, about whether the plaintiff's First Amendment rights of free expression are hindered by the UIGEA: "The plaintiff has not identified, and the Court does not discern, any 'communicative element' inherent in the only conduct criminalized by UIGEA--the taking of another's money.... Also, as UIGEA only has potential application if a bet or wager is otherwise unlawful where initiated or received, the plaintiff cannot claim any First Amendment protections for conduct--in accepting the funds for that bet or wager--that essentially facilitates another's criminal act." (Emphasis added.)

If a non-attorney read this and said that it was a "holding" of the court that the UIGEA only prohibited conduct that was already illegal under relevant state law, I could easily dismiss it as a misunderstanding. But Mr. Bernstein knows full well how to distinguish a court's holdings from its incidental statements. What he claims as the former is unarguably the latter. In short, he is lying through his teeth.

Continuing with the press release: "'iMEGA is very pleased that the Court recognized our standing and the weaknesses in UIGEA' said Joe Brennan Jr., the chairman of iMEGA." Note that he does not name any specific "weaknesses in UIGEA" that he claims the court "recognized." That's too bad. It might be enlightening, since I can't find anything in the decision that could plausibly be seen as such a finding, a holding, or even dicta.

The closest I can find is in the concluding paragraph: "The plaintiff's claims ... pose questions as to whether UIGEA, given its exceptions and conjectural enforcement problems, will be successful in accomplishing its desired ends." But this is plainly not the judge expressing an opinion she formed on this; instead, she's just restating what it is the plaintiff is alleging. In fact, she explicitly declines to opine in the way that Mr. Brennan claims that she does: "But it is not the Court's role to pass on the wisdom of a Congressional act or speculate as to its effectiveness." So Mr. Brennan is lying just as much as his attorney is.

Mr. Brennan is next quoted in the press release as follows: "Judge Cooper found that banks, credit card companies and other payment system instruments are exempt from criminal sanctions under UIGEA, significantly undercutting UIGEA’s enforcement mechanism."

That's just complete rot. What he is apparently referring to is merely a footnote dealing with a hypothetical, not a substantive ruling at all. The plaintiff claimed that UIGEA violates the Constitution's ban on ex post facto laws; i.e., Congress can't make an action a crime after it has been committed. This was one of the sillier claims in the suit, since nothing in UIGEA even remotely hints of such an attempt. By both text and clear implication, it prohibits only conduct occurring after its passage. The judge recognized that, and had no difficulty dismissing this part of the complaint.

iMEGA had based this particular claim on a previous case from the Fifth Circuit appellate court, which held, in part, that the federal Wire Act did not prohibit interstate electronic money transfers for gambling other than sports bets. In response, the judge in this case added in a "by the way" footnote that the financial institutions in that Fifth Circuit case would not be criminally liable under UIGEA anyway, since by its own terms the statute in question "does not include the activities of a financial transaction provider." In other words, the judge was making a hypothetical, footnoted comment about how parties in another, previous case might fare under the UIGEA.

This is about as purely dicta and as far from an actual holding or ruling as one can get. Furthermore, she is doing no more than quoting the plain terms of the statute, not making any sort of interpretive call as to what that language means as applied to an actual controversy in front of her. Banks and other financial institutions were not parties to this lawsuit, so the judge could not make any legal determination about their status and/or rights, even if she had been inclined to do so.


Lou Krieger weighs in, and gets it wrong

Lou Krieger blogged about this case on Tuesday, March 11, at http://loukrieger.blogspot.com/2008/03/banks-will-not-be-held-liable-for.html. His first sentence says, "Criminal liability for banks that are unable to stop online gambling transactions was removed by a US Supreme Court Judge in a decision that is unlikely to be appealed." Let's see how many errors we can count in that one sentence.

First, the decision did not come from a "US Supreme Court Judge." It was from Mary L. Cooper, a federal judge in the District of New Jersey. (If she has recently been elevated to the Supreme Court, thus giving us 10 justices there instead of the traditional 9, I apparently missed the announcement, as well as the Senate hearings on her confirmation, etc.)

Second, there was nothing in the decision that even remotely "removed" criminal liability. As I just explained, she merely stated a completely incidental, off-the-cuff, footnoted recognition that the plain language of the UIGEA exempts financial institutions from criminal liability. (They are subject to civil sanctions, though.) Since banks were not parties in the case, nothing that the judge should incidentally happen to say about them is of any legal significance.

Third is this business about "unlikely to be appealed." I have no idea where that comes from. The various governmental defendants cannot appeal--BECAUSE THEY WON! You can't appeal a decision that went in your favor. If the plaintiff appeals, then the government can seek the appellate court's simultaneous review of Judge Cooper's decision on standing--the one part of the case on which they got an adverse decision--but they cannot initiate the appeal. If he is referring to the plaintiff, I don't see how he gets to a conclusion that the case is "unlikely to be appealed," as Mr. Bernstein explicitly says in the press release, "we plan to appeal to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals." Whichever side of the question of an appeal Mr. Krieger is addressing, he's wrong.

Mr. Krieger continues: "Most experts are of the opinion that the US Government will not appeal the decision that banks should be held criminally liable for something the industry insists they have no control over."

I have no idea which "experts" he polled to come to this conclusion, and he doesn't identify them, nor tell us how many there were, nor how big the majority was that constituted "most" of them. But this sentence again shows that Mr. Krieger is completely lost as to what this decision said and did.

As I explained, the government cannot appeal the case, even if it wanted to, because it WON. So apparently Mr. Krieger's panel of alleged "experts" are a little confused about the single most fundamental point of appellate law: that only the loser can file an appeal. (Kind of makes you wonder just how they came to be regarded as "experts," doesn't it?)

Second, the sentence quoted is in direct contradiction to the first sentence of his blog post. There he said, erroneously, that the court ruled that banks could not be found criminally liable under the UIGEA. Now, however, he is saying that the government "will not appeal the decision that banks should be held criminally liable." Uh, well, which is it, Mr. Krieger?

I'm not the first to point out Mr. Krieger's obvious factual error about which court issued the ruling, and the highly questionable claim about the decision allegedly absolving banks of criminal liability; see, e.g., http://ndebtpokertour.blogspot.com/2008/03/battle-against-uigea-wages-on-and-on.html, which I found via http://hardboiledpoker.blogspot.com/2008/03/good-bad-and-uigea.html. I mention this because the first of these, cheer_dad's blog, says that he posted a comment on Mr. Krieger's blog about his concerns. But as of this afternoon, no comments show up there. Since he did put up another new post yesterday (Thursday, March 13), it makes me wonder whether he is deliberately not posting comments critical of his statements.

