Then I guess I should have been more clear. He didn't raise with his Royal because the board was paired, ie, he wasn't sure he had the best hand. He thought he had a flush.

It was an interesting hand. I folded pre-flop. Flop came Qs Js Ts. Guy next to me shows me his 9s 8s. Ks hits the river, kid with bare As smooth calls (with no one to act behind him) and wins the showdown. When asked why he didn't raise, he pointed out the pair on the board.

It was his first time playing in a card room. He also made quad Aces TWICE within the same 45-minute span as that Royal. He left the table, broke, an hour later (we were playing $1-4 spread limit).

In the interest of disclosure, I should mention that I once checked down a straight-flush because the room offered a bonus for making one, and I didn't know if there needed to be a showdown. $11 pot for me.

Question for the dealers... Talk about the tightest player that you have ever seen. Do any of you have experiences with people who you almost never see play a hand?

Doesn't this advice contradict the "protect your hand" advice that is given all over this forum? If you've got your cards in front of your stack with a chip on them and the dealer inadvertently mucks them, do you have any recourse? Of course not. If you come on here and post that situation (I've seen quite a few of these posts), the responses you'll see are that you should protect your hand.

I agree that cards and chips should be visible, but I don't agree that you don't need your fingers on them. I've personally seen a dealer take cards from somebody that was in a hand and had a card protector on top of them. The dealer took the cards and the card protector (it wasn't a chip, but a coin slightly larger than a chip) and the cards ended up in the much. The floor was called and the response from the floor person was that it was the player's responsibility to protect his hand. And this was a situation where the player was at the final table of a tournament and was all-in waiting for other players at the table to act. His hand was ruled dead and he was out of the tournament.

Nobody is perfect and everyone makes mistakes. A simple way a player can protect him/herself from a potential dealer mistake is to keep a hold of his/her cards.

Now, when not in a hand, I do agree that you shouldn't have your hands in front of your stack. This makes it easy to tell that you aren't in the hand so people aren't waiting on you to act. I find that I sometimes have to remind myself to keep my hands out from in front of my stack.

You gonna take it?

Place bets properly, be clear with your actions, MAKE SURE EVERYONE CAN SEE YOUR CARDS, etc.

Nah, I like just about everyone here.

Okay, I swear I am not making this up. It is the all time worst thing I have ever seen at a poker game.

2/5nl game. One guy just loves to gamble. He loves action. So he decides to make it 50 to go in the dark before the cards are even dealt. One by one the other players look at their hand, wince, and grudgingly muck their cards. Everybody, all the way around. Stare at cards. Stare at 50 dollar blind bet. Stare at cards. Wince. Muck. FINALLY it gets back to the big blind. And he tanks. And tanks.... and tanks. And he open folds... POCKET KINGS. To a $50 bet UTG IN THE DARK. Why? "Because he could have had aces."

I swear I'm not making this up.

It's nothing special, it's pretty basic.


1. Pay attention.
2. Protect your hand.
3. Verbalize your action clearly.
4. Table your hand when action is complete.

If everyone did these simple things, all games would be better.

Do you really think someone with quads is going to fold out of fear of the royal flush? There is absolutely NO way for quads to lose. Trust me, EVERYBODY at the table is aware of jackpot possibility.

I've had my cards mucked from underneath my arms while pushing my stack forward, so I certainly understand the fear.

I'm a huge "protect your hand" advocate, and I take it a few steps further than physically protecting the physical cards. When I'm in a hand I'm aware of everything, especially the dealer's motions. Sure, mistakes can happen, but I'm on the look-out, and my hand is ready to spring into action if I sense the cards might be in danger.

You mentioned a "card protector" hand being mucked... I'm not excusing it, but this is part of why I feel chips are better than a trinket. They're part of the tools of the game provided by the casino, and they more quickly register in the dealer's repetitive-action job.

Being an active participant in the hand (such as, for example, saying "time" when you need more than half a second) not only helps you protect your interest in the hand, it lets others (including the dealer) know that you're in the hand, and know that you know you're in the hand. The guys who get their cards mucked are the guys who sit there quietly, who mumble their actions, who look the other way, who stare at their stacks, etc. They're the people afraid to interact (or, on the other end, are interacting with everything except the game). Becoming more engaged not only helps you from your end, it registers you in the brains of others, helping protect your hand.

When dealers get a sense that you are aware of your surroundings and respectful of the table, the dealers become a lot more aware and respectful of you.

There is a guy who plays in STL and moves around the poker rooms daily. He plays 3-6 LHE and in early position will auto fold his hand if his first card is not an ace or a king before looking at his second card. He often does this out of turn. He will sit in the 1 or the 10 seat and constantly complain to the dealers that the shuffle machines do not work and that it is rigged so that the bad beat will not hit.
He will often come up to me and let me know that the shufflers are broke because he had a deuce in his hand four times in a row. He is probably 75+ years old and speaks broken english making it nearly impossible to understand what he is saying. He asks for a wash of the cards in between every hand.

