Sexism, and pretty blatant, imo.

Unless you're doing it by choice

So this I was working a slightly earlier than normal shift. Caught a down in the last of the daily tournaments. Small buyin fast structure sort of thing ... doesn;t attract serious poker players but many of the players think they are....


So the blinds are T400 T800. Early position player calls, middle position player shoves all in for T1300. folds around to BB who calls the extra T500..... Early position limper now announces a reraise. I tell him he can't reraise because the all-in wasn't a full raise. The player assures me that I am out of my gourd. of course he can reraise because the BB still has chips.

I try to explain it to him again, but now every single player at the table is in agreement with him that he can reraise.

I call the floor over and explain what happened. Floor tells them he can;t reraise. Guy gets all pouty about our stupid "house Rule." Of course BB goes on to win when his crappy J2 suited flops a flush.

I have never before had an entire table all fail to understand that rule before.

But these guys were so clueless that I later had this happen at the fianl table. Player goes all in and gets to calls. he thinks action is over so he flips his cards up 9 10 he shows. He announce his hand so both players have equal information and then continue with the hand. The side players check around the flop and turn. The river comes giving the All-in Player a straight. There is nothing in the side pot ... when one the two players on the sidepot bets .... the other folds and the player shows an Ace high no kicker .... he bluffed into a dry sidepot where he knew he couldn;t beat the all-in player

Ah, the all too common, why can't I re-raise guy who doesn't get the concept.

I had a situation at a 1-2 NL table with his just slightly less common cousin, the hey, he's not allowed to re-raise guy. All action was pre-flop. Seat 7 raised it to 8 dollars. Seat 2 raises to 22. Seat 6 calls and Seat 7 goes all-in for 38 dollars. Back to seat 2 who now shoves all-in for a total of ~150, which covers seat 6's chipstack.

As I'm dealing the hand out, seat 5 is sitting directly across from me and looking at me funny. I know exactly what's on his mind but he's not commenting. I deal the hand out and Seat 2's JJ holds up and he wins the entire pot. After I push all the chips to the winner, Seat 5 decides it's a good time to speak up. "Hey, that guy shouldn't have been allowed to re-raise because the first all-in wasn't a full raise."

I start to explain to him that yes, it actually was a full raise, but now Seat 6 goes ballistic, yelling that he should get his chips back because I screwed up. I call the floor over and mercifully our best floor person comes over for the ruling. I explain that the hand is already over (which should really be all the info he needs to make a ruling) and then I add in "he bet this, he bet this, he raised this, etc". The floor backs up my ruling and explains why all raises were legal repeating my explanation just about word for word.

Seat 6 is still fuming as he crumbles up a $100 bill and tosses it at me to buy more chips. As I'm cutting out his stack of 20 red chips I look to Seat 5 and let him know that the next time he thinks the dealer screws up it's okay to say so at the time and not wait until the hand is over.

Is is discrimination but it's perfectly legal discrimination. The Supreme Court already ruled on this some time ago. A workplace is perfectly allowed to have different standards for men and women based on societal norms.

Why yes, I looked all of this up when I was hired...

Same spot about 3 months ago in a daily tournament. I can't remember the numbers, but a re-raise was not permitted because the all-in was not a full raise and the whole table went ballistic when I said "No". Several of them tried to explain to me the (non-existent) half bet rule and that the all-in was more than half so he can raise, bla bla bla. Floor rules he can't raise (of course) and one player says to the floor "You California casinos sure do have some weird rules"

My room made this more complicated and I felt sorry for the players. When we first opened, we used a 150% rule for No Limit games which is usually used in limit games but is not standard for NL (as most of you probably know).

IOW, for a while there, if someone bet $50 and there was an all-in for $75-99, that would be enough to allow the original bettor to re-pop it.

We changed the rule to the correct one some time ago (you have to at least double the raise to re-pop; in my example above you needed to have the all-in player have it be at least $100) but the rule change was confusing for a while there.

For the first time in my career as a dealer I mucked a players cards that weren't supposed to be mucked on Sunday night here in LA at very high profile charity fundraiser. There was a lot of action on the right side of the table that required my attention and when I made it around to seat 1, his cards were about 6 inches in front of his chips. As my head is coming around, seat 2 mucks his cards very near where seat 1 had his just sitting there waiting to act. Instinct kicked in and I just grabbed all 4 cards and mucked them. Whole thing took less than 1 sec probably. Seat 1 suddenly yells WHOA WHOA WHOA! I didn't fold! I wanted to call. I apologised all over myself and told him I could call the floor but they will rule your hand dead. He seemed to understand and I know it's his responsibility to protect his hand but I still felt terrible. He whispers to me I had Jd 10d. Flop? Yeah it was 7-8-9.

Psandman i appreciate your position experience and opinion. But...

I found this in Las Vegas Hilton RuleBook:
"Page 18 General Rules
A21. STRING BET
A player is not allowed to make a bet, gauge an opponent's reaction, and then increase the amount of the bet. In order to add additional chips to the original wager, he must indicate at the time it is made that the bet is not yet complete."

I have yet to find a refrence to anything remotely close to your explaination( though it is not an unreasonable interpretation) in any rulebook, it more as i state, unclear, even RRoP:

"General Rules of Poker:
14 String raises are not allowed. The dealer should enforce obvious infractions to this string-raise law without being asked. To protect your right to raise, you should either declare your intention verbally or place the proper amount of chips into the pot. Putting a full bet plus a half-bet or more into the pot is considered to be the same as announcing a raise, and the raise must be completed. (This does not apply in the use of a single chip of greater value.) "

Thats your interpretation of what i said.

