im still confused. How far was the chips in front of you for the dealer not notice that you were all in and where were your cards at that he could reach around the chips and grab your cards and mucks it before anyone notices.

The sad fact of poker life OP is that you must always act like the dealer is likely to do the stupidest, most brain dead things possible at any time and therefore never let your guard down. I was in a single table tourney once in the one seat. The two seat and I get it all in preflop and table our cards. I have KK and he has AA.

The dealer, without even putting out the flop looks at the hands, sees my Kk is less than Aa and snatches them up and starts to put them in the muck. So I instinctively grab his hand right before my cards hit the muck, and he snaps "never touch the dealer". I said I'm protecting my hand, and he goes on and on about not touching the dealer, ignoring the part about he hasnt put a flop out yet.

The floor shows up, and the first question he asked was whether my cards hit the muck. I said no, because I stopped them by grabbing his hand. He goes "you cant grab his hand" and then says my cards wouldnt be dead if they hit the muck. So i asked if thats true, then why was that the first thing you asked. He had no answer for that.

So the hand played out, but after that I realized that no situation is too stupid or too improbable to happen that some dealer wont **** it up and do it. And most of the time there is no consequence to the dealer for the **** up, as they will blame you for not protecting yourself from dealer stupidity. I have never seen a dealer, no matter how bad or how many mistakes they make, be fired for that. Only when they affect the house by ****ing up the well do they get canned.

Dont get me wrong. I respect and am friendly with many of the dealers where I play. But even with the best of them, I protect my hand like I'm being dealt to by the idiot from the STT. You can never let your guard down.

It happens. I'd imagine the OP was in the 1 or 10 seat. I'm not saying it's excusable or a small mistake, but you've never accidentally clipped a curb making a turn while driving? You've never knocked over a glass and spilled a drink all over the table?

A lot of what a dealer does is done under the pressure of spending an entire shift doing everything as fast as he possibly can. This is for him so he gets more hands out which is what the dealer wants for money, what the house wants for money, and what the players want because life is finite and they want to see as many hands as they can while they're playing. Many of the small "non-thinky" things go to autopilot.

If someone is all-in and mucks happen a lot faster than usual, many players are tossing their cards in all at once and they slide and bounce all over the place. Maybe OP had his cards pretty close to the dealer (maybe he didn't?). I don't know. Maybe the dealer thought it was an errant hand that he had not swiped into the muck. I'm just saying that it's a mistake that CAN happen and when you're in the 1 or 10 seat, be more protective of your hand than you think you need to be. What if instead of the dealer just mucking OP's hand, someone accidentally (or purposely) tossed their mucked cards into his hand? It's still on the player to have protected his hand. In this case the floor may be able to identify the hand and let it play out, but in many cases this will not be how that works and the hand will be dead.



Protect your hand. **** happens.

Our TDs give a rules speech before every tournament. "If your hand is mucked in error there may be no recourse".

And I hate to say it, this is one of those cases. He is all in for equal action and has no cards.

And I have seen similarly awful. Tournament is going hand for hand on the bubble, player being moved to rebalance. As he gets to his new table, he reaches in his pocket and takes out all of his chips.

Would the aces have held? Least you had good sense to post here and not bbv

If I was the dealer in this situation, I would feel ashamed enough that I would personally refund the OP's buy-in out of my own pocket. The casino should really be doing something this make this right.

No, you wouldn't.

Make sure you force them to deal the board out next time, just in case there are two ace of clubs.

Sorry for your loss.

We already know the dealer took his cards because he didn't hear the all in.
Therefore he should get his chips back.

What? This doesn't make sense. Op declared ALL IN and committed all his chips to the pot, and was called by a larger stack. It's unfortunate Dealer mucked his hand, but that doesn't undo the action of the hand. If it did, one could bluff-shove, then muck if he gets called and keep his chips.

My only explanation.

Way to take it to an extreme, incorrectly.

The point is that the dealer didn't know he was all in. How can a dealer enforce an allin he didn't know happened?

As I said earlier, the TDA rules allow for a 'for the good of the game' decision to overrule an existing rule. This was the place for it. Even more so than thr Gaelle Bauman (sp?) incident at the WSOP a few years ago when a player shoved and mucked his own cards when she was about to call. I think that scenario, they allowed him to keep his chips apart from a min raise amount. Personally I think he got off lightly (and made the Nov 9).
The difference is though that he mucked the cards himself.

You're naive if you think that if a floor will commonly override the rule and allow a player to take his chips back, that this wouldn't become a common angle for a player to freeroll. Your argument that this wouldn't happen is that the player mucked his own cards, and then you go and cite a situation where a player mucked his own cards and got his chips back.


Your sense of logic seems to be missing a few steps in the chain.

Huh? If dealer didn't hear OP say "all in", and the chips weren't in the center, and dealer acted like OP mucked, it should have been treated as a fold. OP doesn't get to be all in with AA, but shouldn't have lost any chips either.

Not really, you just don't understand.

I mentioned the Koroknai/Bauman incident as it was an example of a situation where it would've been more acceptable to enforce the all in as it was down to the mistake of the player.

Giving OP his chips back wouldn't create a common angle as it would rely on a dealer mistake happening for the angle to work.

No. You don't understand, because what you say below is completely incorrect.

Which part is incorrect?
If you mean the first part, how do you know?
If you mean the second part, that is why I say the TDA overrule should be used in this case.

Try expanding on your comments instead of just saying I'm wrong.

The thing you keep asserting as correct is wrong. This is a strange line to take after so many people have told you that. Here, I'll help you out:

For starters, the dealer doesn't enforce that part of the game. The player is all-in by virtue of having bet all of his chips. The chips are irreversibly committed once called. This is true in part because of the potential angles explained to you.

