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What’s the Deal?
You know how at a poker tournament there’s always that pack of people numbly walking the halls complaining about bad beats? Well, at this year’s World Series that tired tradition has nearly been replaced with the bitching from players about the collective ineptitude of the dealers. Totally unbiased aside: it’s completely justified too. Care to hear some examples?
At the same table where Ellix Powers freaked out last night, a guy who had raised huge before the flop lost a large pot on the river when the Brazilian woman made a straight with her A-J. Everyone at the table wanted to know what the preflop raiser had, so you know what the dealer, this old man named Sam, did? He grabbed the MUCKED cards off the table and showed them to everyone: pocket kings. Ridiculous.
In one of the $325 one-table satellites yesterday two players showed down their hands. One had A-4, the other A-6, and one of them said, “Chop chop,” meaning they were going to split the pot because with the way the board presented itself their kickers didn’t play. But the addled dealer misheard and thought the player had dropped the f-bomb and he called a floor man over and gave the player a ten-minute penalty even though every one at the table came to the player’s defense. Absurd.
And it’s not happening only in the low-limit games. Playing $400/$800, Mike Matusow encountered what in his opinion was the worst dealer he’d ever seen. “I had a dealer in the box that truly didn’t have any clue what he was doing. He didn’t know how to pitch the cards. He didn’t know what was going on in the game. He didn’t know where the action was. He didn’t really have a clue. When he left the box, we were like, “There’s something wrong with that guy. Is he on drugs?’”
How about this one? In the $2,000 No-Limit Hold’em event several weeks ago E-Fro experienced this nightmare. “I was short-stacked and we’re on the bubble,” he said. “I’m in the big blind. I take my cards and pull them over to me. The guy under the gun folds. The dealer takes his cards and then reaches around and takes one of my cards. I was like, ‘What are you doing?’ She’s like, ‘Oh, right.’ I said. ‘What are you even thinking?’ She’s like, ‘I don’t know, man. We can call the floor.’” The floor ruled that his hand was dead.
Then in the Shootout event, two hands in a row, the dealer accidentally flipped an ace while E-Fro had an ace down. This sort of thing happens all the time and players will put up with it from time to time… but not TWO HANDS IN A ROW. Always mild-mannered, E-Fro let it go, but Young Phan reacted as if it had happened to him. “You better apologize to him,” he yelled at the dealer. “Do you know what you just did?”
Imagine if right before the Super Bowl the NFL replaced their normal referees with guys who usually worked high-school games. That’s what’s going on here and besides the players there’s only one other group that’s going to suffer because of it. “A lot of people aren’t playing side games here because of it,” said Mike Matusow.
