Who Wins the Pot?

The most important area covered by the rules of poker is who wins the pot. As most of you know, there is no such thing as a single set of poker rules that is generally accepted by the poker community. Each cardroom has a set of laws governing within its walls like an ancient city-state. However, there are several rules that are in such widespread use that they are generally accepted.

I recently received an E-mail from a reader concerning a hand that was played in which there was a controversy over who really won the pot. I think this type of situation is a recurring problem, and is worth discussing. It involves the typical situation in which a hand that appears to have been mucked is alleged to be superior to a hand that is still lying faceup on the table. Here is the E-mail, edited to conceal the identity of the player and cardroom involved:

"I called a raise with a pocket pair, hoping to flop a set, and caught a lucky flop; I had bottom set and my main opponent had top two pair, queens and tens. Naturally, the betting was heavy and created a big pot. Diamonds came on the turn and river, putting a possible backdoor flush on the board. At the showdown, I declared the set and showed my hand. My opponent said, 'Nice hand,' obviously conceding. He showed his cards and then turned them over. The dealer mucked his cards, and I waited for the sweet pot. But first, another player said to my opponent that he may have had a flush. The Q and 10 were pulled from the dead-card stack. My opponent claimed them as his. I did not notice his cards previously, because he had conceded. "Knowing" that you can't reclaim dead cards, I considered the pot mine. Then, the bickering started, and a floorperson was called. Two players at the table said the Q 10 belonged to my opponent. The floorperson told the dealer to muck my cards and give the pot to my opponent, claiming that the best hand wins. I always thought the best live hand won."

The writer wanted my take on this situation. My answer is far from simple, because so many components apply to what occurred, and each is capable of changing the proper winner of the pot. So, I will take a close look at each component in the decision.

The first thing we should realize is that a hand that has been put into the muck can still win the pot under certain circumstances. Otherwise, there would be too many times that the dealer made a mistake and deprived the rightful player of winning. It is too heavy a burden to place on a player that he physically defend his cards until he actually gets the money. Particularly in hold'em, where the table is large and the dealer tries to center the winning hand where all can see it, we cannot require that a player prevent his winning hand from being handled by anyone else. So, it is necessary to look at each individual situation and do the right thing.

One showdown rule that is pretty universal is that the winning hand must be shown to the whole table before something bad happens to it. If a player shows it to the person next to him, or even to the dealer, and then throws it into the muck before it's shown to the table, the hand really is dead beyond retrieval. (In the situation discussed, the hand was shown to the table before being mucked.)

The next question is how the hand got into the muck. If the dealer reached out and grabbed it, then put it in the muck before the player realized the dealer's intent, this would be an obvious case of the hand not being killed beyond redemption. Even if the player was unaware that he had a winner, I do not believe this should make a difference. How does a player prove that he knew he had the best hand – or an opponent prove that the hand's owner did not?

Less clear is when the player had thrown his own hand into the muck. Some cardrooms have a line drawn marking the central part of the table, and say that a hand thrown away over this line is a dead hand. There is also the issue of whether an opponent influenced such an action by miscalling his hand (and it can be hard to know whether the hand was miscalled unintentionally or with malice aforethought). Most cardrooms will give a player the pot if he had the best hand, even if he thought he had a loser and threw it away. Evidently, this was the policy in the cardroom where the incident occurred.

There are also different degrees of a hand being mucked. A hand can come in contact with the discards yet still be "identifiable." Normal cardroom policy is to not consider mere contact with the discards as sufficient to prevent a hand from coming back to win the pot. In other cases, a hand can be put into the discards in such a manner that there is no chance of knowing what was thrown away. Naturally, life being what it is, there are annoying shades of gray in between identifiable and unidentifiable.

The modern trend in ruling whether a hand is alive or dead is to strain to give the best hand the money. So, in most places, even if a hand had been put into the muck in such a manner that it was not identifiable, the player would get the money if it could be verified that he had shown down the best hand. But how does one prove this?

One of the most unreliable ways to verify what a player had is to listen to one or two of the other players declare what they saw. Even when the player testifying was pure of heart, I have witnessed many occasions when someone thought he saw something and was mistaken. Even in a court of law, where someone is under oath, there are plenty of mistakes made by eyewitnesses. Typically, in the type of situation described, one or two people think they saw something, and the rest of the players either did not notice what happened or are unwilling to get involved. Sometimes, the dealer's testimony can be erroneous as well, even though he is more likely to at least be impartial. What should we do?

If there is any questionable part of the situation we have described, it is the fact that the floorperson took testimony from one or two people, awarded the pot, and considered the incident settled. I find this to be a frequent way of handling such a situation – and it's a reprehensible one. Why take the word of a player when you can verify exactly what the hand was by consulting the overhead camera? It is rare to find a public cardroom that does not have such a device, so it should be used.

Why isn't an overhead camera considered the proper way to settle a dispute as to what a player held? There are several reasons:

1. Lots of people incorrectly think an eyewitness is a sufficiently reliable source of information.

2. The floorperson wants to get the situation over with quickly. (It's too bad that accuracy is not considered to be much more important than speed.)

3. The cardroom rules do not make it clear that a pot can be impounded for a while until the overhead camera can be used to settle a dispute. (Note that my own rule set, "Robert's Rules of Poker," specifically allows impounding a pot for this purpose.)

4. Security personnel are not as cooperative with the cardroom as they should be. The only way around this problem is for someone higher up in the casino hierarchy to make it clear to security that settling such a dispute is important to customer relations and part of their job.

Consulting the overhead camera should be a standard procedure when the identity of a poker hand is in question and needs to be properly determined in order to award the money to the right person. Let's use the high-tech equipment available instead of rushing to judgment.