Quote:
Originally Posted by Carnivore
In the above example I don't think the cards should be retrievable.
We had this one at our local casino a couple of weeks ago.
Seat 5 bets the river. Seat 9 calls.
Seat 5 shows his hand. Seat 9 lifts his cards up in disgust, then mucks them (they don't touch the muck though)
Seat 10 tells seat 9 he had the best hand. Seat 9 quickly reaches forward and grabs his cards and tables the winner.
The floor is called. The floor eventually ships the pot to seat 5, specifically because seat 9 only grabbed his hand back based on something he was told by seat 10.
IMO the solution to a lot of these problems is that dealers should very quickly grab and muck hands that are thrown into the table face down. Then the cards are gone and the issues don't happen.
This seems to be confusing two issues. First, are retrievable cards dead when the player indicates a willingness to forfeit his right to the hand (not going to get into the semantics of fold vs muck, but propelling the cards face down towards the center definitely indicates that you are conceding the hand)? if so, when are the cards dead? As soon as they hit the flet, as soon as they touch other cards (but are still identifiable), as soon as the dealer touches them, or as soon as they are not identifiable?
The second issue, which seems to be the logic used in your example, has come up before. It is the idea that another player violating OPTAH can kill anothe rplayers hand. Almost universally that is considered a bad idea.
The floor in your example seemed to be unable to take a hard stand on the primary issue, are the cards dead or not, and used faulty logic from the PTAH to bolster his decision. I don't mind the outcome, but I think his reasoning is flawed.