Most of us would agree that $1/$2 live has far more recreational players than $5/$10 live. Even the regs at 1/2 are significantly less experienced than the regs at 5/10.

But so often, I see the dealers at 1/2 being extremely strict with rules and mercilessly declaring "string bet" without any prior warning to a player who's been at the casino only a handful of times in his/her life.

I understand this attitude at 5/10 when there is big money on the table and players are sufficiently experienced to know the rules, but it seems a bit harsh at 1/2.

Should the dealers be more lenient with the rules at 1/2?

The rules have to be enforced. They can be explained to a new player, and on a friendly table the "why" can be explained as well, but they still must be enforced to ensure that the game is fair to the other 9 players.

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Some of the rules just seem so pedantic though. For example, I've seen a guy had his quads mucked because he flipped over a 7 at showdown on a 777xx board but left his other card face down. This was a recreational player at 1/2 who stopped coming to the casino after that.

And when there's literally a 0.3 second delay between the first chip and the second chip being released from someone's hand, can't we just let them off with a warning? Same with if a player wants to call a $10 bet but accidentally chucks $15 out, can't we give them the benefit of the doubt if they're clearly a losing casual player and they clearly didn't intend to raise or angle shoot?

Angle shooting is a much bigger issue at higher stakes. When a player at 1/2 does the wrong thing, it's almost always because they were ignorant of the rules, not because they meant malice.

Why do we scare away recreational players like this?

In a word, No.

That is just a **** employee who hurt his employer's business by mucking the quad 7s. The dealer could simply say "show 2 to win" without bending or changing any rules.

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I would agree, it's ALMOST always a mistake. The problem is you are now tasking the dealer with making a judgement call on what was a mistake and what was an angle. I'd rather the dealer stick to black and white decisions regarding rules than try to interpret mistake/angle.

All players deserve to have the game run fairly and that's the dealers job. HOW he handles situations that arise is a different story. I've seen dealers scare new players off by berating them on a simple string raise and I've seen dealers calmly explain that it isn't allowed.

HOW the dealer handles it should be a topic of conversation, THAT he needs to handle it really isn't up for debate.

I'd feel dirty being on the receiving end of the pot, I'd def give the pot to him/her.

Your room sounds very strict. In the rooms that I play in these things would not happen. The dealers give advice to players and it’s a very casual atmosphere. I haven’t seen a string bet called in 25+ sessions.

No. The rules are there for a reason. New players need to learn them like everyone else.
This was a bad dealer. All dealers should tell this player I need to see 2 cards for you to win.
These are things we should be letting go when it is an obvious mistake with a clarification of the rules.

It is not up to the staff to decide who is and who isn't a losing casual player and why should we treat them differently? We would be asking for other players to show up and act like noobs so they could shoot angles.

I disagree with CupOfSalt, and half agree and half disagree with Suit, because he says both that rules are rules, but also that there are things we should let go of.

I agree with the latter part. Yes, there are times and games where you can and should be more lenient with new players, to give them a good and fair experience. But it's a fuzzy line, and it takes some experience to know which are which, which is important to say and understand.

To me, this includes:
* Many types of string bets, but not all of them
* Definitely the "show 2 to win" example. That is just awful. I saw that happen once when a dealer was definitely just trying to push the pot to his buddy the reg, and to this day he is the only dealer I will never ever tip again, and I hope he got fired at some point.
* Table talk violations

It's also important to say that I think these players should be given some latitude up front, but it isn't infinite. They do in fact need to learn the rules and abide by them.

It's also important to note that some of these fuzzy interpretations can be made by an experienced dealer, but many should only come from a floor, so as not to put the dealer in an awkward position with the other players.

The question was if we should be more lenient with rules in a 1/2 game vs a 5/10 game. The answer to that is no. We should be lenient with certain rules, like the examples given, in all the games. There are so many players out there that have played a lot at home games and such so they seem to know what is going on until they try to show one card and muck the other one or string bet or say "Who has a heart?" on a 4 heart board because all these things fly at their regular games. We need to be lenient to these things for good reason. Plenty of these guys have the cash flow to play 5/10 as well. Nazi dealers are bad for the game as there are some rules that don't require a Nazi approach.

