It's a one table home game Sit and Go tournament, 9 players. We are using 2 decks. Dealer uses one while the cutoff shuffles the other one during the hand in order to prepare it for the next hand.

So there's a hand with preflop action and it ends up being heads up on the flop. Flop somehow gets dealt FROM THE WRONG DECK (i.e. the one the cutoff was shuffling).

The hand gets completed - using the wrong deck - and it ends up being an All In from a big stack and the smaller stack calls and loses. We don't even know how much the smaller stack had because it was obvious they were covered. Pot gets pushed and it gets merged into the big stack without being able to be recovered. Then we discover the error. There were no duplicate cards during the hand (that anyone happened to notice).

How should this get handled?

I would usually cancel the hand and return everybody their chips. With nobody noticing the amounts, though... How big a BI are we talking? I might just refund the small stack his BI and play it out.

A) don't use two decks
B) nothing u can do now but deal the next hand

Home Game:
- Do the best you can considering it's not a card room with a paid dealer, cameras and the expectation that players know all rules/etiquette


Cancel hand as best you can.

You can re-construct the pot based on the preflop action and an estimate of the small stack remaining.

FWIW - Return the blinds and preflop action to anyone who folded.

Next hand is the same dealer and same blinds.


To PPG:
Disagree on both counts.
Our home games always ran with 2 decks.
Always something you can do.

As with others, cancel hand.

You don't say specifically, but I assume you're using two different colored and/or styled decks. If that's not true, that's #1 to correct.

In the home games I've played in, it's been current UTG shuffling the deck for the next hand. Don't know that would be any better than cutoff, but we never had a cross-deck problem.

Yeah we use different coloured decks. Same would be insane.

We ended up canceling the hand and approximating how many chips to return.

You mean how much was the buy in? It's a $15 tourney with one rebuy allowed but I don't get what the buy in amount would have to do with anything.

what i dont get is how did the deck leave the dealers hand in first place is the dealer playing as well? the cutoff shuffling would surely have seen dealer grab the deck he was shuffling and if thats true why didnt he say something? just too many variables. i would just refund the guy his buyin+ rebuys/addons as a show of good faith that you want to run a good game and adjust tourney payouts to reflect him not being in and move on.

I don't have much of a comment to this other than I'm impressed that I prompted your first post two and a half years after you signed up.

Mostly that if it was a small game like this that folks would likely be fine with Tyler's suggestion and less likely to ***** about ICM considerations, etc.

Fair enough. I was the one that won the hand fwiw. Flopped a straight lol

Oh and I just realized we never returned the blinds! I can't remember 100% but I even think the button passed for the next hand (otherwise the blinds from the previous hand would have probably complained). Oh well.

This happened once in our home tourney. We undid the entire hand and pulled everyone's chips back as best we could remember.