This part is also not true to even the least imaginative of us. There is no scenario where an all-in player can successfully muck his cards without being able to find at least a tenuous argument that the dealer made a mistake. Not a single one.

So he loses nothing by attempting to muck.

But he didn't attempt to muck. The dealer did it. Stop talking about the player mucking his hand.

That's my whole point. A point that not a single person has offered a proper argument around.

Someone give me one of these possible angles that could be shot with the exclusive requirement that the dealer mucks your hand. (not one for player mucking his hand himself, as that's all that people seem capable of so far)

I totally get that Koroknai's muck could've been an angle and personally I think he should've lost his stack, but I can understand why Jack made the decision he did.

By "attempting to muck" I obviously mean "attempting to get his cards mucked". You know this and are choosing to be difficult. Dealers are trained to sweep unprotected cards into the muck.

I'm not choosing to be difficult at all. I'm sure dealers are trained to sweep unprotected cards. I'm sure they are also trained to be aware of which players have gone all in. Like when an all in is just announced and they tell the player to push a stack forward (which OP did anyway), or in some cases like they throw out an all in chip or triangle.

Once again I notice you haven't answered my question.

If they are that's an incredibly dumb thing to train them to do. The normal position of live cards is sitting directly in front of the player. That's where these cards were, and in fact three stacks of chips were forward of his cards. To fold a hand the player needs to release his cards in a forward motion. So the idea that the dealer was correct to sweep any unprotected cards because they are trained that way is terrible if true.

If cards, capped or uncapped, are directly in front of a player, a dealer should be trained to keep his hands off of them, period. If there is any question about whether the cards have been released forward or not, the dealer should be trained to ask. But this notion of scooping up any cards without a cap or hand on them is crazy.

I know that it's important to protect your cards from dealer error, but lets be clear about that. It's 100% a dealer error when a dealer reaches and grabs cards directly in front of a player and behind his chips. It's not that this player did anything wrong in and of itself . He didnt position his cards in a place a dealer paying attention would think they are mucked. He simply failed to idiotproof his cards.

Poker is sort of unusual in that all dealer errors are somehow ulimately blamed on the player. And that's been obvious ITT, where a dealer said he was mostly mad at a player for letting him muck his live cards. That's like saying a bus passenger is responsible for a bus driver running a red light and hitting someone because the passenger didnt stop him. The driver cant just say, sorry, bus driving is a repetitive and boring job, and I was on auto pilot, so you should have stopped me, so this accident is your fault.


So I sort of see Pete's point that since this was clearly a dealer screw up, that there should, under the fairness rule, be a way to remedy that. But that's just not how poker rolls, and the player is responsible for supervising dealers and correcting their mistakes before it's too late. It's just that like the OP, until you have a dealer make an incredibly stupid mistake at your expense, you may not realize that and you think you can let your guard down in obvious situations. But you cant.

And it's sort of damned if you do and damned if you don't. Say something when you think a dealer made a mistake and you'll get the. "One dealer to a table" or "let me do my job" look/comment if you're wrong. But dont speak up and you're right, you get the "why didnt you say something before I did it?" Reaction.

Well, I just tweeted Jack and Matt Savage and asked them for their input. I'd be especially interested to hear Jack's view seeing as he made the call in the Koroknai case.

Personally, as a dealer and I know I'm NOT the norm, nor do I expect others to act in the way I do, I always ask if a player is folding if I have any doubt that I misinterpreted what they have done. There have been a few times that I will be rightfully distracted to my right and action is on Seat 1. When I bring my attention to him, his cards are just sitting there...maybe they're slightly more forward than he normally keeps them during a hand, maybe they're not...but I will ask the player if it's a fold before I swipe them. If I slow the game down for this, I don't care. I'm not swiping some dude's aces while he's contemplating a bet.

There are times where this player will be snotty with me with a "yeah, no **** I'm folding why are you bothering me" attitude/answer when I ask. That has never stopped me from asking every single time it happens.



The times I WILL quickly swipe a hand into the muck is if someone throws their cards face down toward the center of the table. I'm not there to double check with a player that is making a mucking motion and I'm not opening it up for him to change his mind. If it's showdown where the board plays and I don't get mucked cards into the muck and they're just sitting off to the side and are identifiable, now I'm the bad guy when the floor gets called and lets the guy table his hand for a portion of the pot after he clearly mucked. Mucked hands go in the muck. What happens if I grabbed a mucked hand earlier and didn't pull them all the way into the muck and a guy reaches for them saying "I have a live hand"? If I see cards I have somehow not mucked, I'm generally mucking them (I feel like this is what happened to the lady in the video posted in the first reply). If we asked permission every time someone mucked, people would get tired of it real fast.


That last paragraph doesn't explain why a dealer would muck a guy's live hand. It can't. There is no rational explanation for it. I'm just pointing out that "get dead hands into the muck" is pretty universally sought by everyone...players, the dealer, the floor...everyone except the occasional guy that didn't realize he had the flush with 4 hearts on the board and mucked his hand and now it's too late.


*edit* I just removed some stuff about not knowing if the OP had chips out in front of his cards, etc....

Everything I posted here is a little off topic now that I realize that, so I apologize for the waste of time. The dealer thought the hand was over for some reason and was quickly advancing to the next hand. I've definitely dropped the stub once or twice thinking the hand was over because I thought everyone folded and had overlooked someone that was still in the hand. I've never swiped someone's live hand because of it, but I have felt REALLY stupid the times I've done this. There's no excuse for it at all, but mistakes happen.

It would seem the dealer made a HUGE mistake but it's still up to the player to protect his hand. This thread wouldn't exist if the player had his hand on his cards (it's hard to have a chip on your cards while you're all-in unless it's a protector you brought which is fast becoming a less-cool thing to have)