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pot wrongly awarded

This situation came up in a tournament i was running last night. It was the last hand before the break. Self deal game so no house dealer. Just as the break had started Player A who was the dealer, said he had just awarded the pot to Player B, but just realised that he should have won the pot. Player A said he had KJ and Player B had J2 and that the board was 329 J 9. Therefore Player A should have won with 2 pair and a higher kicker.

Both players cards were turned face up at showdown. But Player A thinking he’d lost mucked all the cards and the board, although they didnt get mixed with the remaining stub. As the next hand hadnt started i felt i should try and reconstruct the hand in the best interests of the game. I worked out what the pot was and figured if i could be 100% sure what the board was ,and that Player A had KJ and Player B had J2 then Player A should be awarded the pot. As in the rule cards speak etc.

In the end i awarded the pot to Player B who had J2 because only one other person at the table would confirm that Player A had KJ. Either the other players at the table hadnt noticed what happened or didnt want to get involved.

I do believe Player A had KJ ,but without the other players at the table speaking up i felt i couldnt award him the pot without being 100% certain. I feel i made the correct ruling but id be grateful for your comments.

This entry was posted on October 17, 2008 at 10:01 pm and is filed under Dealers Responsibilities, Errors, Partial Faults, Etc., Protecting Hand, Dealer Ruins Hand, Player Responsible, Incorrect Pot Awards, Chaos: Sloppy Mgmt of Tables & Tournament, Mucking, Dead Hands, Etc, Showdowns & Pot Awarding, Dealer Errors, Bad Flops, Etc.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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7 Responses to “pot wrongly awarded”

ChicagoMike says:
October 19, 2008 at 8:46 pm
Dave this is a borderline situation and IMO you did the most important thing which is to make a THOUGHTFUL call, with FAIRNESS in mind. You just have to ask yourself if you tried to be as fair as possible, there’s no single rule to tell us how to sort out a mess.

I’m curious that since you say the players hands and board cards weren’t mixed with the muck, perhaps you only had 9 cards to sort through… 5 on the board plus 2 in each of 2 hands. If so, you could clearly see a king in that pile, but was it on the board or in the dealer’s hand ? Perhaps the cards weren’t even that clear and there could be a slight question as to whether those were indeed the final 9 cards.

One way to look at it would be that if the king were on the board and Player B acknowledged Player A had a jack, then there’d definitely be a split because the king would play for both hands. Did Player B acknowledge that Player A had a Jack at least? We might say that the King was EITHER on the board or in the hand of Player A… there’s several ways to rule here, and when the players are self-dealing and the dealer’s involved, and nobody else is paying attention you just have to make the fairest determination you can.

This is a risk the players take when they join the tournament and ultimately the responsibility falls to Player A to protect his hand, and read his hand properly AND especially not to relinquish a hand until he’s satisfied he’s lost. Alot of times the cards would get mixed with muck and you wouldn’t even have this much info to go on. My experience with self-dealing tournaments has been that once a pot is awarded, it’s almost never re-awarded to someone else.
davethedealer says:
October 20, 2008 at 7:44 am
Thanks for the response Mike. The muck contained 13 cards though which made it that bit harder. Player B said he didnt even see Player A’s cards which didnt help the situation!
ChicagoMike says:
October 22, 2008 at 1:17 am
Sounds right Dave…

You just didn’t have enough concrete evidence to REVERSE a pot award….
brossignol says:
October 25, 2008 at 2:29 pm
Hey Mike,

This actually opens up an interesting dilemma of sorts. We have to reach a bit into the hypothetical though.

In this situation, it is a little easier as there was a player-dealer involved.

But, let’s say this is a *regular* tournament w/ full-time dealers and the action after showdown goes like this:

Player A (allegedly holding KJ) and Player B (holding J2) w/ a board of 329J9.

Dealer pulls hands into the muck w/ board cards (ostensibly to clear a path for the pot to be awarded), Player A assumes the pot is coming to him, but the dealer pushes pot to Player B….

Now what?

I am curious as to what your thoughts are on this.

And, this is why I instruct my dealers to *kill* all *losing* hands by turning them face down and then pulling them into the muck pile well prior to awarding the pot — but, we all know that instructions are not always followed. =)
ChicagoMike says:
October 25, 2008 at 4:00 pm
Brossignol:

I agree that the scenario you describe happens too often and is to be avoided. The reason it occurs is that the hands are mucked THEN the pot is awarded, and this is a recipe for problems when there’s a dispute over the pot award.
JustinFromTulsa says:
October 27, 2008 at 12:29 am
Brossignol, in my casino I’m probably going to go to surveillance and look at the tape if no one at the table can confirm the holdings of the player that claims he should have won the pot. In my opinion, a tabled hand, that contains the winning combination, cannot be killed. If the player tabled his hand, compared it to the other players hand and determined it to be the winning hand, and then the dealer mucked everything and awarded the pot incorrectly, I will do everything possible to get the pot back to the person that should have won. First I’m going to ask the other players at the table to confirm his cards, then I’m going to look for them in the mess of board cards and hole cards, if I can find them and others have confirmed them I will give him the pot. If no one can confirm them I will probably look throught the cards and try to identify them and then go to surveillance. The problem with that is surveillance takes time. I’m not going to pause the tourney in the meantime so what do I do with the chips in question while I check the tape? I would probably hold the chips in the dealer tray until I find out who they belong to. What do you think about this:? The pot in question is 2500 chips. Now award both players 2500 in chips while you check the tape and the person you determine has lost the pot gets his 2500 taken away if he isn’t already busted by the time you get back. I know that sounds crazy but can you think of another way to deal with it? You can’t wait until you come back to award the chips for too many reasons to list. So now you are stuck with either making a decision immediately as to who gets the pot in the first place or checking the tape and doing something like this with the chips for the pot in question.

After all is said and done I would punish the dealer in some way; send them home for the night, suspend them, write them up, something. Protocol is in place to avoid these kinds of things. Push up the board cards that combine with the winning hole cards, muck the losing hand, award the pot, then scrap everything. It’s pretty simple. Dealing is a great job in most places, they should learn to do their job the way it’s been outlined for them to do it.
frenchflush says:
November 4, 2008 at 10:04 am
Hello,

Maybe you’ll think my solution is too simple … but in NO DEALER tournaments (I do manage thoses kind up to 1300 live players!) we change some (very few) rules like this one: “IN NO DEALER TOURNAMENT A HAND IS DEFINITIVELEY OVER AND THE POT IS DEFINITIVELY AWARDED WHEN THE CHIPS OF THE POT ARE MIXED TOGETHER WITH THE WINNER’S OWN REMAINING CHIPS!”

The goal of this special rule is to never reconstruct a pot without the help of some “official witness”: I mean a professional dealer!

If the winner was all-in (no remaining chips in front of him): the hand is normally over when the cards are re-shuffled.

In a private mail, Matt Savage asked me once to work about the little project of writing some “NO DEALER” special rules. Not a full book but just the changing rules. Shame on me I never did it (& though my english was too poor) … but we surely should write it some day!

With best regards,

GG

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