We have another guest that will sit down with the $30 min at 3-6 and wait for the button to pass, fold around, then get up and leave before his blinds. This same guest would sit at the 2-6 spread limit stud game with no ante with the $20 min then short buy for $10 if he lost.

If I hadn't seen almost exactly the same thing from the other side of the table I would not believe you. My friend and I were pretty tilted one night, so for fun we were buying in $50 at a time in 1/2 NL and jamming blind every hand. We were losing maybe $250-350 a piece but somehow all of the other players were still getting tilted by this. Several old regs were racking up (lol) when this one Russian lady who I'd played with in tournaments there before and know to be a huge nit looks at her cards UTG, rolls her eyes and sighs in disgust and then angrily tables KK and says "I can't even play this with those two over there, I'm leaving this crazy table", grabs her chips and walks away. This night proved to me that others hate money even more than I do .

Yeah I'm glad I entered that hold'em game, because I won back the cash I had dropped earlier that day in a different game. Too bad I didn't make a full million in profits tho...

BTW I emailed the casino manager regarding my trip. Hopefully those who I said nice things about will at least be recognized a little bit for their efforts.

Here are some slightly edited excerpts:

At the moment, I'm too busy fishin' and drinking beer to do more than check my email and a few forums once every few days. In other words...

Screw you guys, I'm going home.

I should have also mentioned that the Asian food was pretty good too. I ate about $35 worth in a single sitting the first night I was there.

dialing frantically as we speak.

That is the most lunch hurlingest move I've ever heard of. And to think I just ate Mexican food. Thanks a lot, Quad.

If you are in one of the corner seats farthest away from the dealer - it's the 4 and 7 seat in the casino I work in - and especially if you are in the seat on the side where the dealer is holding the stub (to my left as a right-handed dealer) - I love it when after action is complete you slide/toss/push your bet closer to me. That speeds things along expoentially for me as someone lacking the longest reach.

Also don't talk about the BBJ during a hand. It can void the hand if it hits and even though that is extremely unlikely to happen, it means the dealer has to comment on how you shouldn't talk about it and that always starts very long conversations.

I know one a lot worse than that. Back in about 97 in a card club I worked in some real dummies decideded to put this tight ass "Smitty" in the 10-20 game. It was capped to him on the button, he studied his card and held them high so his backers could see. He then threw his pocket aces in the muck. And some of his backers thought this was smart to just not invovled in any pot that is capped preflop.

We had a HUGE white dry erase board. The ***** of it was when someone tried to squeeze past to grab a cushion and their shoulder taking out 3 or 4 names.

The Canadian guy who plays LO/8 in Tunica. He won't play ten hands in ten hours, yet, amazingly, he always gets action (ie, paid off, because he only plays the nuts), and seems to always book a nice win.

When I play LO/8, my goal is to make THAT guy think, "Boy, YTF plays tight!"

You think a random chip, being swept up with cards, will register MORE as a warning than a trinket? Really?

Honestly, I like this fold better than the Kings, I think. At least he's thinking "I only have a 30% chance to win, my heart can't take it."
Plus, it's a limit game, yes? Less gain.


they're BOTH morans, but if I was going to pick one over the other...

Are there any dealers in here from lucky chances in the bay area?

This is such a good post. Seriously.

Thanks!

I can't speak for all dealers, but I know it does for me.

It's streamlining. There are three tools of the game: the cards, the chips, and the button. That's what my brain and periphery are expecting to see. My brain knows without thinking that a card-colored rectangle with a chip-colored circle is an active hand.

It's like driving: I'm taking in as much as I can as efficiently as I can. When I reach an intersection with a red octagon, I don't have to pause and read it and think about what it means. I just know what to do. If I suddenly come across a silver oval, well, now I have to step away from my rhythm for a second to see what it says.

Is it a huge deal? Of course not. But I'm expecting the specific color and shape contrast of the cards/chips. Trinkets are all different sizes and colors, and while looking at them directly makes them obvious what they are, looking at them from the corner of my eye doesn't always register.

Make sense?

Think of it from another angle... you've been in games with kill buttons or missed blind buttons or whatever, right? I've played in places where the kill button was white on the no-kill side (ie, for the first pot won). Very frequently, with the no-kill button in the CO, the dealer would stop pitching there (a clue that the dealer wasn't counting during the pitch, BTW). And if the no-kill were in MP, even the players would start acting as if it was the dealer button.

It's a rhythm and a language.

I once fold A2 suited with two broadway cards preflop because he had limped in in front of me.

Question!

How do they handle taxes on tokes at your joint? Where I work everything is counted up at the end of your shift and you get taxed on the full amount.

How prevalent is the "tax compliance" stuff where you get taxed on a certain amount and the rest you're free? I've heard of this but never seen it.

It's in California. But there's a lot of mandatory pay-out involved, too.