Does he post? Can he chime in?

This is a shockingly high number. I mean I see now why you want the Maginot Line of fingers and chips to defend against the Luftwaffe of flying cards but wow.

That seems pretty low. That is less than 1 a down. Remember that if you are not protecting your hand on an ongoing basis, you probably aren't noticing when a card gets out of place. When someone is engaged in what is going on at the table, they see a lot more than if they are doing something other than protecting their hand.

edit to add: YTF is one of the best dealers I know, he does an amazing job of keeping his table under control. When I have needed to hire (do not contact me, I have been out of poker for quite a while now) he was always the first person I contacted.

Exactly!

As a player, it's my prerogative to get drunk and chat with neighbors and watch the game and flirt with waitresses. That's why I pay rake.

I don't pay rake for the opportunity to scrutinize and second guess the dealer. I want the dealer to do his ****ing job and have cards magically appear in front of me 99.999% of the time (the number if nines is not chosen randomly - at the frequency stated, that's one error that affects me every few thousand hours of play and one error that I see affecting someone at my table every few hundred hours).

And when that one in a thousand hours mistake happens, I'm happy to extend an apologetic dealer the courtesy they will have extended me dozens of times when I've ****ed up.

This a bit of a rabbit hole, away from the point a bit, but i will bite. Of the 6 or 7 cards that went astray, how many of them occurred while not dealing, and waiting for a tanking player to act?

You pay rake to sit at the table. How you feel you should spend your time at the table is up to you.

Calli,

Do you play other games? Chess? Backgammon? Pool? Monopoly? Uno?

I'm sure you must.

In any of those games: do you ever NOT watch your opponent when he takes his turn?

I can't imagine this. If my opponent excuses himself mid-game for a bathroom break or other interruption, I wait until he returns before taking my turn, because I know he wants to watch me do it. On those rare times I decide to act before he returns (he trusts/respects me enough to know I'm not going to cheat/lie about what happened while he was gone), he's always shocked that I would do such a thing.

Yet, I see poker players staunchly refuse to watch the game until they must be prompted to take their turn--AND THEY'RE PLAYING FOR MONEY!!!

Please, on behalf of all those players, tell me if you play other games like that as well. I've always wondered.

yeah let's compare 10-handed games to heads up

never seen someone take a break from a hand of heads up poker where the cards were still being dealt and his opponent betting without waiting for him

This post is totally irrelevant to the topic.

The parallel would be playing chess and having someone other than your opponent reach over and take your king. Then you'd be like, hey, what the ****, and they'd explain that it's your responsiblity to watch your pieces. Then, when you argue, yeah, well, I protect my pieces but I didn't think that would happen, someone would say that it happens 6 times a night at this chess hall so they're not going to apologize.

I've played pool against multiple players in one game. And Scrabble, Sorry, Monopoly, Uno...Baseball, Football, Basketball...

And let's be clear, I don't mean watch every second of the game--just when you have cards.

Last night, I got distracted, and didn't notice the UTG player in Seat 10 raised pre-flop. I immediately turned my back on him as soon as he put his bet out, to follow the action to the 1-seat. Four players folded, CO and Button limped, SB limped--and I yelled "TIME", because now that my eyes were back at this end of the table, I saw the raise from UTG.

I call the floor, and it's a big mess, mulitple floors consult before making a ruling and getting the game going again. I'm relieved that no one is upset with the ruling, and no one squawks after the hand. UTG was a little belligerent during the ruling, but only because he felt everyone was blaming him for this, even though no one said a word to indicate any such feelings.

About five minutes later he wants to raise again, and he's still salty. He loudly announces the raise, puts the chips out with extra flourish, and is really being rude about it...so I can let loose the words I've been biting my tongue to keep in: "Let me ask you something: when you saw everyone limping, why didn't you speak up, to stop it from going so far?"

"Because I was turned THIS way, when they did that!", he blurted, turning his chair 180 degrees and sitting with his back to the table. I don't know if he was watching tv, or grabbing food off a side table--but it wasn't a brief thing, the action made it all the way around the table, in a slow-moving LL game.

*This* is what I'm asking about. Someone explain to me how you can play a game, ANY GAME, this way. I love games, and I just can't understand this. He spoke of playing with his back to the table and striving to ignore the game like it was the most natural thing in the world. If I'm raising preflop UTG, I'm very interested in this hand. The tv and the food table can wait a minute or two.

That's why I ask--I don't get it, and no one has ever been able to explain people to me.

It's not irrelevant, it's the root of the problem.

Whatever, I give up, if I haven't changed anyone's mind yet, I'm not going to. My parting words:

The sign turned from Don't Walk to Walk. My date and I (our first date!) started walking. Before I stepped off the sidewalk, I looked to make sure there was no danger. She did not, she just started walking when the sign said so.

I suggested to her how dangerous this was, in a big city like this. She would have none of it. "Pedestrians in the crosswalk have the right of way, and the sign said Walk. If someone hit me, it would be their fault."

At this point, I decided there would be no second date. I did not bother to point out that "it would be their fault" would be little comfort when you're lying in traction with broken legs and a broken back.

