The Rules Guy: How To Conduct Yourself at the Poker Table

Most players learn poker’s explicit rules pretty quickly: the “one-chip rule,” for example, or “verbal declarations are binding.” But not everyone seems to have digested the game’s vast book of unwritten rules, admonitions like “don’t berate other players (particularly bad ones)” or “say ‘nice hand’ even when you mean something entirely different.”

Enter “The Rules Guy.” TRG believes that civility and sportsmanship are never wrong, and that bad behavior (even when you’re simply trying to get an edge) is bad for the game. Have you got a question about how to conduct yourself at the poker table? Email TRG at [email protected].

It’s Your Hand: Protect It

Dear The Rules Guy: 

The following happened to me at an Arizona casino. Deep in a tournament, I was in the big blind with a suited ace. As the hand began, another player threw his cards in the air striking me and falling partly on my cards. The dealer indicated he knew which were mine, but called the floor anyway. Ruling: I had to sacrifice my cards and my big blind. I was punished. The thrower was not. Am I wrong in feeling I was treated unfairly?

—Agitated in Arizona

Dear Agitated:

First, The Rules Guy thinks you are absolutely right to be agitated—but not at the floor. You should be agitated at the unthinking card thrower and, it must be said, at yourself.
In boxing, when he delivers his pre-fight instructions, the referee always says, “Protect yourself at all times.” Similarly, the poker player should protect his (or her) cards and chips at all times.

Most people learn this lesson as follows: They are seated in the one seat or the nine or ten seat, but fail to protect their cards. Then they watch with horror, and a profound sense of injustice, as the dealer scoops their cards and kills their hand. Lesson learned! Protect your cards.

Many players “cap” their cards with a chip or some more personal token (think Greg “Fossilman” Raymer’s fossils or Humberto Brenes’s ridiculous shark). And most players instinctively protect their cards during the deal, raising their fingers to corral the pitch and keep their cards inviolable. Had you done either, your opponent’s throw would have landed one or more of his cards on top of your card cap or fingers, with no ambiguity about which cards were yours and which were his.

Job done, problem solved.

Protecting your hand from the dealer seems less necessary if you’re seated in the middle seats, but regardless of where you sit, you should protect your cards for just the reason you describe, an overzealous mucker. If your cards are protected, it’s almost impossible to foul your hand.

In short, you weren’t treated unfairly. In fact, it’s hard to see how the floor could rule any other way. Your hand was fouled, and your hand was dead. As the Tournament Directors Association Rule no. 56 states, “Players must protect their own hands at all times. If a hand is fouled or a dealer kills a hand by mistake, the player has no redress and is not entitled to a refund of called bets.”

There is some real utility in this rule: If a fouled hand had “redress,” the potential for angle-shooting would be substantial. A bad egg in the small blind signals to his pal he doesn’t like his hand, and his buddy tries to deliberately foul the small blind’s hand in the hopes of getting another shot. Bad indeed.

The fact that you were in the big blind, and that you had a reasonable hand, surely made this sting a bit more—but the ruling against you was fair.

Your sin was one of omission, not commission, and you do deserve sympathy. But it was only unfair in the karmic sense—not in the rules sense. Still, your card-throwing opponent owes you an apology, and he should have been given a warning for his behavior (and a penalty if he did it again).

All’s Not Fair in Poker

Dear The Rules Guy:

It’s easy to see why we have rules against outright cheating or other forms of collusion, but why is angle-shooting so bad (assuming, of course, that it doesn’t violate a particular rule or is a form of cheating)? Poker is, after all, a game of deception; why can’t I be deceptive?

—Deceptive in Dallas

Dear DinD:

Deception is (generally) good, but deceit is always bad. You raise an excellent question, and one that The Rules Guy has spent many an hour pondering.

And recently, in a fit of sheer inspired genius, TRG had the answer. He scribbled it on a Post-It note, stuck it in a pocket, and pulled it out a few days later: “good v. bad.” That was the sole evidence of TRG’s aha! moment: “good versus bad.”

But TRG thinks he knows what TRG was thinking when TRG thought that.

The reasoning goes something like this. Let’s imagine a player is in a game and he wants a call or a fold—it really doesn’t matter which. And he constructs a small set of behaviors or actions that might convince his opponent to do what he wants. He might, for example, overbet the pot on the river when he wants a call, reasoning that the extra-large bet looks like someone who doesn’t want a call—thereby inducing a call. Or he might check to feign weakness or disinterest, hoping his opponent misreads him as weak and giving him the opportunity to check-raise.

Both of these are deceptions: perfectly legal and completely reasonable in the often unreasonable game of poker. These moves are unambiguously good (in a moral sense).

Now consider a different kind of deception: A player moves a stack towards the middle without saying anything. If his opponent in later position assumes it’s a bet and folds, the deceiver pretends he made a bet and takes the pot. If the opponent calls and tables a winner, the deceiver asserts he made no bet and mucks, taking the chips back.

This kind of deception is unambiguously bad. See the difference? In the first example, a player makes an unambiguous (overbet, checking), entirely legal move in order to deceive. In the second, a player makes a highly ambiguous move in order to sow confusion and profit from same.

While that particularly example is reasonably rare, the fact is that poker presents all kinds of opportunities for people to behave well and badly. Choose the path of the good. ♠