Cluster of a Hand (x-posted from Breakroom thread)

My opinion is that the dealer is slightly to blame, seat 2 and 3 also share a good chunk of blame. The dealer announced 2 players and tapped the table and no one spoke up.

I think the best possible ruling, though still rough, is all 3 players are all-in for 3400 and run it out, basically ruling their 1700s as sufficient to serve to call the announced 3400 bet, but no way to have future action occur.

dealer absolutely to blame - he knew something was fishy and instead of asking players what happened just went ahead and dealt

I had a little trouble following everything clearly because there is so much info. I'm not sure that assigning blame is really very relevant here. It was a weird confluence of events that created some accidental misinformation. Yes, dealer should keep an eye on the entire table at all times, but everyone is human and has only 2 eyes.

As floor: definitely do not misdeal. (Or void the hand, which is actually what it would be in this case.). Way too much action. As a general rule: misdeals only if caught before significant action, void the hand only if duplicate cards or wrong color cards are found mid deal.

Maybe I am missing something, but I tell the table the flop is going away and will be reshuffled into the stub and redealt. Then back it up to seat 2, action is 3400 to him, call, raise or fold. Then continue to seat three, 1700 more to him (unless 2 raised). Let action proceed normally from there. Then redeal the flop and continue if needed. Seat 6 is SOL he already folded, and shares his own responsibility for not knowing there were 3 in the hand too. (KITN for going through the muck to find his two 7s too, why the **** would you ever do that unless you were planning to let him play them?)

As an alternative, you could say that seat 2 undercalled and owes another 1700. Seat 3 did not get a chance to act on the raise, but you could also just force him to call the additional 1700 using rule 1. Then keep the flop and let seat 3 act on the flop as normal. Then deal the turn once action completes. But I don't like this quite as much because it feels more like freerolling, even though it logically is really not (unless 2 or 3 try to get out of paying the extra after seeing the flop).

Yeah, the questions at the end are from the OP, agree that blame is less interesting than the best possible outcome. My concern with your plan is the players have exposed certain factors about their hand already.

Also allowing seat 2 and 3 to re-litigate their preflop action with all the knowledge of what now happens behind them feels concerning.

No great options, which is why I was interested in player thoughts for sure!

I think the action got lost in the details.

Preflop - seat 8 opens to 3400, seat 2 throws out 1700 thinking he's opening, seat 3 throws out 1700 thinking he's calling seat 2's open, neither of them realize 8 put out 3400. Dealer sees the 2x 1700 and think it's a single call b/c 3 is hiding cards.

Flop - seat 8 checks, seat 2 checks, seat 3 now wants to bet surprising dealer who doesn't know he had cards.

So I ws saying when you said "it's to seat 2, call 3400, raise or fold" it was allowing him to re-decide preflop action, but I think you thought that was on the flop.

My concern about knowledge is the players know that the flop that came is one that the opener wants to check, seat 2 wants to check, and seat 3 wants to bet. So even though that flop isn't coming back, that does give information IMO.

My preference is make the pot right & play on. Let seat 3 have all options on flop since the scenario is changed quite a bit. Situation could have been avoided by anyone between seat 2 thru 7 paying just a little attention to the table, but mostly falls on 2 & 3 obviously.

I don't assign much if any blame to the dealer. Just consider how rare the scenario is : Player on one side of table (seats 1-3 or 7-9) raises to an amount. Dealer proves & announces that amount. Then 2 consecutive players on the other side, in order, raise to exactly half that amount and call it, with one of them holding their cards in their hand as dealer comes to bring the bet(s) in. And nobody notices.

I'm glad I wasn't the floor, because I had to think about this for a while to get it straight. I'm with Dinesh here. Treat 2 and 3 as under-calls. Force them to put in the other 1700. If the turn was exposed, even a little, treat it as premature. 6 gets a warning for telling everyone what he folded. 3 bets 3000 on the flop.

To be fair, he SUSPECTED something was fishy but could not figure it out.

Do you want to be judged on all of your weird intuition that have or have not worked out?

Again, as the OP, I am not trying to absolve the dealer. At some level he screwed up. Absolutely no frickin doubt. That said, I am pretty sure 90%+ of dealers screw up in this situation. A confluence of circumstances made it impossible to figure out what is going on. Assigning blame wasn't the point of the post. While it is certain at some level the dealer is to blame, it is also more than that. Going Nerd, it is a Kobayashi Maru situation.it is beyond assigning blame.

[QUOTE=dinesh;59231938]Maybe I am missing something, but I tell the table the flop is going away and will be reshuffled into the stub and redealt. Then back it up to seat 2, action is 3400 to him, call, raise or fold. Then continue to seat three, 1700 more to him (unless 2 raised). Let action proceed normally from there. Then redeal the flop and continue if needed. Seat 6 is SOL he already folded, and shares his own responsibility for not knowing there were 3 in the hand too. /QUOTE]

I am not trying to be argumentative. I fully recognize that there isn't a right answer to this. It is a messed up situation. Obviously everyone will come at this with different perspectives which will cloud their views and decisions.

I feel you are too easily dismissing the fact the fact that the button might have played differently given different information. Should he have known something was wrong? Perhaps. But that is no different than seat 2 and 3 should know something is wrong. Under your scenario, why do they (seat 2 and 3) get to correct their own mistakes and call and the button doesn't?

The point is, the hand has gotten so fuc..., er messed up, that any solution is going to favor someone over someone else, so is restarting the hand all that bad?