Cheer_dad is also careful to add, "Do NOT construe my comments as criticism of Lou Krieger who I greatly admire and respect. I believe he has reported consistently and kept the poker blogging community very well informed on the subject of the fight against the UIGEA. I for one am grateful." Well, readers may feel free to construe my comments as criticism of Lou Krieger for sloppy reporting, at least in this instance. The more prominent one's place in the poker community, the more careful one should be in getting the basic facts right, and on that count he failed miserably here.

Poker News also errs

Haley Hintze, reporting for Poker News, also got at least one thing about the relevant law wrong, I believe. (See http://www.pokernews.com/news/2008/03/imega-action-dismissed-legal-standing-granted.htm.) She writes, "However, iMEGA was granted legal standing as an association acting on behalf of members potentially affected by UIGEA implementation, allowing the group to continue to appeal or possibly file a new action against the law on different grounds."

iMEGA can certainly file an appeal, but they could do so even if the decision had been that they do not have standing, so the implication that their right to appeal is only preserved because of how the judge ruled on the question of standing is just plain wrong.

I don't know where she gets the last part of her assertion (about possibly filing a new action on different grounds), but I believe it is in error. I don't claim expertise in federal procedure, but my understanding is that iMEGA would be unlikely to be able to bring a new claim. The general rule is that you have to bundle all of your complaints into one lawsuit. If you fail to recognize and state a possible cause of action in your original suit, and the case gets dismissed, you're out of luck; you can't come back later against the same defendants with different legal theories asking for the same remedy. This makes perfect sense, as a protective measure for defendants. It's very expensive to defend onesself against civil suits, and it would also be a waste of court resources if a plaintiff were able to bring a series of suits, each making one legal claim. Rather, a plaintiff gets one shot at the defendants, and if he neglects to name a cause of action, tough, it's his own fault, and he doesn't get a second bite at the apple. If Ms. Hintze has specific grounds for thinking that this general rule will not apply to this case, I'd be interested in hearing about it, though I think it's more likely that she just doesn't understand general principles of court procedure.

Ms. Hintze also makes a small error in this sentence: "In a footnote to the dismissal of one of iMEGA's motions, a states-rights challenge based on the Tenth Amendment, Judge Cooper noted that 'UIGEA exempts purely financial entities from criminal liability.'" Actually, this was in a footnote to the ruling on the plaintiff's claim under the ex post facto clause of the Constutition, not the Tenth Amendment claim.

Those small points aside, the Poker News story gets the general gist and most of the details of the case right, and, to its credit, expresses some skepticism about the iMEGA press release.

Conclusion

The iMEGA suit was, in my opinion, ill-founded. The claims it made were weak and never had much chance of prevailing. The court's decision seems to be very solid and well-grounded in precedential case law. For iMEGA to claim this decision as a victory is pure face-saving spin. It was, in fact, a thorough and well-deserved legal ass-kicking. Shame on Lou Krieger for buying their BS hook, line, and sinker, and for additionally screwing up the facts in the process.

I have emailed iMEGA, Mr. Krieger, and Ms. Hintze with links to this post, inviting their responses. If I get any, I will post them here as an addendum.


Addendum, March 15, 2008

I decided to do a Google blog search to see what others have been writing about this decision. Goodness gracious, the bloggers and secondary poker "news" sources of the world just have no clue about basic legal precepts.

Probably the error repeated most often (e.g., here: http://www.holdem4u.info/2008/03/07/judge-gives-imega-case-mixed-results/) is that the judge's ruling "did give the group legal standing to challenge the law in an appellate court." No, no, no. iMEGA could file an appeal even if the court had ruled that they did not have legal standing to bring the suit originally. Appeal of an unfavorable trial-court decision is a matter of statutory right in virtually every civil case. It doesn't matter whether the adverse decision is that you didn't have standing, that the facts didn't support your case, or that the law was against you--no matter what the grounds for the decision going against you, you can appeal.

An anonymous poster at http://www.reviewed-casinos.com/casino_news/0703081.php wrote that the judge said "she could not rule on the constitutional issues." Huh??? She did rule on the constitutional issues, as would have been apparent if this writer had bothered to read the decision. How can so many people post facts and opinions without even taking the time to read the core material?

The same author claims that the court ruled that "neither does it [the UIGEA] violate World Trade Organisation rules." Not quite. The judge simply noted that federal law prohibits private individuals and organizations from bringing suits alleging violations of WTO agreements. As an aside, she noted that it doesn't matter whether the UIGEA is inconsistent with WTO agreements, because in the case of a conflict, the statute's provisions would have to be held to trump the WTO agreements. (I don't claim to know whether that is actually an accurate statement of the law, but that's what the court said.)

Here's a poker blogger who simply stole Lou Krieger's post, without any attribution, and presented it as his own: http://www.fullofpoker.com/2008/03/banks-not-responsible-for-gambling.html. He's a thief and a plagiarist. Probably cheats at poker, too, given those personal ethics.

Christopher Costigan, over at gambling911.com, is just friggin' crazy about the court decision. See his breathless enthusiasm at http://www.gambling911.com/online-gambling-030608A.html. He calls the decision a "major victory" and "great news." He is either completely clueless or a protege of Jon Lovitz's "Pathological Liar" character.

Here's a new flash, folks: Just because you read something in the internet doesn't mean it's true. Shocking, I know, but you need to be told this sooner or later. Better it come from a friend like me, no?


Addendum, March 17, 2008

Mr. Krieger sent me this email today:

****
Thanks for your email and link to your site. If you go back to my blog you'll see that's I've published a correction to my factual errors, a link to your post, along with a significant portion of your analysis of the iMEGA spin on Judge Cooper's decision.

I would have gotten back to you earlier, but I wanted to see if I received any other note's on this post (I did), plus I was involved in a bicycling event over the weekend and had to finish up the editing for Poker Player Newspaper. As long as you keep the discourse civil--which you did--critique and criticism are always welcome.

Thanks for reading my blog. Now that I know of it, I'll read yours in the future too.

Lou Krieger

*****

The new post at his blog referenced above is at
http://loukrieger.blogspot.com/2008/03/lots-of-corrections-on-my-march-11-post.html

Poker gems, #89

Lou Krieger, in Poker Player newspaper column, March 3, 2008, p. 6.


All it takes is a short period of erratic, undisciplined play for an otherwise good poker player to blow back money that took hours, days, or even weeks to win. You can't allow your discipline a day off when you're a working professional poker player. The price is just too high.

Lying about your hand

"Did you know that it's OK to lie about your hand, but you're not allowed to tell the truth about it?"

I heard that from a woman at the table yesterday at the Flamingo. It's not the first time that I've heard somebody make such an assertion. Most famously, Annie Duke said essentially the same thing during one of the 2006 World Series of Poker episodes. I suspect that the 700 million re-broadcasts of the series are ultimately the source by which most players "know" this rule.

