PLO 5/5 live: Mistake or Angle (+ floor ruling)

Your cards are you receipt. Don't let go of them before the pot is pushed to you.

That is the letter of the law ruling. Hard to complain about it.

Having said that, As floor I am using rule 1 to give pot to second guy to discard with a stern warning, and warning other player not to angleshoot.

Kitn to dealer. Kill discarded hands promptly, and do not kill winning hand until pot is pushed. That is SOP for a reason.

I prefer to learn my lessons on really small pots...

Dealer made a horrible mistake and like dinesh if i were the floor I would rule in favor of player B getting the pot because at best what Player A did is an angle.

Also as a rule in some rooms Player B doesn't actually have to show his hand if Player A mucks. If the rule in this room is that Player B has to show his winning hand then the Dealer's mistake is horrible twice because he never should have allowed Player B to muck his hand.

Personally I never will muck my hand unless the Dealer has put all other mucked hands into the muck pile. I think I have mentioned this before but one time in a WSOP tournament the Dealer wouldn't move the mucked hand into the muck pile even after i asked him to twice. So I called the Floor over and the Floor instructed the Dealer to move the mucked hand into the muck pile. At that point I pushed my hand forward and accepted the pot.

Lots of KsITN to be given out here.

KITN to dealer for mucking the hand of the second guy to muck first.
KITN to floor for not giving the pot to the guy who mucked second... or a second KITN to the dealer for not explaining the order of events correctly, maybe both.
KITN to B for mucking before getting the pot. Even though A mucked first and B *should* get the pot, wait till you get it and A's hand is killed before you do the same.

A could be angling or just realized he at least wanted to see B's hand. Either way, KITN for the way he went about it.

Either way, my foot hurts now.

a) what is kitn??? even chatgpt could not help with that one ;-))
b) player another session with that guy, and the way he acted and behaved throughout makes me sure now, he was angling ... just fits alltogether to nicely.

I've seen rulings go against a player when they say, "You win" at showdown and it causes the other player to muck their hand.

Angle for sure.
Made possible by the dealer.
However B could/should have waited for the pot, to give up his cards.

Ban A, fire dealer, scold B but give him or her the pot

I didnt 100% follow all of this, but this is why I ALWAYS table my hand, especially at PLO in big pots. If a player mucks his hand, I feel he has somewhat brought it on himself if he gets screwed. If a player angles him into mucking, then he just got angled. He should have tabled his hand. If he wants to hide information, he could table it for a second before tossing it, and then it can go the cameras if it has to. The angling player should then get kicked out if it's clear he's being purposefully deceptive, or derided by the table until he self deports himself from it.

Your idea of flash table is bad. First don’t depend on the cameras for reading a hand. Since you will never see the images, you never know if the camera actually got a good image or not. Not every place has good cameras, with good lighting that are well aimed and focused.

More important a properly tabled hand isn’t tabled to show the camera. It is to allow hand to be read. Face up, on the felt visible so dealer and players can read the hand. If your process doesn’t allow this reading, have you actually tabled?

You may get away with what you describe 99 times, but very possible the 100 time the floor will simply declare you did not properly table the hand.

Mid and high stakes player pools are small enough that you should know the angle shooters. Low stakes the player pool isn’t catching and effectively using that tiny bit of info. But if someone is watching that close and using the data, you did not hide it from them.

Floor ruling does not cut it.

First - a ruling that the entire pot goes to player B would be fine - or maybe the floor should look at the video. That allows floor to say A's hand was dead and be improperly retrieved his cards from the muck.

If floor does not award the pot to B, it should compensate B in some way. Its completely unacceptable from dealer, and B might have a case the room violated gaming laws.

And yes, this is obviously an angle. Otherwise A would say, push him the pot, he can just tell mr what he had. Or even, let the pot be pushed to him, then immediately hand it to the other player.

Under tight rules enforcement the only way A could hand pot to B is if A was leaving the game.

[Rule #1 has entered the chat.]

Sure, but in mid-stakes games its not an issue if the table is cool with it.

Floor stopping this from happening is the type of ruling that alienates players forever.

And Player A absolutely should leave the game if its the only way he is allowed to return the pot to its rightful owner. That or pay 5k to the other player out of his pocket (still not a great outcome, since B may not want to put that money on the table).

