Shouldn't The Dealer Know the Rules Better than I Do?

This was from a session last month in Vegas, the one “notable” hand in another one of my bad sessions from that trip.

Same old same old as far as the poker went, at least in regards to result.  But I caught a dealer error that I want to talk about.  By correcting the dealer, I may have cost myself a few bucks, but I figured that out only in hindsight.

I had only been at the table for a few hands, so I still had my original $200 stack.  Now, I don’t want to publically embarrass the dealer or identify the dealer in anyway.  So even tho this dealer has a “blog name,” I’m not going to reveal it.  All I will say is that this dealer has been working full time in my favorite room since I started playing there, and has dealt me a shitload of cards over the years.  So the dealer should know all the house rules, right?  And know them better than I do, right?

In early position I had Ace-King offsuit.  The guy in front of me raised to $7 and I called.  As I’ve mentioned a bunch of times, I rarely three-bet with A-K and since I had just sat down and didn’t recognize anyone (except the dealer), I wasn’t about to change things up there.

One other player called and we saw a flop of Ace-9-7, two hearts.  My King was a heart and the Ace on the board was a heart, so I had the back-door nut flush draw in addition to top pair, top kicker.  The preflop raiser bet $20 and we both called.

The turn was an 8, and it wasn’t a heart.  The preflop raiser put out $50.

Well, I thought about folding.  No chance for the flush, how much do I want to invest on a TPTK hand, with a possible flush coming and perhaps already a made straight?  And I didn’t know anything about the other players in the hand. But I talked myself into calling.  This was probably just one of the many very bad decisions I made this trip.  My thought at the time was, “It’s just too weak to fold there.”  But I think I confused “weak” with “sensible.”

Anyway, the last guy puts all his chips out—a total of $81. Uh oh.

The preflop raiser announces raise and I know there’s no way he can raise.  His bet wasn’t raised by a full bet.  All he can do is call.

The dealer didn’t say anything and the player hadn’t committed to a specific raise amount yet, he was counting his chips.

I wasted no time in telling the dealer, “He can’t raise there….it’s not a full bet.”

At first the dealer agreed.  “He’s right, the bet wasn’t enough……”

But while the player was questioning it, the dealer was thinking and then came up with a “correction.” 

“He can raise, the bet was $50, the raise was $31, that’s more than half, so he can raise.”  So the dealer not only didn’t get the rule right, but is bad at math, at least initially.

This topic has been covered a few times here, most notably in the post here.  The dealer was using the rule from limit poker for this no-limit game.  The dealer totally confused the two.

What was odd was that although I used to play limit there all the time when I was starting out in poker, I know for a fact that they hadn’t spread a limit hold’em game there in at least a year, and probably longer.  So how the dealer could still be thinking of the limit game rules is beyond me.

Of course, in that discussion of the rules of limit vs. no-limit, it was pointed out that there may be some poker rooms that use the limit game interpretation for no-limit.  But I was 99.999% certain that wasn’t the case for this room.

I explained to the dealer why that ruling was incorrect, and that it is different for no-limit.  I should have asked the dealer when the last time they had a limit game there where it could have come up, but I didn’t.

The dealer, at that point, did not argue with me, to the dealer’s credit. “Wait, wait….now I’m confused…..I’ll get the floor.”  The dealer saw the shift manager in the vicinity and called him over.  The dealer accurately reported the situation and the shift boss gave the exact same ruling that I had said.  The first player could only call the raise.  I was still shocked that a veteran dealer could make such a mistake, but then, we’re all human, right?

When the shift manager left, I started wondering if I hadn’t just been arguing against self-interest.  Had I let the player raise, I surely would have found a fold. Any raise would have have pretty much been for all my remaining chips and at that point, it would have been pretty obvious I was beat.

It still was….but for the size of the pot, and with my call closing the action, I didn’t see how it made any sense to fold for $31.  So I did indeed call.

The river was another 7, and to my surprise, the preflop raiser, who wanted to raise on the turn, announced “check.”  I was only too happy to check behind.  The all-in guy showed Ace-7 for a boat.  The first guy didn’t really show his hand but I managed to catch a quick glance at it and he had Jack-10 for the straight. 

As I said, my session didn’t get any better and I left down some money and wondering why I paid $31 to prove I knew the rules better than a long-time dealer.

Well now, this is a pretty short post by my standards, so I better put some filler in here.  Just the other day, I was shocked to find out that a lot of people enjoy looking at pictures of large-breasted women.  So I’ll fill this out with a few pics of same.  Enjoy.