Had to make this call today.

We're at showdown. Heads up. Board is A3KQA. No flush or anything.
Player A tables his hand, A8.
Player B goes to turn one card over, accidentally flashes an 8, but then turns over an A and places his hand on the table, A face up and 8 face down. Cards are in front of the player, but out in the table where you'd normally fold.

Player C, who is not in the hand says that he thought he saw the other card and would like it exposed. Dealer turns over the 8, so both players are now showing A8.

So I come over and player A is insisting he won, player B thinks it should be a chop, and most of the rest of the table has one opinion or the other.

I took plenty of time to make sure that the events went down as described, asked some questions, quieted people down. During my discussion, I asked player B if he meant to fold and he kind of reluctantly admitted this was the case. In the end the entire table agreed with the action I described to them.

No player involved has a record of bad behavior, players A and B are relatively unknown to me.



It was a difficult decision but everyone was cool with it. However after discussing it with the other staff on hand I'm less confident. So I'd like to hear what everyone here has to say.

Also I reminded the dealer that in this sort of a situation you should say something like, "Is that a fold?" and clear up the action before any problems arise.

Player B intended to fold, and the hand was only legally tabled* by the request of a player NOT in the hand. My room would call this a fold, and I'd probably make the exact same call - award to A.



*my state explicitly requires all cards to be tabled at showdown to be awarded any portion of the pot.

Why player B would admit that he was intending to fold is beyond me but if he is Mr. Honest, so be it. Push the pot to player A.

His intent was to fold as admitted by him. He made an action with his cards that in most places constitutes a fold. It's a fold.

If player B had said he didn't mean to fold then your decision is much tougher and then you could've called this either way and I'd be completely ok with it, but in that situation I might lean towards chopping it myself...

Either way the dealer is getting a quick KITN.

I agree the dealer gets a KITN. He shouldn't have exposed the other card until Player B states he was folding or allows Player B to expose it.

To me, the right answer comes from the philosophy you want to follow in the room and even the stakes. One position is that you want in the end the best hand to win (or chop). How it got there is less important. For a more locals room or 1/2, I'd be inclined to rule it a chop because nobody is a real pro. Another is that pots have to be won the right way. If you don't follow the rules exactly, you're going to lose. If it was 10/25, sorry, you know what you're supposed to do playing for this much money because too many of these people are pros and your mistake, your problem.

I suspect that this is the cause of the difference in opinion in the break room.

Thanks for the responses everyone. I'm glad I can come to you guys and do these line checks. I'm pretty confident in how I run my room but I'm also aware that I don't know everything and I do make mistakes.

I forgot to mention this is a tournament. Sorry about that.

We try to straddle that line, where we want to be fair but we also want to have people follow the rules. As a long-time B&M reader I know how awful it is when poker becomes "Gotcha!" so we try to avoid that. However in this case, as player A would not have exposed his hand if an uninvolved player hadn't asked, the issue wouldn't have come up. Like you said, it's difficult to both enforce the rules and not zap innocents on technicalities. We do our best and I am understanding with my floorpeople when they're in these coin flip situations.

To calm the table down I explained how important it was I get this right, because it doesn't just affect A and B it affects all 50 players in the tournament. Then I put B on the spot to answer what he had intended to do, like I said he admitted it grudgingly and I suspect if I wasn't the manager over there making a decision he might not have.

Thanks! There were a few regs at the table (player C included) and I told them I'd post it here and hopefully get responses from respectable floors and dealers. As usual you are on that list so I'm glad we had the same thought process. I'm looking forward to tomorrow when I tell Player C that (so far anyway) the consensus is with me.

What is the wording of what constitutes a fold in your room? For example, where I play it is: cards are released, face down, in a forward motion.

All conditions must be met. So when someone releases his cards forward face up, it is not a fold, and the dealer must clarify the action before mucking them. Same if it is one up or one down.

Also, do you have to show both cards to win in your room? Some rooms you dont. In ours you do, but if a tourist doesnt know that and shows just one, our dealers say aomething like "you must show two cards to win"

If your room doesnt say one card up and one down is a fold, I would say the pot is chopped. IMO intent doesnt matter here. Either he completed the act of folding, as defined by your room, or he didnt. If he didnt, it doesnt matter that the third party spoke up. That's his rule violation, not the players. Just like if a player tanks, and looks like he is about to fold, and another guy says "you have to call that" and the guy calls.

So if putting one card up and one down is a fold, then he loses. But if it's not, then it should have been chopped, IMO. He may have been planning to fold, but if he hadnt yet, you cant act like he did.

The other thing that sounds so weird about this is since player B already saw player A table A8, how could he possibly think his own A8 was a losing hand?

Are you able to rference the regulation which states this. I did a quick once over of the PA regs and couldn;t find this.

We use TDA rules with some minor modifications (that are pointed out in our rules) and refer to RROP if TDA doesn't specify. A quick search through our posted rules doesn't clarify this. Unfortunately we just reprinted our rules poster to get us in line with 2013 TDA but I will get some clarification on "what constitutes a fold" in there the next time I update them. This is a pretty rare case but that is what rules are for.