So you guys keep ignoring the game, the way she ignored the traffic. Don't bother going to all the trouble of protecting your cards, the way she didn't bother to Glance To Her Freaking Left For Half A Second. Because after all, how often does someone plow into pedestrians crossing the street? It would be so...unexpected!

And even if your $1k pot gets shipped to someone else instead, you'll always have the comfort of telling yourself that it was someone else's fault....and that's worth more than a $1k pot to many of you, it seems, much to my bewilderment.

/YTF OUT

Nice attempt at a mic-drop, but this is literally about saying the word "sorry".

Sadly pedestrians are heavily protected by laws in case you hit them. They won't even let natural selection take care of this problem. You bet I would hit that brake just slightly later if I was allowed to.

But yeah, that's exactly the behavior people have when they turn away from their cards expecting them to be there when they finally pay attention again.

yeah incredibly sad that pedestrians have a right of way, need to have more red light hit and runs to teach them a lesson, wtf are you on?

This is the part that confuses me. I don't think most of the people here, or really anyone, is saying that a player should not protect their hand, or that the rule that allows another person's mistake to kill a hand is wrong. The whole idea here is that when someone makes a mistake, and moving a muck in such a way that it spills cards onto a live hand is most definitely a mistake, they should acknowledge it.

The whole idea that 'mistakes happen, so eff the players for not taking better care of their cards, I ain't acknowledging my mistake' is odd, to say the least.

Except pedestrians and cyclists tend to cross streets where they don't have the right of way, and they still don't look.

The reason they do this, besides being horrible people, is that the one hitting them when they swirl across the road when they aren't supposed to is in trouble. Legally they're kind of invincible, and yet they don't realize they are the ones to be mangled on impact.

I'm not sure where you get that from. If they do not have the right of way, then "legally" they are at fault if there is a collision, not the driver.* State laws are also quite different on where pedestrians do and do not have the right of way: http://www.ncsl.org/research/transpo...e-summary.aspx

* Obviously, anyone can sue anyone for anything at any time, so there is a danger there, but if the statute says the pedestrian is at fault, one would hope any civil suit would be fairly easy to win.

It is the same reason your insurance company doesn't want you to discuss a car accident you are involved in. If you acknowledge fault, we can move on to compensation. Also, I can't tell you how frequently "I'm sorry" is followed by "**** you dealer" or "shut up and deal." There is no need for the dealer to become involved, is someone that still wanted to play has their hand mucked, the floor is being called, let them deal with it.

I'm not from the states.

I can't even count how many times I've told my kids that the way you behave should have nothing to do with the way others behave.

Refusing to apologize to reasonable people because there are unreasonable people in the world is a real ******* move.

Flawed analogy. First of all, any admission right after an accident would have so little weight in determining fault that it is not even worth considering. Two, it is highly unlikely that the disposition of a poker pot is going to be determined in a court of law. Three, I have always been told to never discuss the details of the accident or who is at fault, never been told to not say sorry.

So, if someone clearly makes a mistake, and that mistake negatively effects someone else, you think they should never apologize because of the risk of admitting liability under a set of rules that does not exist for that situation.

With regards to players reacting badly, I am sure it happens, but my experience is that players let it go much faster after a simple and quick apology. I play mainly in the Texas\OK area, though, and circuit dealers have made a point of saying that our player pool seems a bit nicer than most (especially the bay area), so maybe my opinion is skewed.

One of the reasons I research diseases now is that poker players as a whole are some of the most miserable people in the world. I have met a lot of great people in a card room, but the average poker player is not one of them (note: I haven't stepped into a poker room since about 2013).

This whole thread reminds me of the old "Tastes great! / Less filling!" Miller Lite beer ads. (False dichotomy.)
Of course dealers will make mistakes, unexpected in the moment, certain in the long run.
AND of course players should protect their hands against the inevitable unexpected event.
These are not mutually exclusive.
When either a player or a dealer does make a mistake (even if the other could have prevented or protected against it), saying "Sorry!" is just simple courtesy. How the other party then reacts to that should be irrelevant to its being offered.
But (IMO), it's far more likely that the player (in this case) will be receptive to learning a lesson (to protect his hand) if the dealer first shows him the courtesy of acknowledging an error, than if the dealer refuses to do so and simply tells him that it was his fault for not protecting his hand.
I do realize that there are a plenty of truly miserable human beings playing poker, who will seize on any admission of error by a dealer as a sign of weakness and an excuse to verbally abuse them (not that they think they need one, anyway). But I still think that the majority of players will react better if offered a simple "Sorry" here.

Asking a player to protect their hand is not a binary thing. It's reasonable to ask someone to put one chip on top, it's not reasonable to ask them to enclose their cards with a plexiglass protector in case a chunk of ceiling falls down.

Wow this is getting a bit heated lol.
Honestly I've never once protected my cards but I will probably start doing so now. I guess my main argument would be in a situation like this where the dealer is needlessly fiddling with the muck and kills a players hand, shouldn't the floor comp that player something? Maybe a couple steak dinners at the overpriced restaurant across the hall? A free motel room? That's what I would expect and most likely demand if a dealer killed my hand in this Manor.

lol

Save yourself the disappointment and protect your hand.