Dealers responsiblity in reading showdown hands

May 31, 2008 by bill.buckley.

I was recently playing in a cash game where the players usually hold back on showing thier cards and qucikly muck if they are the losing hand.  I had a hand where I clearly got conterfited and elected to show my cards first when they were doing their normal holding back.   I flipped them over annoucing I had pocket 7s (not saying anything else about the hand).  The dealer picking up quickly the 7s were counterfited, without waiting to see if others would show thier hand announced my hand as  Queens and 8’s with a 7 kicker,  it appeared to me she was doing this to keep other players from volunteerly mucking thier hand.  I do not feel I did anything ethically wrong in annoucing my hand since I did not try in any way try to announce I won.  My question is what is the dealers responsiblity in this situation.  Should she have aided the other people in reading the hand before they showed, or waited until they either showed or mucked before specifying my actual hand.  Since I was conterfited and another player then showed thier card they out kicked me and won the bet. 

A related situation also happened on another day in a tournement.  Player A had A 7, Player B had A 3 the river was A Q 8 8 J (another counterfit situation - this time resulting in a split pot).  Player A showed his hand (A 7),   Player B then showed he had and A but not realizing  the counterfit situation left the other card turned face down, made a comment about being outkicked  and pushed them forwared and released them.  In this case it was other players that realized the counterfit situation and told player B to turn over the other card, Player B confused by the two or three players telling him this did nothing, but a third player (player C not in the hand) reached forword picked up player Bs downed card, showing it and announcing the split pot).  The dealer then commenced to divide up the pot and award it to both player A and player B, while player A was telling the dealer he did not think that  should be correct but that player As cards should be considered a muck.  After awarding the pot and starting to rifle the deck the dealer then acknowledge back to player A that he was probably right but it was too late to fix it.  However, most of the other players probably did not hear this since there was still a lot of discussion going on with player B to help him understand why it was a split pot.   What should the outcome of this hand been?

Thanks

Bill

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