But it's not true. The fact that so many people hear this and instantly believe it is just one tiny manifestation of the general societal problem that most people have precious little training or experience in critical thinking.* Even if I weren't pretty well attuned to the subject of poker rules, just an overall skepticism about accepting as fact things that people say would have caused me to raise a quizzical eyebrow at Ms. Duke's claim. I would immediately think, "Can that really be true? If so, it doesn't make any sense at all."

Let me address this under three headings: (1) Why the "rule" as stated would be stupid and pointless, (2) What the rule actually is, and (3) What I think the rule should be.

The alleged rule would be stupid and pointless

Suppose for a moment that there really were a rule that said that you could say any lie you wanted to about your hand, but couldn't tell the truth about what you were holding. Two prominent poker columnists have recently addressed this in detail, apparently both believing that there actually is just such a rule. They both do a nice job of explaining why it's ridiculous.

First is Steve Zolotow, writing for Card Player magazine (http://www.cardplayer.com/author/article/all/57/10074):

Someone in the main event told the truth about his hand, saying, "I have a king." His opponent folded, but he received a one-round penalty for telling the truth. Obviously, he should have said, "I don't have a king," then paused and added, "but there is a penalty for telling the truth." Thus, he could have conveyed the same information by lying about his hand. As long as we know that our opponent must be lying, we can assume the opposite is the truth. Unless players are allowed to use some mix of truth and lies, they effectively are telling the truth.

Next up is Mike Caro, who calls this "the idiot rule," because it prevents people from disclosing whatever they want about their cards only if both players are idiots (http://www.pokerplayernewspaper.com/viewarticle.php?id=2351):

But the worst rule in poker states that you can't tell the truth about your hand. For instance, you can't say, "I have three aces," if you actually do. That sucks. It sucks because, by rule, anything I say must be a lie to be legal. So, if I say I have a full house, opponents are given information. They know I can't have a full house or I'd be in violation of the idiot rule. So, I guess, if I wanted to tell someone I had aces full, I'd have to say something like, "One thing I can say positively is that I don't have aces full." If I said that and didn't have aces full, I'd be telling the truth and in clear violation of the idiot rule. For that reason, astute opponents would know that I'm lying--which is legal--and that I absolutely do have aces-full.

Exactly so. A rule requiring that everything you say about your hand must be a lie would be (1) unenforceable (because not every hand gets opened to check to see if the player was telling the truth or not) and, (2) completely ineffective. In fact, paradoxically, the more rigorously it was enforced, the less effective it would become at the presumed goal of preventing collusion.

That ain't really the rule

Fortunately, nobody has yet, to the best of my knowledge, actually been stupid enough to implement the "rule" that Zolotow and Caro rail against. I'm really quite surprised that both of these columnists took the trouble to publish a critique of a rule that doesn't exist.

So where does this poker urban legend come from? As far as I can tell, the source is this language in the World Series of Poker rules (http://www.worldseriesofpoker.com/pdfs/wsop.tournament-rules.07.pdf):

52. Players are obligated to protect the other players in the tournament at all times. Therefore, whether in a hand or not, players may not a.) disclose contents of live or folded hands....

Notice that it doesn't say anything at all about "truth" or "lies." It forbids one to "disclose" the contents of one's hand. The number of ways that one can "disclose" one's holdings are limited only by the imagination. You could show your cards. You could just say what you have. You could tap it out with your feet in morse code. You could send smoke signals (well, except that they've banned smoking at the table now). You could let an opponent keep guessing, shaking your head "no" when he's wrong and nodding "yes" when he's right until he's got it, thus never speaking a word. Maybe if you have a touch of Marcel Marceau's spirit in you, you could pantomime it. It doesn't matter--they're all equally prohibited.

The implication is that you also can't "disclose" your hand by invoking a logical game such as Zolotow and Caro propose: "I do not have XYZ, but you know that I have to be lying about that." As they note, that is the functional equivalent of straightforwardly stating exactly what you have. Both are prohibited under the actual wording of the rule in question, because both are just two of the myriad methods by which one might "disclose" one's hand.

Let me repeat: There is no currently published rule anywhere that says or implies that you can lie about your hand but not tell the truth about it.

Let's look at some other common sources for poker rules, for the sake of completeness.

The Tournament Directors Association rule 12 is nearly identical to, and the probable source of, the WSOP rule:

Players are obligated to protect the other players in the tournament at
all times. Therefore, players, whether in the hand or not, may not: 1. Disclose contents of live or folded hands....

Next is Bob Ciaffone's "Robert's Rules of Poker" (http://www.lasvegasvegas.com/poker/chapter1.php):

The following actions are improper, and grounds for warning, suspending, or barring a violator:

...Revealing the contents of a live hand in a multihanded pot before the betting is complete. Do not divulge the contents of a hand during a deal even to someone not in the pot, so you do not leave any possibility of the information being transmitted to an active player.

Cooke's Rules of Real Poker--for my money the best single rulebook yet--says this (p. 71, rule 10.20):

A player shall not intentionally expose a card or reveal it verbally in order to induce or inhibit action. However, in head's up matches (where only two players are dealt in) revealing a card shall be permitted.

I'm not sure if this is intended to cover literally only games where there are only two people playing the whole time, or if it is intended to extend to full ring games, when only two players are contesting the pot.

Lou Krieger and Sheree Bykofsky, in their book The Rules of Poker: Essentials for Every Game, go even further, and would disallow such disclosures even when heads-up (p. 79, rule 3.9):

Intentionally exposing a card to induce or inhibit action is a serious breach of poker ethics, and in certain instances can be considered a form of collusion. It is never permitted.

Notice that not even one of these sources says even a single word about lying versus telling the truth. So the next time you hear somebody make such a claim, ask him or her to point you to the actual source where the alleged rule is written. It's a safe bet that the speaker will be unable to do so.

What should the rule be?

Let's talk about cash games first.

The overarching reason for any no-disclosure rule is to protect other players. For example, perhaps a player has moved all-in ahead of me before the flop and I have pocket kings. I move all-in, too, and show my cards before other people have had a chance to act, because I would really prefer to have to beat only the guy who is already all-in; large pocket pairs don't play well against, say, five or six opponents, so my action is intended to scare off opponents. But the person who first moved all-in may have something like suited 9-10, which plays much better, in terms of risk:reward ratio, when there are several players in the hand (because the payoff for hitting a straight or flush is potentially enormous). Obviously, the same reasoning applies to saying "I have two kings, so the rest of you should fold," even though the verbal disclosure leaves more doubt about the speaker's truthfulness than does showing the cards.

