Man it's late.....

[MSPChris]

OK I just got done watching an old episode of CSI, and there's a high-stakes NL game at the start of the episode.

Guy drops dead before he can call a huge AI bet.

What happens to the pot??

(Dead guy had the nuts, BTW...)

I see that a lot of the regulars here work in Vegas -- anything like that ever happen to any of you?

(My favorite forum on 2+2 -- I umpire amateur baseball all summer and the rules questions in this forum are my favorite.)

[oddjob]

he didn't call? then he has no right to the pot.

[StevieG]

Treat it like he was all-in for the amount bet so far.

Pure speculation on this part:

Floor counts chips, writes note, holds amount in escrow and asks police to notify next of kin and that they have only so long to act.

[bav]

Seems to me the next of kin don't necessarily have a right to the money. The money has to go to the man's estate to be divided according to his will or the intestate laws of the state. If you just hand the cash over to his wife/daughter/father/whatever, you have no idea if it will be properly handled.

So I'd guess the "correct" thing is the casino impounds it and waits for the executor of the estate to show up with notarized whozits to make a claim. Or perhaps turns it over to some government agency that does the same thing, though I cannot think of any appropriate agency other than the state treasury. And it gets perhaps more entertaining if the guy dies in Nevada but his home state is elsewhere.

Of course, the guy probably isn't going to be pronounced in the casino. So paramedics will come and start CPR and transport him. He's still legally alive until a doctor says he ain't. So they probably should transport the money with him, no? Making it the hospital's problem.

No clue what a casino will actually do in this case. My guess is they'll just hand the money to a known relative, at least if it's a small amount.

I've been playing in a room when a player died at the table one over, but it was traumatic enough I wasn't really worried about what they were gonna do with his chips. Once they started doing CPR on this poor guy splayed out on the floor I had to take a walk (yeah, they were still trying to play poker on the other tables in the room). In that case it was a 4/8 game, I think, so the guy wouldn't have had more than a few $hundred on the table, and he was a regular who always came in with his granddaughter. Seems highly likely they quietly cashed him out and gave the granddaughter the money.

As for what to do with what's in the pot... just like an online disconnect. He's all-in for what's already in. Deal it out, distribute the pot appropriately.

[samjjones]

(surveying crime scene)
"I thought it was aces and eights, but it looks like he had the dead man's hand."



<font size=5>YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH</font>

[bav]

I used to kinda like CSI Miami. They so jumped so many sharks so long ago... Anymore it's just really lazy or bad script writing with dreadfully contrived situations, over the top "suspense" and ridiculous results. It's like a 10yo who gets B's in english writes the scripts.

[StevieG]

bav,

Good points. Probably the most expedient thing for the casino to do would be to make the chips part of the deceased's effects and leave it to the authorities. Maybe an EMT or police officer or lawyer can chime in on the normal procedure for handling the possessions of someone found and pronounced dead?

Also, this had to have happened at some point (if not in a poker room, then certainly in a casino), correct? Cannot be completely unprecedented.

[youtalkfunny]

This is so easy. The guy's dead? His heart's dead, his brain's dead?

Then his HAND IS DEAD.

[*TT*]

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[Aces McGee]

awesome post, samjjones.

-McGee