To some (me) 1/2 is big money. I want the rules followed.

OP, I realize this is a sore subject for you. You've created a thread before on your treatment in LV over rules violations.

While perhaps you don't see how it would be an advantage to string bet, but even at 1/2 players look for tells to see if someone is happy or worried if there is a bet. Most people only need a 10 second explanation on how to avoid it and then don't do it again. If table talk wasn't regulated, people could be coaching their friends at the table as to what to do. The $15 accidental bet isn't going to be an issue most of the time since it isn't a legal raise.

Finally, if I were in a position where a $400 pot wasn't big money to me, I wouldn't be sweating writing threads about relaxing the enforcement of rules.

They key word I agree with here is "we," in that we as players should definitely accept relaxed enforcement of minor rules violations in cases where some kind of judgement is required/requested.

String bets are a good example. There are obvious string raises, like a new player emulating what he sees on TV and saying "I'll see your 20 and raise you 40." They flat out need to learn that's blatantly against the rules. But then on the flip side there are people (even experienced players who regularly play at another room) who make two stacks just behind the betting line and push them over thr line simulatneously not realizing the betting line doesn't count and forward motion does.

In the latter case, your willingness as a player to call out the rules "violation" should depend on the stakes (and overall context of the game) as well as the severity of the violation. If it's clear they just didn't know and/or there's a reasonable explanation for what they did (like you understand your room has an uncommon rule), it's totally fine and even beneficial to waive off the dealer or floor. Or make the correction without asking for rules enforcement, e.g., "just so you know, the rule here is forward motion, I know you meant to raise so I'm fine with it but you should be careful."

Everyone has a knee jerk reaction to being on the receiving end of a rules violation (or even an angle). But there's nothing wrong with letting someone get a minor advantage over you once in a while, especially when at small stakes it's very easy to run up a huge skill gap.

I'm not super concerned about getting cheated out of a large pot. The whole point of being good at poker is to put your opponent in "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situations, and not to end up in scenarios where you're pulling your hoodie over your face and praying to sweet sweet Jesus that they don't make the decision that will destroy your session/week/month/year.

That problem is not a problem of unfiar enforcement of a rule. That problem is that there is a bad rule if flipping up one card is consideredmucking the pther card. In any reasonable room the player would still be expected to show the other card but his hand isn't dead (atleast until hedoes something like throw it into the muck face down).
Why should they get a warning? This doesn;t sound like a string bet. If you are playing in a room where that is a string bet the problem is the rule is bad.
How are you going to work that.... of yes sir you can make it $15 now becaue we believe you are an honest player .... then the next hand the dealer disallows another player from doing it "because you sir are an angle shooting scum bucket"

Its not practical nor reasonable to have the staff make these judgments on each of these types of rules. Now if the player tosses three chips and only 2 cross the line I agree it should be ruled that all three are the bet. But that is true regardless of who does it. But if a player has 2 chips in his hand, tosses them and then says oops I meant it to be three chips that is a different issue.

I tend to think the other way. The players in the bigger games are generally better able to protect themselves. If you are going to relax enforcement of the rules somewhere it seems better suited for the players who can protect themselves then the clueless guys in the smallest game.


Look if some snowflake is going to take his ball and leave because he wasn't allowed to make a string raise .....when he is learning to play poker .... he was going to be a problematic player anyway. Reasonable people would learn and move on.

Did you play perfectly when you started? Did you make a string bet or do something else that wasn;t allowed? When the rule was enforced did you stop playing poker? Obviously not ... you learned from it. you moved on ... why assume that everyone else is going to quit playing if we enforce a rule.

This was probably a rhetorical question but let me answer it.

Many of us learned to play poker when poker was more popular. Games were ridiculously soft (in some of my games people just turned losers over at showdown because they didn't know if two pair beat three of a kind or if a straight beat a flush). We'd wait 3 hours for a 3/6 LHE game and when we got to the table, we'd still be giddy with excitement.

