WWYD? Another home game SNAFU...

[Pac1982]

I had an unusual issue in a league game, and I wasn't sure how to rule:

The tourney had progressed to one of the later rounds, blinds are very high, over 50% of the shortest stack and only 10% or so of the big-stacks. Big blind is shortstack, Small blind raises to double the big-blind, big-blind does a quick count of his stack and says "call, I'm all-in for less", as he had less than the raised amount of chips left. The cards are flipped, the board is dealt, the small blind wins the hand, big blind is eliminated.

As the chips are being handed over, however, the big-blind noticed he actually had more chips than he thought (purple chips buried in black chip stacks, but not "hidden", per-se, just a few chips that got mixed in). It turned out he had about 50% more chips left than the original call required, in fact the actual amount he had was more than the small blind had, so he wasn't actually even the short-stack at all.

We all agreed the big-blind was out of the game, no argument there (he thought he was all-in, and if he knew he had more chips, he would still have moved them all-in), but I had a hard time ruling what to do with the remaining "extra" chips (4 players left, top 3 paid, that many chips could make a potentially big difference to the outcome). Everyone said the winner of the hand should get them, but I wonder what would happen if the big blind won the hand instead of the small blind. For example if I thought someone was all-in with 4000 chips against me with about 6000 chips left and I lost the hand, only to find out my opponent actually had 6500 chips, I seriously doubt I would be happy about being eliminated when I only agreed to rish 2.3s of my stack. I was in for 4000 chips, and if I lose, I'm only gonna pay 4000 chips... By the same token, if I'm only risking 4000, should I then be allowed to win 6000 'cos the other guy didn't realize he had 50% more than he thought he did? That was my that was my argument, anyway.

So my solution was to remove the offending chips from the game completely, or at the very least, the 5 purples (T2500) should be swapped for 5 blacks (T500), as all-present believed they actually were. But everyone was against me on this one, especially the winner of the hand.

In the end, I stopped arguing and the chips stayed in play, all being awarded to the winner of the hand, who got a huge undeserved windfall on that hand IMO, and an unfair advantage over the remaining players...

Obviously this could/should have been avoided by a proper chip-count before the cards were turned over, we all know we screwed that up...

But What should we have done with those "unearned" chips?