What about less specific disclosures, such as "I have a really big hand here"? I would outlaw them, too, on the slippery-slope argument. If you write the rule so that it only prohibits stating exactly what your cards are, then presumably it would be acceptable to say something like "I have a pocket pair bigger than queens." That comes so close to what is prohibited that the rule ceases to be useful. So I would move the dividing line all the way down to zero: you can't say anything that suggests--truthfully or not--the strength of your hand. I would also prohibit statements that come in the form of "I might have...," which is a common ploy of some players.

When there are only two players contesting the pot, however, a player disclosing his hand cannot do any harm to anybody except himself, and since I don't believe in protecting people from their own mistakes and/or stupidity, I'd allow it. There are times when revealing one or more cards can work to one's advantage in confusing or deceiving an opponent. Consider this absolutely brilliant ploy by Daniel Negreanu, where he combines showing one card, a statement about what the other one might be, and a scary-looking minimum raise, to get Sam Farha to fold a better hand: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d33K96MGzVA. It's an ingenius trick, one of the slyest bits of deception I've ever seen deployed at a poker table.

I was on the bad end of another skillful bit of deceptive revealing by an opponent a couple of months ago. I started with a strong hand (can't remember exactly what it was), but hated seeing three hearts on the flop, when I had none. The turn brought a fourth heart to the board. I bet, my tricky opponent took a long time to decide what to do. While thinking, he turned over the 7 of hearts. He finally called. The river was a blank. I decided that with just a 7-high flush, he must be worried that I had a higher flush, so I moved all-in. He insta-called with the look on his face of the cat that caught the canary (as, indeed, he had). His other card was the king of hearts. He had flopped the king-high flush, and his showing the lower card tricked me into thinking exactly what he wanted me to think: that he just had a low flush and was in a difficult spot, when really he had the second nuts. Well played, sir--you lured me in perfectly.

That kind of clever psychological gambit should absolutely be part of the game, as long as only two players are involved. So showing one or both hole cards, or announcing or hinting at your hand--honestly or dishonestly--is fine by me.

What about in tournaments? The same considerations hold for multi-way pots, but there's an added wrinkle in tournaments that makes the picture less clear for heads-up situations. That relates to the concept of "tournament equity." This isn't the place for detailed analysis, but basically, depending on the payout schedule, late in a tournament, how one player acts in a hand can dramatically affect the amount of money that other players--even those not involved in the current hand--can expect to win. This is at the heart of an interesting debate between Lee Jones and Daniel Negreanu, at http://www.biggerdeal.com/2007/10/05/daniel%e2%80%99s-wrong-i%e2%80%99m-10000-sure/. Be sure to read the comments, too. (One of the commenters is me. I'll let people guess which one.)

I don't know the optimal way to balance the advantages of allowing the kind of Negreanu-esque ploy, which has traditionally been an integral part of the game, against preventing injury to uninvolved players' tournament equity. Perhaps starting the ban on disclosing one's hand, even when only two people are in the pot, when the money is reached, or a few places before the money, or at the final table, would strike the best balance. Of course, even if it works that way, when it gets down to the final two contestants, the rule serves no purpose and could be taken out of effect again.

Back to the start

But all of that is mostly irrelevant to where I started this discussion. I began with griping about how so many players just hear somebody say what a poker rule is, and accept that as the gospel truth, without looking it up anywhere, without thinking very hard about whether the alleged rule makes any sense or not, etc. To compound the problem, these people then repeat it to others, spreading the disinformation. It makes me crazy. It's not that hard to find out what the rules really are.

So when you hear somebody claim that there's a poker rule that says ________, and you've never heard it before, ask for evidence. Hold the thought in suspension until you can verify it. Don't pass it on as it it's the revealed word of God.

And for Pete's sake, don't talk about your hand!


*I risk going off on a full-tilt tangent here, because this is one of my biggest all-time sources of frustration and dismay about the world. In fact, if I had the magical power to cure just one ill of humankind, I think it would be the lack of critical thinking. I would make every person on the planet instantly inclined to critical thinking, and skilled at it. This would immediately solve countless woes, from the relatively trivial (people wasting their money on pills that the sellers promise will cause miraculous weight loss, enlarge male genitalia, or make the user irresitible to the opposite sex) to the truly world-changing (people being led to believe that if they fly a commercial jet into a skyscraper they will be rewarded with a bevy of virgins in heaven). So don't get me started.


Addendum, December 7, 2007

I emailed Mr. Caro to tell him of my disagreement with the premise of his column (Mr. Zolotow doesn't have a published email address). He responded quickly, for which I am grateful. With his consent, I'll share his comment:

About the issue on “can’t tell the truth.” I know that rule is in existence. It only applies to tournaments, though. Many directors have since modified it. Hopefully, my urging had something to do with it. I was, I think, instrumental in arguing against it on several televised events I participated in. They even waived the “can’t show cards” heads-up rule in both the National Heads-up Championship (NBC) and Superstars, when I participated. That wasn’t my influence alone. Many others felt it made for good TV to adopt these changes.

I even had the honor of roasting the person who first put the rule into place at the WSOP.

This is useful information. I can't find any such rule in current, published sources, but it's certainly possible that, as suggested in Mr. Caro's reply, there are tournament directors who use such an unpublished rule specific to their facility, and/or that if I looked at older versions of tournament rules I would find it. I freely admit that I didn't investigate older materials, so if a must-lie rule previouly existed, I wouldn't know about it (having been in the poker world for only a couple of years now).

No-limit straddles

Every poker room in the city, save one, has what seems to me to be a flaw in its rules: specifically, a fixed amount for a straddle bet in no-limit games. This is my call for the other 50+ rooms to get with the program.

First, the basics. A straddle is the currently more popular term for what Michael Wiesenberg's poker dictionary (the best there is; see http://www.poker1.com/mcu/mculib_dictionary.asp) calls an overblind:

********
overblind
1. (v) Put in a blind when one is already present. In a traveling blind game, this could mean someone putting in an optional blind in addition to the mandatory blinds. In a game without mandatory blinds, this would be blinding a pot (putting in a blind) after someone else has killed it. (To put in an overblind is sometimes called to kill.) Sometimes called go the overs. 2. (n) The blind put in by the person who overblinds. In a 3-3-6 traveling blind game ($12 limit or $12 minimum bet no-limit), John might put in $12 before getting his cards. He has doubled the limit (or the minimum bet) to $24, and he gets last action before the draw. Someone might say, "John acts last; he has the overblind." Also straddle, for both meanings.
**********

Because a straddle is simply a blind raise (though whether it is technically a "raise" is a point I'll deal with shortly), with the option to reraise oneself, in limit games it makes sense for it to be the same amount that a regular raise from first position (i.e., under the gun) would be. But since no-limit games don’t restrict the size of a raise, it's illogical for the amount of a straddle to be limited.

