I have not had a player die in the room yet.

Perhaps I am a bit cold, but as a player unless I knew the guy who died, I don't see why I wouldn't want to keep playing . People I don't know die all the time and I don't feel compelled to change my life around it.

I understand how others could feel differently .... but only in the sense that I understand that other people are irrational.

My first boss in poker (who both ytf and psandman know) told me a story about a guy dieing. A little while later his wife comes in looking for him.

I had another thing happen my first week in a new room. A player got sick so I helped him to do sit down. He collapsed so I called the emts. The emts were working on him and I was trapped by them in the poker office. I picked up the phone and called my boss to see what the procedure was if he died as he was the chip leader in the tournament and had enough to blind to the cash. The emts were just glaring at me.

The one time I watched a guy die at the table in front of me it was unexpectedly disturbing. I knew the guy, but only from playing with him every couple weeks for a couple years at the poker table. It impacted a lot of people.

I don't know how I'd react if it was a total stranger. Can't really predict it, since I didn't really expect to be hugely bothered by a 80yo bare acquaintance going. I've always been somewhat fatalistic about these things; we all die eventually, and when you die at age 80 it's ok--that's what is supposed to happen. But it's one thing to read about it in the paper, it's another to watch it unfold. It was when they started CPR I got really bothered, and when they hooked him to the defib machine I hadda flee the room.

I fully understand not wanting watch while that happens. I have seen people need assistance or even need to leave by ambulance from the poker room and I always find it awkward. Its a big scene that demands attention yet i feel it should be a private thing so I'm never really sure where to look.

I saw a craps dealer (the stickman) collapse and watched while they trie dto keep the table going while the paramedics worked on the guy (the new stickman was literally standing over the guy). I thought that was really a bad decision to keep that one open but never thought they should close the tables next to it.

I've told this story before (probably in this thread), but it's one of my favs, so here we go again:

There were only five poker rooms in Tunica when I worked there, none were very big and most were very small, and all the players and dealers were familiar with all the rooms and their staffs. Well, I'm working at the Grand one day when word comes in that one of the Horseshoe dealers, a young kid whom everybody liked, had walked out of the poker room on his break, walked next door to the Gold Strike, somehow got access to the roof, and jumped to his death (30 floors?).

It's a shocking story, so even if you didn't know the kid, you were shocked. If you did know him, you were sad. The better you knew him, the sadder you were.

One girl playing in our room at that moment said she was very good friends with him, and tears were streaming down her face for an hour or more...but she never missed a hand! "Boo hoo hoo, this is awful...I raise....oh my God, how could he do this?....I check....boo hoo hoo, I can't believe it, I was just talking to him the other day....I've got Aces up..." Like I said, this went on for over an hour, real tears never stopped running down her face, and never once did she even consider getting up from the table for a moment, let alone quitting the game.

BTW, last time this subject came up, we had a player hit the floor in Seabrook, NH. Luckily, one of our part-time dealers was full-time fireman with EMT training, and he did the CPR until the ambulance arrived. Everyone who saw it was convinced he was a goner, but an hour or so later the tourney director announced (yes, announced, over the mic) that the man pulled through at the hospital. There was no doubt that he owed his life to that dealer.

He even came back to play a few times, several weeks later...but whenever someone brought it up, he got very shaken up, and politely asked if we could talk about something else.

Heaviest post I have ever read at twoplustwo. Kind of puts all the posts about scamming and other complaints into perspective.

Pretty disgusting that people just go on gambling after someone dies. If I managed a poker room I would shut down for at least a day if someone died in the room.

If you managed a casino would you shut that down for the day also?

I'm sure there are a few people here who would make a joke about not wanting to change into the 'cold' seat...

Why?

Out of respect for human life perhaps. I don't know really. Some actions are just instincts like yielding a chair for a pregnant woman or holding in a fart during an interview.

I've always kind of felt like there is no world except the worlds inside every person. If a world ends, it should be acknowledged in some way by those nearby who presumably have some stake in that general process if not that particular instance of the process (of death). I don't know why so often it feels right that that type of acknowledgement is in some way abstemious.

I think that the wife of the guy who died would have felt much better had she not seen people just carrying on gambling as though nothing serious had happened.

It depends on how big it is. If someone died in the slots I would probably shut down that bank of slots for a day. If someone died shooting dice I would close the craps tables for a day. Blackjack would be a tough decision- probably just shut down that table where the death occurred. Shutting down the whole casino would be a bit too much though. Maybe if two people died in one day I would shut it all down for a day.

Can you imagine the press if 3 people died in one day? There would be psychologists on the news talking about the ill health effects of gambling. At some point callousness does become an expense in PR terms.

when i first started dealing almost 20 years ago i got to know a guy, "Bill" who played in our room. He used to deal poker in Vegas mid to late 70's.
He had plenty of stories about the snatch games and all the "shenanigans" that went on.
One story he told us, i think he was at the Sands, graveyard shift dealing, and an old guy goes face-down on the table, said he appeared to have died.
He stopped and yelled for the shift man who came over checked the guy.
Yup, dead. and walked away to call whoever he needed to call.

Bill stayed still staring at this guy, dead at the table, Shift man came back and whispered in Bills ear:
Are you a doctor?
No
Then you cant help, Deal.

Bill said he dealt around this guy for probably 15 minutes before someone arrived to take him away.
On top of that callousness, he said the players were just as unconcerned.

everything that lives must die.

I can see it both ways. If the whole casino shuts down for the day are the employees paid? What about the vendors, hotel, and all the ancilliary action that supports the casino?

I work for an electric utility and have seen about ten on the job fatalities in my career. I see folks killed in auto accidents, house fires, and shootings a few times per month.

Do we shut down the electric company? Nope, gotta keep putting the juice down the lines.

I could see someone walking into the room not knowing what happened
and sit in the seat and lose a few pots and say "Who died in this seat?".

If you have multiple deaths in one day you have to start wondering if there is something going on to cause those deaths. And so the thought of closing down has enter one's head not because of the fact that three people died .... but out of concern that no one else die ......

But putting that aside ........ if three people die in my casino today I have no concern about PR issues ...... but if I close my casino because of it then I have PR issues. Because 3 people dying in the casino won't be noticed by the press ...... until I close down.

Getting power to people's houses, businesses and such is not anywhere in the league of playing poker. Someone dying right at the very table you are sitting at vs someone dies in the area you happen to be working are two different things. Not a fair comparison.

Would it have been better if she had come into an empty card room with no one there to tell her where to find her husband?

Did a player minbet to take down the pot?

I was gonna post about my crap day dealing at the tables but the death threads put my bleak outing into perspective. I would not continue dealing if a guy died at my table. That's just plain disrespectful. I'll be back another time to tell about my sucky day at work.

Well we are both speculating but I do think if three people died in one day in one casino it would make the news even if you didn't shut down. Someone would simply call the press once the word got around. Also journalists and writers gamble more than others. Plus gamblers are very superstitious. I wouldn't risk having that stigma of that kind of three of a kind. But it would be pretty rare to have two people die. I'm sure an actuary could figure it.

I think so. I mean if my kid died at the prom and I arrived to see the rest of the students dancing....I don't know what I would do but I can tell you the dancing would stop.

What the hell are you doing crashing your kid's prom? Sheesh...

And the fact that a teenager dying is much more of a tragedy than the likely age of someone who dies at a casino, who is likely to be 80+ and have lived a full life.