EPT EVENT ONE BARCELONA THREAD!!!

[Martin Aigner]

First situation: It happened in the second level, blinds 50/100. Player A moves all in on the river with a busted flush draw. Player B calls him. A taps his hand on the table, the way you do it as a typical nice-hand or nice-call gesture, you know what I mean. So obviously he was bluffing. Then he turned his and over and showed his K high. Player B looked at player A and saw him knocking on the felt. So he knew that his 2 pair were good. Now here comes the problem: B didn´t see that A turned his hand over, so B thought that A gave up the hand without showing his hand. Unfortunately B threw his hand away and it hit the muck. As soon as the dealer starts to push the pot to A, B cries that it was his pot and turns his hand, which was placed near the muck, over. Again: The hand did originally hit the muck. Obviously it was still clear though that these were his cards. The floorman was called and declared the hand of A dead. What´s your oppinion here? (BTW: I think the ruling was correct, but I´m not too sure whether the rule per se is good for poker. There might be some cases where the floorman should be able to declare a hand that hit the muck should still be live, like in this situation. On then other side: Making such a decission takes lots of sure instinct. Some floormen might be overtaxed). Of course he could have ruled in another way anyway, since he can decide against the rules in situations when it is good for the game (e.g. somebody want so shoot an angle obviously). BTW: Player B obviously wasn´t to excited about the ruling, but the took it like a real sport.

Second situation, it again involves player A from situation one: Since A doubled up in the hand above, he had about 18k. He got involved in this pot: A called in the CO (150), C raised to 300, I mucked the SB, BB called 150, A called 150. Flop: T76. BB bet 400, A called, C raised to 2k. BB mucked, A called 1600. Turn: T76-8. A bet some amount, C raised, A moved all in and C called. Both had very healthy stacks. Showdown: A: T8 (two pair), C T9 (straight). River was another 7 and C´s hand was good. Now here comes the problem. The dealer counted C´s stack, and since the stack included lots of small chips he used lots of space on the felt, moving the chips pretty close to A´s stack. After he finished he sayed the amount (in spanish) and started to count A´s stack, which had lots of 1K chips in it. Dealer recognized pretty fast that A had C coverd an pushed all the money to A. Nobody could do anything, since the dealer was way too fast and the chips were already so close side by side. Now obvisously a big cry from several players followed, since nobody expected the dealer to push the pot to the wrong player. It was a huge discussion, since C thought his all in bet contained more chips than the amount the dealer counted, but finally, after reconstructing the pot including flop action and taking the amount that the dealer counted they both agreed that this should be correct. The settling of this problem took 15 minutes!!! And this is a tourney with 1-hrs rounds. Since right before this hand occured half the field went to dinner I asked the floorman if it wasn´t possible let our table go for break as well and come back and play with the other tables. (Half the tables went to dinner while the rest played for 60 minutes, and then the first group came back and the rest went to break. After that all played together again). I thought that everybody would agree that this would be a smart decission (I much rather have only 45 minutes to eat dinner than to play only 3/4th of the limit), but actually pretty much nobody agreed with me :-))) No big deal though.

Situation three. Again player A was involved (he was "innocent" in all three situations!!!): Due to the second pot his stack was crippled. He was down to 4k and got involved in a pot with player C again. On the flop C bet out 500 and A moved his stack all in. Now his stack didn´t contain any yellow 1k chips, which were very well distinguishable from the other chips. Actually the 25 chips and the 500 chips look a bit similar (at least for me, but I´m colourblind... [img]/images/graemlins/blush.gif[/img] ). Now here´s the problem: C obvioulsy didn´t think that A still had 4k left, since he didn´t have any yellow chips. Of course he should have known A´s stacksize anyway due to the discussion in hand two, but that´s not the point. So after A moved in C sayed lloud and clearly (I sat right to the dealer in seat 10, C in seat 9 and A in seat 8):"I call, count it please." The dealer started to count and suddenly C realised that he wasn´t even close to being pot commited. After some deliberation (about 30 seconds) he mucked his hand. During the time C took to make his decission A looked a me in a questioning manner. I clearly heard C say "call", but decided not the say anything for several reasons: 1) It´s mainly the responsibility of the dealer to take care of things like that. 2) I didn´t want to get involved here, since I thought that I would become the bad boy of the table here. I´m not too sure about that now, but that was the way I felt right at he moment when it happened. 3) If A would have said something to the dealer, I would have been his ear witness. But since A didnt do nothing more than looking in a curious way, I didn´t want to be the first to open up his mouth. So finally the dealer pushed the pot to A. After the hand was over I told C loudly that probably everybody on the table knew that he shot an angle, but he denied anything. He said that I misunderstood him. He didn´t say "call, count the chips" but "fold". I then explained to him that he didn´t really want to make us believe that he would say "fold, count his chips". He just laughed it off. What an [censored] this guy was. Anyway, I´m not too sure what my play was here.

Any thoughts?

Martin Aigner