To be sure, nearly every poker room with no-limit games allows only a fixed straddle of double the big blind. Treasure Island is the exception. (The astute reader may have guessed that from the choice of accompanying photo.) There, a straddle bet in a no-limit game can be of any size the player wants to make it, up to his whole stack. After thinking about it, I’ve come to the conclusion that they’re doing it right, and everybody else is doing it wrong.

Personally, I think straddles are generally pretty stupid strategy. (See my full rant on this at http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2006/11/live-straddle.html.) I rarely do them, but it doesn’t bother me that others like using them. It just seems to me that if the goal of allowing them in the first place is to increase action (particularly at a tight-fisted table), then that would be better achieved by allowing a straddle of any amount. As it stands, the difference between calling the $2 big blind (in a $1-2 game) and a $4 straddle is virtually nil. But a straddle to, say, $15 would definitely alter (and make more complicated) the decisions for the other players. And from the perspective of poker room managers, it will tend to increase the chance of getting a pot large enough to collect the maximum rake.

I’ve checked several sources, and there is very little advice in print about this question. Specifically, the allowable amount of a straddle in a no-limit game is not discussed in Cooke’s Rules of Real Poker or Lou Krieger’s Rules of Poker. Bob Ciaffone’s "Robert’s Rules of Poker" (never in print, as far as I know, but widely available online) specifies that the straddle amount is twice the big blind, but it’s not clear to me whether he is intending to include no-limit games in that prescription. In Paymar et al’s Professional Poker Dealer’s Handbook, p. 141 (2nd edition), they don’t discuss no-limit games, but do say that in spread-limit games the straddle amount can be anything up to the maximum raise that would be allowed. This makes sense. Extending the same logic to no-limit games, the straddle amount should be unlimited.

Two technical questions that I can think of will come up if other poker rooms were to decide to give this a trial:

1. What is the minimum amount of a reraise? If the straddle is just a raise of the $2 big blind, then a straddle of, say, $15 is a $13 raise, and one would think that the minimum reraise would therefore be another $13, to a total of a $28 bet. But it may be better to think of the straddle not as a standard raise, but more like another (optional) blind. If so, then the minimum next raise would need to be double the straddle amount (e.g., to $30 on a $15 straddle). (Robert’s Rules, version 10, #15: “A straddle bet sets a new minimum bring-in; it is not treated as a raise.”) Personally, I think this makes more sense, and would be easier to implement, though it’s only a small difference.

2. What is the minimum bet on subsequent betting rounds? Usually the minimum bet on the flop, turn, and river is the amount of the big blind. Usually the occurrence of a straddle before the flop isn’t considered to change this. However, if one sees the straddle as, effectively, a third blind, then it might make more sense to use the straddle amount as the minimum bet size on subsequent streets, too. Furthermore, if there’s a straddle to, say, $15, with a call or two, a minimum bet on subsequent betting rounds of $15 is more sensible than reverting to a $2 minimum, given how big the pot is going to be. The question may never come up, because the kind of action junkie that will throw in a sizable straddle, given the chance, isn’t going to even consider a $2 bet when there’s a decent-sized pot built by his pre-flop action. But the room staff should make the decision in advance one way or the other, to be prepared, just in case.

So how about it, Venetian? Caesars? Mirage? MGM? Mandalay? Binion's? Red Rock? Who among you will step forward, admit that you've had an illogical rule in place, and change it?

Walking away in the middle of a hand--not recommended!

Tonight at the Hilton I witnessed another very strange occurrence in a poker hand--a player walking away from the table, leaving behind his would-have-been winning hand, and thereby forfeiting the pot. This also reminded me of a somewhat similar event from last fall.

For those who want the Reader's Digest condensed version without slogging through the stories, here's the moral: If you walk away from the table, you can't win the money, even if you have the best hand! Nobody should be that stupid.

Story #1:

Three players were involved. I folded before the flop and was just watching. Marty is a solid, above-average player in seat 4. Two people I don't recognise are in seats 5 and 6. The flop is J-Q-x, with the two face cards both being spades. Seat 5 pushes all-in, and both opponents call him. Seat 5 then makes his first mistake by flipping his cards face-up, even though the other two players can continue betting into a side pot after the turn and river cards are revealed. I don't know if he didn't realize that two people had called him (his action would be fine against just one opponent, since nobody would have any decisions left to make), or he just didn't understand why he shouldn't do that. (People develop strange bad habits in their casual home games, and tend to bring them to the casino, where they cause trouble.) He has the A-4 of spades, for the nut flush draw, with no pair.

Marty and Seat 6 both check after the turn card and again after the river, both of which are blanks. But as soon as Seat 5 sees that he didn't make his flush on the river, he makes his second mistake: he turns and walks away from the table, without waiting to see the other players' hands or to watch the pot being awarded. I suppose he must have assumed that at least one of the other two players had him beat. This was, in fact, pretty likely, but you never know for sure what people are doing in this crazy game.

So then the next bizarre thing happens: Seat 6 mucks his cards without showing them. He certainly could determine that he didn't have Seat 5's ace-high beat, but Marty hadn't shown yet. This means that Seat 6 couldn't possibly know for sure whether he won or lost.* I think that Seat 6 didn't grasp the implication of Seat 5 walking away (that is, that he was effectively forfeiting any claim to the pot, even if he had the best hand).

Marty is sharp, though, and absolutely knew what that meant. He wisely turned his hole cards face-up after seeing Seat 6 muck. He had a measly 9-10 offsuit, no pair, so he would have lost to the ace-high of Seat 5. He had been going for the straight draw and missed. But he was the only player who (1) was still at the table, and (2) showed his hand to the dealer and the table--which meant that he was the only one to whom the dealer could possibly award the pot, no matter how terrible his cards were!** The dealer can't push the pot to an empty seat, nor to a player who threw his cards away without showing them when the claim to the pot is still undecided.

The story has a coda. Former Seat 5 actually walked only to the poker room entrance, then stopped, as if he wasn't sure what to do next. After the next hand had begun, he came back over and stood next to his friend in seat 9 to watch him play. Seat 9 informs him that A-4 was actually the winning hand, but that he couldn't be awarded the pot because he gave up and left.

Now we're into the second hand after the one in question. I see and hear Former Seat 5 talking to the shift supervisor, Ken, at the front desk. Ken had no idea what had transpired. A few things seem immediately obvious to me: (1) No matter what Ken learns, he's not going to be able to rectify the situation now; it's a pretty universal rule that a player forfeits all claim to a pot if he waits until the next hand is in progress to make his protest about whatever happened.*** (2) Former Seat 5 can only relate first-hand what he saw, and the rest he's going to be recounting second-hand, and it will probably get garbled in the process. Which means that (3) Ken is soon going to have to come over to the table and query the dealer about what happened. The dealer, while a very sweet woman, speaks English as a second language, and she tends to get flustered when she feels under pressure, and when that happens, she doesn't relate events in a clear, concise manner. In other words, if Ken comes over to investigate, it's going to be a huge mess, with everybody offering facts, observations, and opinions, and it will stop the game cold for a long time while Ken sorts it all out. Moreover, Marty will probably come under at least some social pressure to give Former Seat 5 what he (Marty) won in that hand, or maybe split it. I don't think he should have to do that or even get pressed into such a gesture.

