Contracts and Poker: A Study in Ambiguity

A tournament director sent me the following question:

“With blinds at 1,500-3,000, it was folded around to the player in the small blind, who announced ‘5,000 more.’ There was then some discussion around the table as to what the bet should be. I seem to remember one of your past articles about what to do when a player does not state clearly what he means. If you could clarify this for me I would really appreciate it.”

This question presents a great opportunity to review what the TDA Rules say and how contract law can help fill in the gaps in the rules. Before you read on, if you were the TD, what would you decide in this situation and more importantly, why? Let’s make it a multiple choice question. I think the most likely responses are:

A. 8,000
B. 6,500
C. 6,000
D. It is not a meaningful statement and the player can restate it however he wishes.

The starting point for analysis is TDA Rule 3, which describes the official betting terminology (e.g., “fold,” “call,” “raise”) and then warns: “It is the responsibility of players to make their intentions clear: using non-standard terms or gestures is at the player’s risk and may result in a ruling other than what the player intended.” The worst thing the TD could do is to ask the player what he or she intended. Poker, like contracts, finds meaning in a party’s “objective manifestations,” not in the subjective contents of their minds. So let’s start with those manifestations.

The player obviously used non-standard terminology when he said, “5,000 more.” Because his statement is ambiguous, it is up to the floor to determine the meaning. The most recent revision to TDA Rule 1 tells the floor to use “common sense” in making rulings that are not covered by the rules. I think this is equivalent to the contract law rule that you supplement the contract with terms that are reasonable under the facts and circumstances.

In these facts and circumstances, I think the word “more” reasonably indicates an intention to raise. The question then becomes, how much should the raise be? Was he saying “more than the 1,500 I already have committed” or “more than the 3,000 bet to me?’ It seems to me that the reasonable player is raising the amount of the bet to him. Since the bet to him was 3,000, I think it would be reasonable to add the “5,000 more” to that amount and conclude that it was a bet of 8,000.

But wait – there’s more! Another approach that contract law sometimes follows is to interpret an ambiguity against the one who caused it. The TDA rules often follow this approach by determining that an ambiguous bet is the lesser amount. For example, if the bettor says, “raise 5,000,” this is interpreted as a raise to a total of 5,000 rather than a raise of 5,000 more. Since this bettor did not make his intentions clear, you could interpret it against him by ruling that he had raised the lesser amount of 6,500. This ruling has the advantage of being fairer to the other players, who might be more likely to call a smaller raise. However, in my opinion, this rule should only be used as a tiebreaker when all the other alternatives are equally reasonable. Here, as explained above, I think the 8,000 interpretation is more reasonable.

There are at least two other possible approaches. If “more” means “raise,” you could interpret “5,000 more” as if he had said “5,000 raise.” According to Rule 46B, when a player says raise and an amount, that is the total bet. In this situation, when the amount of the bet he faces is 3,000, a raise to a total of 5,000 would be short of the minimum raise, but since his raise of 2,000 is more than half of a raise, it would be considered a raise to 6,000 under Rule 46A.

Alternatively, you could determine that he had raised, but since the amount of the raise is not clear, it is regarded as a min-raise to 6,000. My local cardroom does something like this when a player leads out with a bet of 5,000 on the turn and then on the river says “same bet” and tosses in a 5,000 chip. The floor rules that “same bet” is a non-standard term and concludes that it is a minimum bet – if the blinds were 300-600, this could be a bet of 600! While it is true that “same bet” is non-standard, I think when Rule 3 says that a non-standard bet “may result in a ruling other than what the player intended,” it means this result may occur if there is no reasonable basis for determining what the player meant.

In the facts and circumstances described, I think there is a reasonable basis for concluding that “same bet” means “the same bet I made on the turn.” As a parenthetical, I wonder how that floor would rule when Scotty Nguyen pushes his chips forward and says, “All you can eat baby!” But if you agree with that logic, in our situation it could be ruled a raise to 6,000. And again, this ruling benefits the other players and “punishes” the bettor for causing the ambiguity. In the situation we are analyzing, this would not be a bad result.

So in interpreting this ambiguous language, the TD has a lot of discretion. While my preference is for Answer A, 8,000, Answer C, 6,000, is a close favorite, and both of the others have some support. But the lesson for poker players and for parties to a contract is clear – avoid ambiguity and use standard language to avoid having someone have to decide what you meant by the words you used. ♠

Scott J. Burnham is the retired Curley Professor of Commercial Law at Gonzaga Law School in Spokane, Washington. He can be contacted at [email protected]. This column is adapted from his article, A Transactional Lawyer Looks at the Rules of Tournament Poker, which was published in Gaming Law Review and Economics.