But this floor already ruled per strict interpretation wo any penalty to A. We already decided A is an angle shooter.

So now we expect the same floor to support another rule violation, one he could avoid with a simple rule #1 decision. Then the angle shooter has to voluntarily return winnings received because he is an angle shooter who did this specifically to profit. Yep I am counting on that.

As to out of his pocket. Always an option, but B choosing to keep out of play is very minor diff since the original 5k is still in play just a different stack. But again, you are asking an angle shooter who successfully shot an angle to voluntarily give up his success but leave that money at risk. Seems even less likely.

How is this the letter of the law ruling? What rule exactly?

This may be the worst ruling I've ever seen.

But the OP seems to have left out part of the story. It says A wanted to see B's hand, not that he asked to be awarded the pot.

Hands that are identifiable and recoverable at showdown are live.

Neither player tabled a hand.

Dealer mucked one player's hand, other player took his identifiable and recoverable hand back, and now has the only live hand at showdown.

Seems like showdown was already over to me. And it's the dealer's fault that he mucked the wrong hand first.

The problem is, if it's not safe for player B to release his cards at the point when he does, when exactly is it safe? If every player acts like Mr. Rick does, the game will slow down to a crawl. If you want to ever move on to the next hand without calling a floor, you have to allow the winning player to release his cards without the possibility of the pot being given to someone else on a technicality.

Once there was a similar hand to this one posted here, but the river was checked, and there was actually a 3rd player who still had cards, but everyone forgot about him. The showdown happened all cards were mucked, the pot was pushed, and then player C finally spoke up and said he still had cards.

Should player C be awarded the pot just because he had the last live hand? I sure don't think so, but your rule seems to suggest that he would.

If you don't make a claim for the pot very quickly, you should not be eligible to win the pot. In the OP, player A waited far too long to make a claim for the pot. In fact it took so long that OP forgot to include it in his post.

I have never once release my hand before the pot was pushed to me. Doesn't slow down the game at all.

But the OP doesn't actually say whether or not the pot has been pushed, and that isn't part of the rule mentioned by dinesh.

You "should" wait for two things before releasing your cards at showdown if you think you deserve the pot (especially if you have not tabled your hand, but even if you have, to avoid having to go to the cameras which may or may not happen or be good enough to read your hand):
(1) wait for the dealer to kill all other hands
(2) wait for the dealer to push the pot to you

It is SOP for the dealer to do both of these things before killing your hand, but not all dealers follow procedure all the time, so to protect yourself you need to protect your hand until he has done so. I mentioned a KITN to the dealer for not doing these things in my original response. Yes, it is the dealer's fault, but you're the one who is going to suffer the consequences in the hand, so protect yourself.

If you don't want to do that, whether it's because it will slow the game down, or for any other reason, well, that's up to you to decide. But if you want to avoid situations like this one, then it's what you have to do.

I will admit that I don't always do these things exactly either, but that is the tradeoff I am making with my cards and my money. If things went wrong like they did here, I would argue my case, try to get a rule 1 ruling, but in the end I would understand why the floor might rule the other guy was the only one with a live hand and award him the pot, because that is the letter of the law.

In that other post you mentioned, which I vaguely recall, the third players cards were hidden or somehow invisible to everyone else at the table. IIRC he didn't even act on the river. Which is another error by both the dealer and the other players, you should all be aware of how many people are still in the pot, but so be it. The dealer (probably) killed all the other hands he knew about, then pushed the pot, then killed the winner's hand. Only then did the last player speak up. Yes, it is similar to this situation, but it differs in several key, important details, most importantly that in this case everyone in the hand knew about and could see both players hands sitting on the table, and also that in the other case the guy had hidden cards and didn't protect his action from river to showdown.

In this situation, the guy expecting the pot should know he hasn't tabled, and should retain control of his cards until both the losers (one of which is sitting in the center of the table in plain view) are killed and the pot is being pushed his way. He waited for neither. (I am assuming the pot had not yet been pushed, since as you say it was not mentioned. Even if it had been, as Mr. Sir demonstrated before, you are within your rights to ask the dealer to kill that hand first. It's slightly weird, but this post is the reason why you can/should do so.)