I think I can prevent the impending argument, because I know exactly what happened, and what facts are pertinent to applying the applicable rules. (It does occasionally come in handy to have graduated from a poker dealer school and to have the odd hobby of actually reading boring poker rule books.) So I hopped over and told Ken the story as recounted above. Former Seat 5 didn't deny having left his seat before seeing his opponents' hands. Ken gently explained that there was no way to give him the pot after the fact. (I didn't stick around to hear the explanation, but I assume it included both the fact that the guy had essentially forfeited any claim to the pot by leaving the area, and the fact that they couldn't correct anything this long after the hand was over anyway.) Former Seat 5 appeared to acknowledge that he had screwed up, though I'm only surmising this by body language and gestures. Fortunately, he didn't make a big stink about it.

Story #2:

This occurred the first time I played at the Suncoast last October. A new person was coming to the table, and the previous player from that seat had behind left a glass and a bottle of whatever he was drinking. The new player's hands were full with his chips, so the player in the adjacent seat graciously stood up, picked up the leftover crap, and walked over to the wastebasket near the poker room entrance to throw it away.

The problem was that this guy was, at that very moment, in the middle of a hand with a big pot, being contested by multiple players! He WALKED AWAY FROM THE TABLE, so when it came to his turn to act, and he wasn't in his seat, the dealer assumed he intended to fold and had gone out for a smoke or something. (This is very common, unfortunately. People often don't wait for their turn to fold before getting up to go to the restroom, get a snack, smoke, or whatever. They just leave their cards, knowing that the dealer will have no choice but to collect them as folded. It's rude and against the rules, but they do it all the time anyway.)

He was livid to return to the table and find that the dealer had mucked his cards. He claimed (plausibly, I thought--though it doesn't make even a speck of difference whether he was being truthful) to have had a flush, and that he would have beaten the hand that had been declared the winner. Maybe he did. But if so, it just magnifies the stupidity of walking away. He could have at least told the dealer, "I'm just stepping away to clear stuff out for this new player, I'll be back in ten seconds." That would have prevented the problem. He ranted on and on for 30 minutes about it.

Every poker room I've ever played in has posted on the wall a list of house rules. Usually near the top of the list is the universal mandate that each player must protect his or her own hand--protect it, that is, not only from being seen by other players, but from a whole variety of things that can cause it to be declared dead.**** These include the dealer accidentally collecting the cards after erroneously thinking the player has folded, another player's discarded hand getting intermingled with the player's live hole cards, and the cards falling off the table.

Walking away from the table isn't doing a very good job of protecting one's cards. It was this guy's own fault, and he just wouldn't admit it. The dealer took pretty intense abuse from him and from a couple of other players who agreed with him. She was actually close to tears. I stayed out of the controversy, except to reassure the dealer privately later that it wasn't her fault.

Moral of the stories (reprise):

If you're so stupid that you walk away from the table when you have money in the pot and it is even remotely possible that you might win the hand at showdown, you deserve to lose. All you have to do is sit there! What could be easier?!



*Even if he has no pair and both of his cards are lower than what's on the board--which means that the five community cards are his final hand, and his hole cards are ignored--that might be true for the other remaining player, too, in which case they would split the pot.


**He probably could have claimed it even without showing, since one opponent had forfeited by leaving and the other had forfeited by mucking his cards. But Marty is smart enough to make it all clean and legal and straightforward, and not leave open a possible argument somebody might have for reclaiming the pot if it came to a floor person's decision.


***E.g., Cooke, Cooke's Rules of Real Poker, p. 75:

11.13 After Showdown. ...Once the dealer has commenced the shuffle for the next hand then all rights to a decision regarding the previous hand are forfeited.


****See also:

The Professional Poker Dealer's Handbook by Paymar, Harris, and Malmuth, p. 18 (emphasis in original):
1. Players must protect their own hands at all times. This may be the most important rule in all of poker. A hand may be declared "dead" if even one card touches the muck or if another player's card touches a hand that is not protected.... Although the dealer should be aware of only mucking discarded hands, a player who fails to take reasonable means to protect his or her hand usually has no recourse if the hand becomes fouled or if the dealer accidentally collects an unprotected hand.

Poker Tournament Directors' Association rules, #28:
Unprotected hands. If a dealer kills an unprotected hand, the player will have no redress and will not be entitled to a refund of bets.

Robert's Rules of Poker, Chapter 3, under "Irregularities":
2. You must protect your own hand at all times. Your cards may be protected with your hands, a chip, or other object placed on top of them. If you fail to protect your hand, you will have no redress if it becomes fouled or the dealer accidentally kills it.

Krieger and Bykofsky, The Rules of Poker, p. 242 (I don't know why this is only in their "Tournament rules" section; it would seem to apply equally to cash games):
9.35 Killing Unprotected Hands. If a dealer kills an unprotected hand, the player will have no redress and will not be entitled to his money back.

Cooke, Cooke's Rules of Real Poker, p. 75:
11.10 Protecting Interest in the Pot. A player with a hand he believes to be the winning hand is responsible to hold onto his own hand until the pot is awarded. No player with an interest in the pot should release his hand to the dealer until his portion of the pot has been pushed to him.


Addendum, February 28, 2008

Reader Darrell Davis emailed me the following note, with an interesting story similar to those above. It is posted here with his permission.

I have been reading your blog and see you sometimes recount other peoples
stories. Usually these are from people you know, not some anonymous internet
person, but I have a story that you might be interested in. It too involves a
dealer affecting the outcome of a hand.

I live outside of Dallas Texas. I normally play at Winstar Casino in
Oklahoma. They have a really nice 46 table poker room. I really like the place.
It always seems well run and efficient. But yesterday I had a hand that was
interesting.

I was playing in a 1-2 NL game. The person to my immediate right had just
lost a big pot and was left with only $8. He did not rebuy. This player was a
regular and seemed extra familar to the current dealer. I don't remember his
name, but I will call him Ted.

The next hand Ted limped in for $2. I looked down to find KhQh and raised
to $12. I got 3 callers, including Ted all in for his remaining $6. This created
a side pot of roughly $16. The flop came Jack high with 2 hearts. It checked to
me and I made a continuation bet. One player at the other end of the table was
contemplating a call. While he was thinking, Ted said "that's not good" and
stood up and walked away behind me.

