What if 8 other players all tell you they heard it as a question? What if the 1 person claiming it was a statement is known to you to be an angle shooter? I think these things are relevant and a hard and fast position such as you suggest is unfair and inappropriate.

Which one is shooting an angle? "All in?" could be an angle. "Hey he said all in, that's a call." could be an angle.

If "hey that's a call" is a known angleshooter and he understands english well
and 8 people heard the question mark, then I wouldn't rule it a call.

If it's heads up, the player is not a known angleshooter and english
is his second language and he thinks the "all in?" is a call. I rule it a call.

Parts of this post will be taken back to the forum and expanded on by myself, most likely in excruciatingly ranty detail.

The way you have it written here it is quite clear from your ACTION that you are calling and meant to call. When someone says one thing (possibly ambiguous) and does another, the chips going over the line tend to reflect their clear intention.

Since I have a hard time hearing in the first place (too many years of bands and casinos) I tend to ask players to verify what they say most of the time. Because I ask for verification, I have very few problems of the nature being discussed in this thread. It's amazing how much better this works than jumping to conclusions. I doubt I've had more than five instances where I had to call the floor for a decision in the last six months, and none of them were to clear up a questionable player action. This partly reflects my working on the floor and having to clean up messes like these, you tend not to make those mistakes if you've had to fix them as a floor.

I'm going to expand on this in a new thread because I feel it's of high importance.

Al

Ok, but there's just not that many floors I've ever worked with that would agree, if any. But that wasn't the case here, the first player was already AI. THe issue is whether asking "All in?" equals "call." "All in?" is a poor choice of words to clarify the action I agree, but if it's clearly not a declaration, it's just nitty. And if the rest of the table heard it as a question as well, it would really take something extraordinary to force a call.

The whole "I heard him/her say this, so it has to be binding" just isn't going to cut it a lot of the time. When there's a misunderstanding, you can't just automatically go one way or the other.

Repeating the action (esp for significant actions like bets, raises, AI), helps cut down on this a lot. You can't always understand a player clearly, because of accents or mumbling or whatever.

Still, like I was saying in my last post, protect your hand. If you're not 100% certain you were actually called, don't flip your cards over. This should be LDO for a big AI pot. Don't you make sure the dealer knows it's a call, and everything is right with the world before turning over the cards?