A couple weeks ago at Bally's I was in a hand where a 4-card flop came out. Floor was called, whom I believe is the room manager, and he ruled "take those 4 cards, mix 'em up real good, and then put 3 of them out as the flop, the 4th becomes the burn." OOOOkay. That surprised the heck outta me, but I wasn't going to try to argue this at the table so I sat quietly and watched the dealer mix around 4 cards and then pick three to be the flop.

Afterward I expressed my surprise at that ruling and a player next to me said "I'm a dual-rate at Venetian and we do that, too--that maintains the deck integrity and guarantees at least two of the right three flop cards come out." Eeeek! I asked "you do realize that the dealer CANNOT really shuffle and mix 4 cards, so basically the dealer is in 100% control of what three cards are used for the flop, right, and if he gets a signal from a friend in the hand as to which card should be the burn card, it'll be the burn card without fail?" "Ummmm"

Has anybody else out there adopted this procedure? I appreciate the nod you're making to try to "maintain deck integrity" but game integrity is more important, and letting the dealer pick 3 of 4 cards to put out on a flop is a dreadfully bad idea. Please stop it.

It is a new adopted TDA rule and also in the WSOP rules this year.

Yikes, really? Ugh. I can see how it would satisfy a lot of people, but I don't like it. I suppose I have to start doing this in my home games too.

I'd rather keep a 4-sided die on hand to determine which is removed, but I suppose even that could be manipulated. How about a dreidel?

Yuck.

http://www.wsop.com/pdfs/2010/2010_W...tion_Rules.pdf

Page 8, Section VII, Rule 161

is there any particular reason why the 3 cards that were going to be the flop can't just remain and the 4th becomes the burn?

yup... thtas the new rule...

better than re-shuffling the whole deck IMHO though!

The stupid, it burns. And it's sinking in further and further every day. Terrible procedure, just terrible.

Awful. If I wanted to play 4 card monte, there's lots of street corners available. It should be fairly obvious what the 4th card was to remove.

I believe the procedure listed is for the cases when it is not certain which card would have been the burn card. If it is easy to tell, I think most places keep it that way, but maybe the OP can let us know.

ABSOLUTELY NOT better. Because it really does let the dealer pick exactly what three of the four cards to use for the board. Kowtowing to the superstitious while opening up the game to manipulation is a very bad trade.

Not. That's part of the issue. You don't know WHICH two cards stuck together when the dealer peeled four of them off. Did two cards come off the first time, the second, or the third? If the dealer knew which card was stuck together there wouldn't have been a four card flop as he would have corrected it before spreading them face up.

The correct procedure is simply to pull it all back except for the burn card and reshuffle.

Why are you guys assuming the dealer is(or could be) involved in cheating with players for this particular occasion. It happens so rarely that it doesn't make any sense for the dealer to want to affect the outcome of the flop for just this instance. If a dealer is cheating here then he's been cheating you the whole time.

Btw, here's the tournament version which takes the dealer influence out of the equation. page 6 #79. http://www.wsop.com/pdfs/2010/2010-WSOP-Rules.pdf

If the flop contains four (rather than three) cards, whether exposed or not, the dealer shall scramble the four cards face down. A
tournament official will be called to randomly select one card to be used as the next burn card and the remaining three cards will become the
flop.

Not quite. The TDA rules are only changed every two years if a summit is held. The last summit was in 2009.

This is the TDA rule in relation to 4 card flops and it differs significantly from the procedure used in the OP in that the FLOOR selects which card will NOT be in the flop.

This procedure keeps the dealer from having control over the flop and maintains more of the original flop than shuffling the cards back into the deck.

It's not stupidity, it's laziness IMO.

Why take the time to re-shuffle and put out a new board when you can just play russian roulette.

As for deck integrity, I have very little use for it. I mean, if you can keep it easily then fine but in cases like this.... Deck integrity will mean something when you can tell me the turn/river cards before they are dealt 100% of the time. Otherwise it's all just random.

It's not about whether the dealer in this particular case was doing something untoward. I'm sure he was not (though somehow after playing 4-card monte he managed to leave out the card that gave my opponent a flopped set on that board--thank you). Pretty much every procedure is supposed to be created with the assumption that if it can manipulated, it will be. You won't find "we chose to do this procedure THIS way instead of THAT way because THAT way has this problem with potential cheating", but it's there.

I don't like the floor picking a random card either, but at least it's better than the dealer alone having control. I'd be happier with "leave the four cards up and roll a die until it comes up 1, 2, 3, or 4 and that becomes the burn card". That would be harder to manipulate.

Honestly, if you're that afraid of dealers cheating, then don't play live. I'm quite sure there are people who can deal and cheat and nobody would be able to catch them.

The odds of anyone hand needing exactly 3 of the 4 cards coming out, to assist someone at the table giving signals, is so remote that it doesn't matter. If they could pull this off, not having hand signals caught, not caught on camera, etc, then they would have been cheating all along.

Lol at the bolded part. I'm pretty sure the "smart" cheaters would just "hand needle" the card they don't want and make sure it was on the bottom. Apparently you don't think like a card cheat.

Wow, not only can dealers control which of the four cards to burn but they can control when to bring out a 4th card. Lets say two players are allin preflop and the pro convinces the mark to flip their hands over. If the flop is more beneficial for the Mark the pro can have a deal with the dealer to deal 4 cards.

This is truly a terrible rule.

This new rule follows the general rule of card room poker rules/policies changes; that is you generally see three steps forward and two back on average.

Anyway, a clear step back IMO to a rule that didn't need changing.

How could he "accidently" deal a 4th card after the flop is shown? The flop cards are all dealt face down before being flipped and spread.

The more I think about this, the less awful it is, especially if the floor picks the card. Poker IS different these days, and there's more risk of rolling and squeezing stub on every hand than of a massive conspiracy on a 4 card flop. But I don't like having to implement this in home games.

While I'm not opposed to the time saving aspects of the rule, it's promoting laziness and when people get lazy, they tend to also get careless..

Lazy + Careless is where we get into a whole host of issues.

I think this is actually a better solution to a 4 card flop then the former solution of shuffle and re-flop, based on the amount of crying, wailing, hair pulling, and all-round grumbling that it produced.

Sure bcause no one will ever complain about the way this scenario turns out, never.

This way definately does mess up the game less in terms of extra information given to all the players. This way only one card is known for sure not to be in any other players' hands, while reshuffling the entire stub could give information of up to 4 cards known not to be in other players' hands.