The other player eventually folded. The dealer quickly threw out the turn
and river which did not improve my hand. I was left with King high as was well
aware that Ted might have had a winning hand. The dealer pushed me the side pot
and then said "lets see them". I asked if Ted's hand was dead. He looked behind
me and said "Ted are you still in this?". I looked over my shoulder and saw Ted
at least 10 feet away talking to another dealer. Ted walked over towards the
table, still talking to the other dealer. He stood about 2 feet behind his chair
and the dealer said "lets see a winner".

I figured if I said anything else Ted would realize that he might have a
winner and turn over his hand anyway. So I went ahead and turned over mine.

The dealer announced "King high" and then asked Ted what he had. Now Ted
realized he had the winner. He came the rest of the way to the table and turned
over his hand for an Ace high to take the main pot.

I jokingly asked the dealer how long he would have waited for Ted to return
to the table before he would have killed his hand. He didn't get it. I was
tempted to call for a ruling from the floor, but I realized that this would
definately make me the bad guy at the table. I really like to play the good guy
image and didn't want to change that. I decided to just concentrate on the next
hand.

The hand didn't affect the bottom line too much, there was roughly $40 in
the main pot. But it was the most interesting hand involving a dealer that I
have been involved in.

-Darrell

I probably would have handled this about the same way. When the guy is still in the room within earshot, he hasn't quite abandoned his hand. It would seem kind of nit-like to try to insist that his hand be killed under those circumstances, especially when (1) the guy is already down, (2) it's such a small amount of money involved, and (3) you can call the player back to the table just as quickly as you can call the floor over to make a decision. But he was definitely pushing the limits of what can reasonably be tolerated before he is considered to have forfeited his interest in the pot, IMHO.

Poker gems, #12

Lou Krieger:

I believe in poker the way I believe in the American Dream. Poker is good for you. It enriches the soul, sharpens the intellect, heals the spirit, and—when played well—nourishes the wallet.

What--chips into the pot aren't enough for you?

Every time I think I've seen it all, some idiotic player comes up with a new way to complain. This time it was a guy who--no kidding--thought that his opponent putting the right number of chips into the pot wasn't enough to constitute a call of his bet.

Hilton, Sunday. Player A is a 60-ish Floridian I've never seen before, one of those who likes to brag that he usually plays at much, much higher stakes than this--which is incredibly annoying and condescending. Player B, on my immediate right, is a 20-something tourist, friendly and inoffensive. I didn't learn either of their names. A is clearly a more experienced player, but B is a whole lot more fun to be around.

They get involved heads-up in a pot. The final board is A-4-3-4-5, with no flushes possible. Player A has been leading the betting all the way, with B just calling. The same pattern occurs on the river. A bets $40. B thinks quite a while, with the $40 in chips already counted out and in his right hand.

Finally he decides to call. He puts the chips well over the betting line with his right hand, and maybe half a second later flips up his hole cards with his left hand. He has A-9, for two pair (aces and fours) with a 9 kicker.

Player B nods in apparent acknowledgement. He picks up his down cards with one squarely on top of the other, and flashes the face of the bottom card to Player A. I see it, too--a 3. Then he tosses both cards face-down toward the dealer (Jessica), who dutifully mucks them. Jessica then begins to push the pot to B.

Here's where the surprising thing happened. As A sees the pot going past him toward B, he gets a startled look on his face and says, "Hey, what are you doing?"

Several of us at once say, "You mucked your cards!" He protests that Player B never called the $40 bet on the river. Apparently he was so distracted with looking at B's turned-up cards that he didn't notice that that action was preceded by B putting eight red chips out in front of him.

Player B was playing straight up, no doubt at all in my mind about that. He did nothing at all to conceal or mask his action. He wasn't shooting an angle, trying to barely have the chips touch the betting line, or any funny business like that. And I was watching him--he unquestionably put the chips in before exposing his hand (although it wouldn't have made any difference; in cash games when heads-up, it's usually allowed to expose one's hole cards to see if an opponent will react to them, before deciding what to do). He did nothing wrong whatsoever, just took the unusual (but not illegal or unethical, by any means) step of showing his hand first, rather than waiting for the bettor to show first. It's true that he never verbally announced "call," but he doesn't have to--actions with chips speak for themselves, by every rulebook of poker ever written.

Player A then compounded his problem by attempting, first, to pull the pot toward him. Jessica sternly rebuked him for this. He then attempted to fish his cards out of the muck. Again, Jessica correctly covered the muck with her hands and told him that he was not allowed to touch the cards. She did all this while calling for the floor person (Ken).

After sorting out the usual cacophony of voices and opinions offered to him all at once, Ken made the only possible decision: the pot went to Player B. Each player has the resonsibility to know what other players' actions have been, and to ask the dealer if it isn't clear.

Player A just screwed up--it's that simple. He failed to notice B putting out his chips, and, upon seeing B's cards face up, assumed, without asking, that B was folding. On the strength of that error and that assumption, he mucked his hand after flashing the 3.

His whole argument came down to two points. First, he claimed that Jessica hadn't announced the call. She says that she did. I don't know whether she did or not; because I knew by watching him that B had made the call, I would have completely tuned out the redundant announcement even if I had heard it. Furthermore, there is no rulebook in existence that says that a dealer failing to announce a player's action makes it as if that action hadn't occurred!

Second, he claimed to have had pocket 3s, for a full house (3s full of 4s). We should believe him, he said, even without having seen his second card, because he wouldn't bet $40 with just the lowest pair on the board. Oh, right--there's no such thing as bluffing in his world, I guess.

Well, too bad, dude. You folded your hand before the dealer awarded the pot, end of story.

In The Professional Poker Dealer's Handbook by Paymar, Harris, and Malmuth, p. 18, we find this (emphasis in original):

1. Players must protect their own hands at all times. This
may be the most important rule in all of poker. A hand may be declared
"dead" if even one card touches the muck or if another player's card touches a
hand that is not protected.... Although the dealer should be aware of only
mucking discarded hands, a player who fails to take reasonable means to protect
his or her hand usually has no recourse if the hand becomes fouled or if the
dealer accidentally collects an unprotected hand.

While it is not necessary for the winner of a pot to show the hand if there
were no callers, it is suggested that the player protect the winning hand until
the dealer is actually pushing the pot to him. The dealer should not ask the
player to relinquish the winning hand before pushing the pot.

I read this shortly before attending poker dealer's school, and it changed how I do things. I now habitually hang on to my down cards until the pot is coming my way (if I'm the winner, or think I am). That way, if the pot is heading to somebody else by mistake, I still have a live hand I can show to claim it. I look at the transaction as a trade: my cards for the pot. Since starting this practice, I have twice accidentally mucked the winning hand (by misreading the board--until it was too late), but I have never had to forfeit a pot that was rightfully mine because of releasing my cards prematurely and letting the dealer muck them before the pot was pushed, or because the dealer uncorrectably pushed the pot to the wrong person. Retaining the cards makes any such error easily correctable.*

The same concept is expressed in Cooke's Rules of Real Poker, p. 75, rule 11.10:

A player with a hand he believes to be the winning hand is responsible to
hold onto his own hand until the pot is awarded. No player with an interest in
the pot should release his hand to the dealer until his portion of the pot has
been pushed to him.

