I have a question about what should happen in a particular situation I was in recently. I was playing in one of the WSOP deepstacks on Sunday and something happened that I hadn't seen before.

I am in a hand with 1 opponent. I have A/8 and I don't recall the flop but the Turn is an ace giving me top pair. My opponent bets, I call. The dealer collects the chips for the pot, burns a card and then somehow manages to accidentally flip over 4 cards from the deck face up. She shows us the exposed cards 8/6/8/2. 8 would have been the river. She discards those cards and uses the next card as the river which is a 10 which just happens to give my opponent two pair which pips out my top pair, when the river should have given me two pair.

It was a small pot and in the 1st level of the event so no big deal really. But I wonder did the dealer do the correct thing? Should she have made the river the card it should have been and just showed us the 3 exposed cards behind? Instead she discarded all 4 and drew the 5 card as the river. What's the correct thing to do here for a dealer?

Unless there's some weird rules going on for the series that I'm not aware of, she should instantly call the floor in this situation. Swift kitn for trying to rectify the situation on their own.

And after that, I believe that if we 'know' which card is supposed to be the river, we use that card. Otherwise we take all 4 cards that she flipped up, shuffle them and use one of them at random since we still have the best chance at having the natural river come out.

I think it always goes back in, even if "we know". Not saying this will ever actually happen, but now you're relying on the dealer saying "No, this is definitely the correct river" if they somehow know it's a card their friend needs while saying "Hmmmm, I'm not entirely sure" if it's a brick.

I don't believe we would ever truly know which card was the original river, but I agree with this ruling.... and the KITN, but welcome to the WSOP; a lot of the dealers are bad.

More new than bad.

Dealer should have called the floor. Unless it was very clear which was supposed to be the river, the floor would likely have her scramble the 4 cards and pick one at random.

Just to be sure - are you certain those 4 cards were from the top of the stub and not random cards from the muck? The cards there are very light and it doesn't take much to flip them.

My understanding is that the exposed cards should go back into the deck, and the deck is reshuffled. It doesn't make a lot of sense to just discard them

"My banking website is more bloated, sluggishly slow, and extremely vulnerable to user data theft than bad."

The bold is what should have happened. However, if it was me and we weren't sure what card should be the river I would have the dealer shuffle the 4 cards in with the stub and deal a new river. I'm not opposed to picking one of the four, but prefer to shuffle all here.

Absolutely not. Either pick the correct river if it's known, or shuffle the four cards and select one of those.

Very interesting. I have not heard of reshuffling just the exposed cards, but it makes some sense. I guess I was thinking of the procedure for a prematurely dealt card.

It would depend on exactly what happened. I think it is possible for it to happen in a way where it is clear which card is the river. But i suspect that if it happened in that way the dealer would have just used that card as the river and treated it as though the extra cards were exposed accidentally after the river

Curious as to why you would shuffle the four cards back into the stub and reshuffle if we were 100% sure the original river was one of the four exposed cards?

How does it enter her head to discard the cards of which one is guaranteed to be the actual river? Like, one of these is sure to be the river, let's discard and make sure it isn't.

I think this is just the way my brain works, but it goes like this:

If we are going to give "the actual river card" and equal chance at showing back up then it should have the same chance as all the rest of the cards and not just those other 3 that also got exposed. The case at hand brings up a good reason why since two of the exposed cards were 8's. Now there's a 50% chance that it will be an 8 which is considerably different than if we used all the cards. If we aren't sure which card it was then my brain says we should make it a completely random card instead of one of only four. The fact that the original river card is of those four means cocka to me.

Like I said, I wouldn't have a problem with just using the 4 that were exposed, but that's just not how I would do it.

Except we know that those 4 cards were actually the one cards that could have been the river card. In that case wouldn't it be completely insane to reshuffle those cards or even discard them?

I mean no information has been given since the turn action was completed. The river card should be the river card. This is no different from dealing the river card and then exposing 3 cards. You can't just shuffle these cards with the rest of the deck or even discard.

I think this line of thought would make more sense in the case of players still having decisions based on future cards such as if this occurred on the turn instead of the river. In the instant case though it doesn't matter that odds of one of these cards coming is now greater because there is no decision making coming based on the odds of a card coming.

Yes exactly. She started to flip over the 8 and then her hand hit the deck and flipped over 3 extra cards as well as the 8 which she was in the process of putting on the river

In the instant case we would be giving the river a 50% chance of being an 8 and the other 2 cards have 25%. Assuming suits don't matter.

I just rather make it more random if that is the idea. Like I said, I don't claim that to be 100% the correct way or only right way, but my brain works that way.