We put up with a lot more because it was a lot more cool to play poker. I'm not saying we should nerf everything, but we definitely shouldn't assume that any experience more than a few years old would be a good predictor for the future.

I tend to agree with the latter above. Although one might think that rules enforcement would be stricter in higher-stakes cash games, IME this often isn't true in practice.
IME, bigger games, with mostly experienced players, tend to allow more looseness on some rules than smaller ones do.
In a lot of 1/2 games, many players actually don't know the rules, or don't know that rules vary from room to room, and the dealers and floors tend to enforce things more automatically and rigidly. (And the players who do know the rules, or think they do, tend to be nittier.)
In the bigger games, the players mostly do know the rules (and often each other), and tend to let each other get away with some sloppiness, or minor mechanical errors, as long as they don't think that they're being angled or disadvantaged. They are also more tolerant of those whom they'd like to keep in the game. Especially if the players don't object (or if they agree), the dealer often will let some things go, more so than in a smaller game.

To a lot of 1/2 regs, the money is actually very significant to them. Look at how important it is to some of the vloggers, for example. I watched a vlog today with one guy admitting his roll is $1800 and he plays 1/2.

Also OMC regs, freeroll chasers, and people that are just plain cheap will think the money is very meaningful, and aren’t there to just have fun.

You're only catching part of the reason why stakes matter.

True, part of it has to do with how much money means to people (i.e. relative scale), but another big part has to do with how much money it is (i.e. absolute scale), period.

For example, let's say that due to some weird coincidence of circumstances related to non-enforcement of yhe rules, there ends up being a dispute over whether someone's cards are live. If the game is sufficiently small and the pot is sufficiently small, the house is just going to step in and say, "come on guys let's just split the pot and I'll give you both buffet comps" or something like that. It works because the amount of squish in the floorman's comp budget is more than the amount being disputed. On the other hand, if it's a 100/200 NL game and a 500 BB pot, there's probably no simple solution, and quite possibly a civil suit, for not following the rules to the letter.

I have indicated before ... I think the rules 'need' to be more enforced (taught/followed) at 1/2 than higher stakes ... with two main reasons. One, these are typically new players that need to learn the rules in the first place. And Two ... The fact that this money generally does mean more to the players than at higher stakes which could (will) create more emotionally driven disputes.

I'm not saying hit them over the head, explain and enforce ... And in the third case, there are more of them to reign in and be 'fair' with.

On the flip side, you do have your worries about angles at the higher stakes, but we had a very nice PLO game going with more of a home game feel to it. There was a shift change of Dealers and we got 3 straight downs with the hammer being laid down ... like no straddle unless you get it out there before the first SB card in PLO!

It changed the attitude of the game for sure and I think contributed to an argument between two players in the 3rd down ... which resulted in $18K getting up and leaving the table with how the Floor handled the spot.

On one side you say if all the Dealers enforced the rules then the 'looseness' would never have existed .. On the other side you can say that the game wouldn't have run (or as big) without the banter being allowed in the first place, which is something that larger stakes players want in 'their' game.

High stakes players want to be catered to even though they bring in less rake than 1/2 games. 'All' poker players have the potential to go blow off steam in the pits.

I don't want to compare 1/2 players to First Graders, but typically in school their is more trust/expectation at the higher grade levels that they have earned. First Graders need to be kept in line or you will potentially have a zoo on your hands! GL

One problem that exists where rules are not enforced because it's that type of game is that sometimes not everyone sees it as that type of game. So a dealer allows a late straddle and there is a player who doesn't like his blinds being straddled. He may not say a word at the table .... But goes to a shift manager to complain that the dealer isn't following the rules ...

But even more common is the that some players are ok with all this looseness while they are winning .... But if they start to run bad their attitude changes.

Dealers don't have a lot to stand on when they get called in to explain why they were allowing this looseness because the rule book doesn't have a ignore the rules for a fun game clause.