Kreiger and Bykofsky use nearly identical language in their Rules of Poker, p. 140, rule 5.22:

A player holding what he believes to be the winning hand should retain his hand
until the pot is awarded. A player with an interest in the pot should not
release his hand until the dealer pushes the pot, or his portion of the pot, to
him.

Finally, we have "Robert's Rules of Poker," most recently Version 10 (found at numerous places around the Web, such as http://www.lasvegasvegas.com/poker/rrpprinter.php):

Cards speak (cards read for themselves). The dealer assists in reading hands,
but players are responsible for holding onto their cards until the winner is
declared.

So in terms of the rules and how they apply here, this wasn't even a close call. Player A in today's incident was just a guy who made a mistake--two mistakes, actually (not noticing that his bet had been called, then throwing away his hand before the dealer pushed him the pot) and was looking to place the blame everywhere except where it belonged--squarely on himself.

Player B rightly got the pot--not necessarily by having the best hand (because we don't know who did), but by having the only hand turned face-up on the table after the final bet and call. I was glad that he didn't apologize or appear to feel guilty over the decision going his way (as it had to, under the circumstances). He did nothing wrong--at least as far as the rules are concerned. (Making that call with his hand was pretty questionable, though!)

Player A, if you're reading this, I have a message for you: I hope that you learned a valuable lesson today. It only cost you about $240 or so--chump change for a guy who is used to playing for tens of thousands at a time, as you claim to do. Maybe it will save you from losing a pot back home in your Big Game there, and you'll come to see it as having been a cheap piece of education. Pity that in all your years of playing for such high stakes, you never bothered to learn some of the most basic rules of the game.


*Incidentally, dealers are supposed to award the pot before killing the winning hand, just to prevent that kind of problem, but unfortuntely many don't follow that correct sequence. Sooner or later, players who don't hold on to their cards until receiving the pot will lose one in an ugly controversy such as today's incident became.

Favoritism? No, it's just the rule, moron

So today I'm at my favorite hangout, the Hilton, playing $3-6 limit while waiting for a no-limit seat to open up. One of the other players is Myron, a sweet octogenarian (I think I heard him tell somebody he's 83) who is a regular there. Rachel, perhaps my favorite dealer anywhere (smart, funny, interesting, unflappable, accurate, consistent about rule enforcement, attentive to detail--what more can you ask a dealer to be?), is in the box. Myron is on the button, but after the flop he mistakenly thinks he's first to act, and puts out a $3 bet. It is pointed out to him that it's not his turn, so he takes it back. The player who is rightly first to act bets $3, and is called by a young guy who just sat down on my right. (I'm not in the hand.) When the action gets back to Myron, he raises to $6. Guy on my right protests, saying that he can't do that; since he bet $3 out of turn, all he can do in turn is the same $3, which would now be a call.

Rachel politely corrects this young man's impression, and says that Myron can, indeed, raise in these circumstances. The young man gets unusually upset at this point, and insists that the rules only allow the $3 call here. Rachel correctly calls the floor over (Irving) and explains the situation. Irving confirms that Myron can raise. (It would be clear to any observer that Myron is a regular and known by name by all the staff--a detail that is about to become important.) Rather than accept this ruling, the guy on my right says, "Oh, you all know each other, that's great."

At the end of her down, Rachel went above and beyond the call of duty by stopping at this guy's seat and quietly offering to explain the rule in more detail, explicitly saying that she didn't want him to be left with the impression that it was favoritism operating. He declined and brushed her off. So he didn't learn anything.

I realize that there's not a snowball's chance in hell that that guy will ever read these words. But I'll feel better for putting it out into the ether anyway. (And, besides, maybe somebody else reading doesn't understand the rule, and can learn a little something.) So here it is: Action out of turn is binding if, and only if, there has been no intervening change in the action between when the out of turn player erroneously acted and when it actually becomes his turn. In this instance, if everybody had checked around to Myron, then he indeed would have been committed to his previous and untimely $3 bet. But the early-position player's bet changed the action. Myron was now free to fold, call, or raise.

Consider the lunacy of the young man's logic under other conditions. Suppose that before the action got to Myron, there was a bet, a raise, and a reraise. By this guy's logic, Myron could still only put in $3, which wouldn't be enough to call. It's absurd.

The purpose of the rule is to prevent angle-shooters from deliberately pretending to put in a bet or raise in order to inhibit action. That is, particularly in a no-limit game, somebody might want to try to scare opponents who are to act before him into not betting by "accidentally" firing a big bet out of turn, then, when everybody checks to him, he checks, too, thus getting himself a free card that he might otherwise have had to call a bet to see. The rule obligates him to the action that he took out of turn. But once somebody acting in turn shows by betting that they're not afraid of the possibility of a call or raise behind, there would be no purpose in forcing the out-of-turn actor to repeat his action in turn.

For the genuinely accidental action, the rule also makes sense. If I erroneously think I'm first to act, I might want to bet. But if instead I see a bet and a bunch of calls and/or reraises, well, that changes everything, and the situation no longer looks like a good one for a bet, so the rule doesn't punish me for my inadvertant error, and I can fold (or raise, or call).

This rule is, as far as I know, universally recognized. Here, for example, is "Robert's Rules of Poker" (available many places, including http://www.lasvegasvegas.com/poker/rrpprinter.php), under "Betting and Raising," #11: "An action or verbal declaration out of turn is binding unless the action to that player is subsequently changed by a bet or raise." Cooke's "Rules of Real Poker," 10.08, on p. 67, says, "A player who makes action out of turn shall be held to that action when it is his turn, unless intervening action changes the action the out-of-turn player is facing." Lou Krieger's new "The Rules of Poker," p. 84, says, "A player acting out of turn will also be held to his or her verbal declaration unless intervening bets or raises change the action faced by the out-of-turn player."

In short, this young guy was, well, insane. Instead of considering the possibility that he might just be wrong about the rules, he leaped to the conclusion that the poker room staff was conspiring against him and in favor of a regular player. Then, rather than accept a kind offer (after he had cooled down a bit) for a more thorough explanation of the situation and the applicable rule, he blew it off, preferring to maintain his paranoid fantasy.

People are funny creatures, in how they are so confident about things they really know nothing about, and in how they will actively choose to remain ignorant, and in how they love to see conspiracy all around when, objectively it isn't there. (No doubt this guy was followed by a squadron of black helicopters on his way home.)