TBF, I am 99% sure the opener (Seat 8) wanted to check raise, not just check. He had AA and was hoping someone stabs at the pot so he could punish him. I don't want to get into strategy because that is not what this thread is about and besides, the opener wasn't generally following any acceptable strategy. He was a spastic, random player.

that's just repeating exactly what i said, i wasn't being unfair

The ruling typically is that the flop is taken aside to be redealt and Seat 2 gets to decide if they are calling the UTG open of 3400 or if they are folding and letting the 1700 stay in the pot. And then Seat 3 gets to decide if they are calling or folding preflop and their 1700 stays in the pot. All folds after stand. And I say typically in a funny way. After almost 20 years of playing tournament poker I have never seen the flop get dealt in a situation like this. Every time it has happened the dealer has required the players, who were unaware there was a raise greater than what they put in, to make a decision as to whether they were going to continue or not by calling or folding. Before the rules changed I was allowed one time to fold and take back what would have been my raise and sometimes when I play even now we allow a SB to take back what they assumed was a call of the BB when there was a raise out there.

Ultimately it doesn't matter how stupidly Seat 2 and 3 have been acting until now. It just explains why they find themselves in this situation. Maybe they will pay more attention moving forward. Maybe they won't. But it doesn't matter as to what is happening in the moment.

The alternative of assuming that both Seat 2 and Seat 3 were calling the bet because they threw out chips thinking Seat 2 was first to act is almost reasonable because it is extremely unlikely that they are folding after putting in half of the original raise in the pot that would have to stay if they fold. The other almost reasonable thing about it is that the Dealer dealt the flop and two players acted though one was a check. In my experience this would only count if 3 players check or two players do something that isn't a check and that didn't happen here... What is unreasonable is that it is likely the decision would be made to speed things up for the floor and the Dealer (just like the actual decision of calling it a misdeal). I don't like it because everyone has seen the flop and wouldn't object to this ruling if they like the flop. Similarly if one or two players don't like the flop then they would object because it would cost them another 1700 chips. And if the Tournament Director is ultimately called over the ruling will always be that the flop comes back and Seat 2 will get to choose whether to call preflop and Seat 3 will also get to choose.

The actual ruling is also outrageously bad because the original raiser is not allowed to play in the pot because of mistakes made by other players and the dealer. This won't be the last time that a dealer mistake will cost somebody a lot of chips but having it run out this way is really really bad.

The main difference is having a live hand in front of you versus one that is mucked & unretrievable.

Yes, any solution could "favor" somebody. Voiding the hand would likely favor multiple people. But if the ruling is standard & in-line with TDA and/or room rules, then it's not as if the floor is "choosing" someone to favor by ruling in that fashion. In some locations, electing to void the hand after so much action could be a breach of room rules, internal controls, and/or gaming rules.

I think it's pretty obvious actually that they should have to make the pot correct, meaning seat 2 and 3 put in the 3400, and seat 3 gets to act on the flop.

Don't really see any merit for anything else.

Haven't really looked at other responses yet.

In retrospect, I def agree with this, and I was allowing what happened after the floor ruled (people, including seat 8, revealing what they had) to influence what the initial ruling should have been in my mind.

Would have been a great chance for floor to use a bastardized version of the Effel to Sammartino line "If you're calling 17, you're calling 34"

Right, but....

I think there is also the issue of even with negating the flop and reshuffling and redealing it, you have given all active players lots of information about each other's hands.

We have all seen premature burn and turns on the turn or river where it is obvious some players liked the card and others did not. That is just one card. Here we have had a whole 3 card flop. That gives a whole lot of information about players hands. It isn't hard to imagine flops (such as a mono-suited flop) where lots of information about players action make their hands somewhat obvious (or at least greatly narrows the range). Or let's make it worse. Let's say seat 3 either quickly checked after seat 2 or intended to quickly check so he doesn't speak up about the premature burn and turn. Now everyone sees a turn as well before the dealer realizes the action was incorrect. Everyone is even deeper in the hand gaining lots of information about each other's hands only to reset everything to pre-flop?

That just seems like we are risking larger later errors in order to fix smaller earlier errors when a better solution is to just start all over.

Like I said, a mono-suited flop may make players act one way, to just redo the flop and have a different mono-suited flop comes out seems like it is begging for trouble.

At some point, players are going to have too much information about each other's hands to simply reset to pre-flop. Maybe it wasn't in this hand, but it wasn't far. Combine that with people acting with incorrect information pre-flop and I think we are risking major problems just to correct earlier problems.

No right answer.

I think the tone and nuance of what we said was very different.

As a poker player, you often make decisions based off of incomplete information. Oftentimes you have suspicions, but not enough evidence to act.

They grey area of deciding what to do with your instincts versus what you actually see is huge and leads to very different conclusions. I think you are being unfair by not acknowledging that.

Also, I agree with you on seat 3 being warned about not making his cards obvious. That said, situations like this, it often isn't an obvious problem until it is.

Prior to this hand, there wasn't any problem with seat 3 inadvertently hiding his cards. He was doing it, but it did not affect the action so no one really noticed it. What I mean by that was when I was playing against him, I knew just from pre-flop action (he put money out) that he was in the hand. So subsequently I wasn't really focused on how he held his cards. I was looking for his action or I was looking at his manner trying to get a read. Other players were the same way. Everyone knew when he was in the hand so there was no confusion so know one paid attention to how he was holding his cards.

You are theoretically corrct, but it was only after it caused a problem did anyone realize he had been doing it.

he is not playing poker, he's doing his job - terrible analogy

Triple? I count 10.

I am a bit tired right now, but I don't understand why you are mentioning redealing the flop. I certainly wasn't advocating that. I agree with the last few posters, that the chips should be made correct but there should be no changes in the cards or other action. Get more chips from seats 2 and 3, action is now on seat 3.