What happens to the $210?

[soah]

[ QUOTE ]
I don't see how Rick doesn't get the 210.

This needs to be simplified.
A. A verbal declaration was made and affirmed by the player who made the call.
B. it is the players responsibility to protect their hand from getting fouled. Period.
The dealer should not have been able to put the hand in the muck if it had been protected PROPERLY.

[/ QUOTE ]

It was not established that the player had announced a call until after his hand had been folded. While verbal declarations may be binding, they have to be understood by the dealer to mean anything. I can't count how many times a player has said something and the dealer responds "Did you say [call/check/raise]?" and waits for confirmation before accepting the action. In this case the dealer believed that the player had folded, and mucked his hand, which was irreversable (sp?). A player cannot call and fold at the same time, and folding is what happened here. After he folds, he cannot call. The merits of my argument are possibly debatable, but I don't think there is any doubt that it's not in the best interest of the game for him to be forced to call here without cards. About the only time I think that he should be forced to pay off the bet is if Rick has the nuts on the river, or has a made straight flush or quads or something else which leaves his opponent drawing dead no matter what two cards he has. Otherwise, there will always be an element of doubt as to who would have won the pot. In the long run, the guy who was trying to call will often have had the winner and got screwed out of the pot here. Forcing him to give up more money simply compounds the problem.

wrt protecting hands, it's true that players are responsible for protecting their cards. However, dealers are not supposed to muck any unprotected hands (by this I refer to cards which are not out in the middle of the table - dealers should only be mucking the cards that appear to have been folded). Players are supposed to protect their cards to protect themselves from dealer error. If a player leaves his cards uncovered, and the dealer mucks them, then the dealer has made a mistake which the player could have prevented, which the player has no recourse against. The player does not "deserve" to have his hand mucked just because he doesn't protect it as he should.