Blame Fore for this question. Or give him well deserved props. Either way is nice, but his twisted mind brought us to this theoretical question.

Anyway, action gets to the river . Player A bets, Player B calls. Player A declares two pair and shows top two. Player B throws his cards forward face down. Dealer goes to grab and muck them. Due to clumsiness, he accidentally exposes them, revealing a straight.

Who wins the pot?

Surely once the cards are in the dealer's hand, they're considered mucked and the cards are dead.

Player A wins. Player B mucked his cards. Whether or not they hit other cards is irrelevant. He threw them in face down indicating his surrender of the pot.

It is not a tabled hand. Player A wins.

You might get different responses if you post the question in the correct subforum..

if Player B realizes he had a straight, speaks up, and they are able to truly/easily identify his cards, then he could be awarded the pot.
but if he throws them facedown and someone else says it and they (and the community cards) are not still clear, then not

I guess my point is who realized and spoke up, and when?

So, if someone mucks their cards and another player grabs them and turns them over, is the hand tabled? I think not. Ditto if it's the dealer. The player has to table their own hand for it to play.

You certainly can dive into this one ..

The TDA rule does have the phrase 'properly tabled' in Rule 13 and has two conditions .. One, turn cards face up ON THE TABLE and two, allow the cards to be read CLEARLY by Dealer and other Players. They don't define 'who' actually can table the cards .. BUT

If you go to Rule 2, Player Responsibilities, it does state that a Player should .. table all cards properly when competing at showdown.

So you'd think that it's pretty straight forward .. but I can also suggest we go this way.

If we allow a Player to win a pot if their neighbor violates OPTAH via verbal announcement/suggestion of a winning hand, then why would we not go that route if the neighbor tables the hand for them?

Also, I've seen plenty of Dealers turn holdings over during tournament all-ins. Granted that is by rule and not by 'suggestion' or accident, it's still the Dealer tabling the cards and they are live.

Cards get exposed all the time and we can't put the cat back in the bag. Dealer mistakes happen and we must live with the 'consequences' .. are we to take exception at Showdown?

I saw a hand where a Dealer told a Player (Seat 1) they should table their hand at Showdown for a winner. The Player won the pot and the Dealer got fired .. but the Player still won the pot.

While I think the 'Player Responsibility' rule is fairly clear, I also KNOW that poker has a long history of 'living with' (allowing) irregular events to have an effect on the course of an ongoing hand and then doling out penalties after the fact. GL

It's a muck. A dealer can't un-muck someone's hand, either accidentally or on purpose. The hand is dead.

A player doesn’t muck a hand. The dealer does. A hand is mucked when the cards are mixed into the muck pile and are no longer identifiable. At showdown, you can discard your hand, but you can’t muck it. If you discard your hand you can retrieve the hand and table it so long as the cards are still clearly identifiable; I.e. the dealer hasn’t mucked your hand.

Since that is the case, if the dealer accidentally flips both cards face up, and assuming the cards are clearly identifiable as the player’s hand, why can’t the player reclaim that hand and win the pot once it is realized that he had a winning hand? How is it different from the case where the player discards and then changes his mind and retrieves the cards?

That is just false. As I said in my previous post, a player can discard his hand face down at showdown and then change his mind and retrieve it so long as the cards are still clearly identifiable as belonging to his hand. Obviously once the dealer mucks the cards, they no longer are identifiable and the player has no recourse, but prior to that he can still reclaim his hand. He does not surrender the pot automatically by discarding his hand.

That applies at showdown; if a player discards his hand while facing a bet, he has folded and no longer can reclaim it, regardless of whether the cards are identifiable or not. That is a different situation though. You can’t fold at showdown.

Consider another situation- a player is clearly tossing his cards into the middle to discard his hand but accidentally flips both of the face up. Again the situation is different depending on whether it is a fold to a bet or it happens at showdown. At showdown he has tabled his hand; his intentions mean nothing. If the hand is a winner he gets the pot, even if he clearly was intending to discard his hand. Obviously if facing a bet, it’s a fold and he cannot win the pot.

Nope. At showdown a player can still table his hand so long as the cards are clearly identifiable as being his. If the dealer grabs the cards but doesn’t mix them into the muck, they are still clearly identifiable (assuming the dealer doesn’t have other cards in his hand), so the player can retrieve them. Accidentally flipping them over doesn’t change that fact.

The answer to this is baked into the question. The difference between the dealer flipping the hand and the player flipping the hand is the identity of the person flipping the hand.

Which rule talks about who flips the cards up?

I think this ultimately boils down to the letter of the law (or rule) vs the spirit of it.

The motives and intent of Player B clearly indicate he was relinquishing his hand. As such, the pot should be rewarded to Player A regardless of any incidental/accidental reveal of his surrendered hand.

To me this is a clear tabling of the hand if they happen to both land on their backs face up for all to see. I could definitely see a rule 1 to make it a dead hand though.

If you accidentally table your hand at showdown your hand is live. At least in any somewhat competently run card room.

Neat. That’s not what happened.

If people are happier with a player turning the cards over themselves, the dealer could hand them back for the player to flip them up again?

You invoked the comparison. A hand that is accidentally tabled by a player is live, despite clear intent by that player to relinquish it.

B wins.

It’s live because the player may recognize his mistake and claim he didn’t intend to muck and it would lead to problems. There’s no way to prove his intent to muck if the player flips it over even if accidentally. The fact that his hand was down on the table and the dealer flipped it when gathering the cards clearly shows the intent of the player to fold. It’s much less clear if the player himself flips them.

In every rule set I have ever seen a hand is defined as tabled when all cards dealt face down are placed faced up on the table and are able to be clearly read by the dealer and all players. There is no mention of intent in that definition nor is there mention of who must expose the cards for them to be tabled. Think of the case where a player discards (face down) and another player who is in the hand invokes IWTSTH. The dealer will expose the discarded hand, and that hand is now a tabled hand and will win the pot if it is the best hand. This shows that the dealer indeed can table a discarded hand.

If we accept that a player can properly table a hand accidentally when discarding it if he inadvertently flips the cards face up, and we accept that a dealer can table a hand (based on the IWTSTH case above) then it follows that a dealer, just like a player, can accidentally table a hand. The hand is tabled if the cards are exposed and clearly readable, not by virtue of the intent of the player or his actions. It makes no difference how or why the cards are exposed; a hand is tabled by solely by virtue of the fact that they are exposed.

A hand can be shown without being live, and in fact the IWTSTH is the classic case. If the winner of the hand askes, the hand is live, if anyone else askes the hand is 'tabled' but is not live and has no claim on the pot.

In all the posts above the language almost exclusively talks about the *player* tabling his hand. If in the scenario in OP the player managed to grab his cards after exposure and table them himself, I think he gets the pot. If the dealer has the presence of mind to grab them and bury them in the muck first, then B has not tabled his hand and A gets the pot.
My reasoning is that B's intent has clearly changed. B demonstrated his intent to relinquish his claim on the pot by discarding his cards for the dealer to muck them and thus remove them from play. Normally he will have no opportunity to change his mind before the cards are physically mucked. In this case due to dealer error he has that opportunity. If he is alert enough to take that opportunity he gets the pot, as they are still his cards until they are mucked. If the dealers gets them into the muck first his intent to muck is still his last action and that's what I rule on.