I understand that perspective, but again, have not seen any citing of this reasoning in any rulebook.

Its not on the dealer to make the call, only to verify in the rare case it actually is a string.

Many times an uninvolved player makes the "observation" a string was made, which then prompts the involved player to agree and then insist that it is so.
Dealer: No string, no body acted behind him, continue.
An easy way to delineate whether the action ( if it has been questioned) has moved on is if the dealer has interpreted that an action has been completed and moved on to the next player to act.
Dealer "No string, i was still waiting for him to finish his action, it wasn't his turn to act yet, he cannot call a string"

That said the dealer isnt accusing the player of unethical conduct, in fact he is enforcing quite the opposite in most cases, he is saying as i suggest, that so often it is NOT a string, its the player who is making the "accusation" and the dealer is denying it.

It is very difficult and as i suggested the dealer isn't doing that in the majority of cases, my opinion is that the way the rule is written (RRoP and others who use a similar just as simple derivation) now it allows far more abuse by those who use it in a manner that was unintended.

We have to have more faith in the dealers who can do their job, and the rooms have to do a better job of training dealers to be professional and culling out the apathetic and incompetent dealers.

Saw one where player bets into dry side pot on the river.

Other player folds TPTK that would have eliminated all in player in 9th.

Bettor was playing the board and when the rest of the table
started giving him a hard time he argued that he did nothing wrong.

All in player that should have been out in 9th goes on to win the tournament.

Ubintook

My position on the string bet is not based on anything I have seen written in a rulebook. It is my opinion that it is the only logical consistent explanation for the rule.

I just can't reconcile the explanation that the rule is designed to prevent a player from gauging his opponents action and then altering his bet, with the fact that we allow a player to do exactly that as long as he does not do it in the betting area.

I am certain others will disagree with me......


but one thing I am certain your explanation of the rule leads to the situation where every hitch or hesitation is accused of being a string bet .... such as last weeks episode with a player who was quite upset that I don;t know what a string bet was because I allowed a player to drop a second chip that wasn;t dropped simulataneously with the first one.

And my explanation of the rule puts me in a spot where I can say .... hey chucklehead you saw the player reach out into the betting area and not withdraw his hand .... why would you think he was done? (I would not actually call him chucklehead)

My favorite thing is at $1/2 when someone makes it $7 and someone else comes in and makes it $12 and half the table yells it's not a legal raise. This happens at least once a month on average. Always amusing.

But they understand after you explain it. And I understand why they think its not a legal raise. because we use the shorthand of saying double the bet. Its not double the bet. And its also not double the raise. It is a raise by at least as much as the last bet or raise.

Generally in my experience this happens when that person was trying to make it $12 from the $2 bet and had no idea someone made it $7 at some point. Not shocking at this limit

I've bolded that part cuz I think it could be argued that guys with long hair is now a societal norm.

However, I probably wouldn't argue it in a situation where my livelihood was at stake

Just wondering what they say to dealers about this? I always thought Title 31 was more geared towards the people in the cage and the floor managers. Never considered the dealers being aware of it; it makes sense though, just never thought of it. With so much action at small stakes I never really considered Title 31 being an issue on poker tables.

Do they tell you to look for people sitting down, not playing a lot and leaving? Do you have to spot them? What determines a suspicious transaction in terms of poker?

Its a complete waste of our time. It is only done so that the casino can say that we are trained.

Same at ours. The test we get is so easy, a 5 year old could pass. And the person who teaches it is REALLY annoying.

They've actually recently changed ours. There's no test and the emphasis is on learning to spot/report suspicious activity, not memorizing dollar amounts and what form is used for what. Some badge levels have to do the later as well, but it ain't dealers.

You may find it interesting that when they came up with this Title 31 (we called "Regulation 6A" back then, but that might be a Nevada term, instead of a Federal one), we had to assign one supervisor to pretty much ignore every other aspect of his job just to keep the MTL up to the second. As if NFL Sunday mornings in the sportsbook weren't busy enough already, now we've permanently lost a supervisor, who has been involuntarily deputized by the gubmint.

And I don't even mind THAT so much, but the part about not being allowed to talk to the customers about what does and doesn't trigger this paperwork strikes me as downright unAmerican.

EDIT: Oh yeah, the whole reason I started typing was to mention that in 12 years of dealing, I'm pretty sure I've received 0 training in T31.

The deal was that because of Nevada Regulation 6A we were exempt from Title 31. Then a few years back that changed and Regulation 6A is no more and we are under Title 31 like the rest of the country.

Regulation 6A apparently was far easier to administer and apparently did not require training of people who were not likely to be involved in such transactions (like poker dealers in low limit poker rooms)

It always does. Just like when you expose a players card and then bring two of them on the flop. You know it's coming.

Last time I exposed a card I got thanked for it. Guy would have had AA. It was raised preflop. Q84 rainbow. Two players get it all in. One had 88 the other had QQ. No A on turn or River

I've told this before, but I once exposed an Ace while pitching, and the guy who "would have had AA" ended up with AQs, made a Royal, and hit a bbj when he cracked JJJJx.

Thats sick, I sincerely hope you got the hookup.

My best card exposing story involves a guy losing a K and getting it replaced by an A, giving him AK instead of KK. It was in a nightly mtt and he gets it allin vs AA and the flop is QJT lol