Yeah you have to show both cards, we apply that standard tournament rule.

I talked with him about it afterward and he just wasn't paying enough attention and admitted that it was a stupid move. On both parts, one) stupid for not seeing the chop and two) stupid for being cutesy with his semi-fold.

Thanks for the feedback. We do try to be understanding with tourists/noobs and while this guy isn't a reg he did have the feel about him of someone who has played in rooms before. He later justified this, he tends to play at our competition and said he'd still be back to play here again.

PA PGCB Poker Regs
It's not 100% obvious, but the most natural reading of the reg indicates that at least one hand must be tabled (and identified, whatever that means) if it makes it to showdown.

I believe this wording is almost identical to that of NJ regs (which were almost certainly used as the template for PA).

If only one card is face up, the hand has not been tabled.

Once he admitted that his intention was to fold, the decision becomes much easier for me. I thank him for his honesty and kill his hand. Obviously, without that admission, it becomes more difficult. I probably lean toward splitting the pot and K the dealer squarely ITN.

This is why I'm such a big fan of dealers clarifying ambiguous actions. To me, the right thing would be for the dealer to look at the player and say "Folding?" If he says no, tell him 2 to win. If he says yes, muck that down card as fast as possible.

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Almost word-for-word what I told the guy. A tabled hand is both cards face-up.

If the cards had been tossed in as they were, it would have been easier. If they had been set further in, easier. But as it was, they were just where a betting line might be.


Yeah his admission made a big difference. I meant to ask in OP how we might have ruled if he hadn't admitted it. Of course, when I was making my decision, I thought "Why don't I just ask what his intention was?" and luckily he made my decision easier.

As for the dealer's responsibility, I agree 100% and I discussed it with the dealer as well as the dealer supervisor so I don't expect it to come up again any time soon.

I agreed completely with your decision, until you mentioned it was a tournament. In tournaments, we wish for the money to the bet hand, so much so that in situation where we are particularly concerned about chip dumping we require hands to be turned face up. In this case the pot should be split because there is strong evidence in most rule sets that we do not want players to be permitted to muck winning hands in tournaments.

I too did a double take when he mentioned it was a tourney, but...

I still think you ship the pot to Player A. Player B could then be subject to penalty at the TD's discretion.

You raise a good point. That's kind of what the tournament director said when I talked to him about it. I did take it into consideration at the table but I didn't make it paramount.

What if the exposed card had been T and then the other card was turned over as J to make a straight? Would I have awarded the pot to B at that point? In that case I certainly would have asked what the action on the river was, if B had called a bet then there'd be something suspicious. So I should have asked what the betting action on the river was, it never came up.

Player C brought it up in an anti-collusion sense. I agreed with the basic theory, but explained that in reality a person cheating never would have shown that Ace, and also would have thrown his cards directly into the muck.

Thanks for contributing, this is why I get excited when I get to make a floor call. It can be a challenge and often it makes me think of the responsibilities I have to the players and staff in my club.

I agree. I wasn't implying that it was tabled. What I was saying is that in our room it's not tabled, but it also is not folded. That's why the dealer has to clarify the action. It's in a no man's land.

I really think you should get away from this thinking. It pretty much amounts to ... If we catch you cheating you must not have been cheating because nobody is that stupid as to cheat so badly.

And it simply isn't true. People do stupid **** all the time. Sometimes they don't realize its wrong. Sometimes they think that its so common that it doesn't matter. Sometimes they think nobody will notice, sometimes they know its against the rules but think that all they have to do is say "Oh I didn't know" and the nice TD will let it slide.

You ope up the newspaper and you see other examples of this. Guy robs a bank ... writes a hold up not on the back of one of his checks ..... Or a guy robs a place where everybody knows him, or a guy calls the police to report that his drugs were stolen by a hooker he hired.

Fair enough. And you're right, two people we have caught cheating were really dumb about it. One brought chips from his pocket into his stack with people sitting right next to him, it was his neighbor who saw it. The other just grabbed someone else's chips when he came back to the table and the dealer was distracted, it was pretty crazy that he thought nobody would notice he suddenly had 20k more and his neighbor 20k less in a tournament with an average stack of 30k.

So yeah people do behave stupidly. But most of the people we've asked to leave for soft playing or suspected chip dumping were caught because we observed their patterns and behavior. Which honestly weren't as subtle as the perpetrators surely thought, but they also weren't rubbing everyone's nose in it as one would have to be to show an Ace in the situation I described.

Finally, I did go to our records and took a look at the two players involved and neither had any sort of notation against them. Which isn't exactly a pass but it doesn't give me reason to suspect anything more than someone probably being too stoned for a noon tournament.

I'm rather forgiving of mistakes of procedure. He showed enough of his hand to show he was a winner. I have no problem chopping the pot, especially because it's a tourney. I also have no problem shipping it to one player. I don't feel it's a tragedy either way.

Thanks for your input pfapfap.

So it sounds like the general consensus would be that it's a tough decision and could really go either way. Maybe it's a coin flip and 55 is splitting the pot while AK is awarding it to seat 1. Either way, it's a good example of why we have the floor to help in these decisions. Thanks!