A friend of mine posted this on a different forum, and I thought I'd copy it here to generate some discussion.
Your tournament is down to the final table and as you walk by, you notice 1 card, on the floor right under the Dealer's chair.
As you notice this, there is also action with 5 players involved, on the turn card with a massive pot in the center!
What do you do?The interesting thing is that Matt Savage actually replied to this note, as follows:
"I know what I have done before and that is to stop the action, check the disposed burn cards to make sure it is not from that hand and if the deck is short return all the bets. Get a new setup and deal the next hand. Cannot play with a foul deck but all the hands previous still stand as normal."
This situation arises more often than one might think. You may have a dealer who forgets to take in a winner's cards from the previous hand, and substantial action occurs in the next hand before those cards are discovered. Or, a dealer dropped one of the cards on the floor when collecting cards for a shuffle for some previous hand, and it is not noticed until later, in the middle of a subsequent hand.
Here are my thoughts, and my private response. In summary, I don't treat "missing cards" in the same way as finding two duplicate cards in a deck, or a card of a different color appearing in the middle of a hand. In general, I personally would not consider this as a fouled deck situation unless I suspected that one of the players knew what cards were missing and may have acted on that information. Agree or disagree?
I saw your post and Matt's response. With all due respect to the "big boss", I personally think you have to be very careful about returning all bets in this type of situation.
If you are a rules theorist, then you'll recall the particular sections in Robert's Rules dealing with fouled decks, and they explicitly make a distinction between fouled decks due to having wrong-color-backed cards appearing in a hand or two cards of the same suit and rank in the deck, and "missing cards". RROP #10 specifically says that "one or more cards missing from the deck does not invalidate the results of a hand", but it is a bit ambiguous as to whether you can void the hand mid-way. In some other rule books (e.g. Cooke's Rules), however, a discovered missing card is grounds for a misdeal, but as you know, once substantial action has occurred, action must continue and a misdeal cannot be called.
Clarity of the rules aside, the main reason that I would not be inclined to treat this as a true "fouled deck" and to return all bets, is that it would make it much too easy for a rogue dealer or a dishonest player to manipulate. For example, suppose that one of the players beside the dealer had kept a card from an earlier hand, got involved in a big pot, and midway through was worried that he was going to lose, he could simply dump the card on the ground and force a return of bets. If you were the player holding the nuts in this hand and just about to be paid out, you would feel robbed and understandably so.
Could a player force the situation by keeping a duplicate card of the same color back hidden and then planting it in the same way? Perhaps, but this is much more difficult to do.
Similarly, what happens if you're deep in the middle of the hand, and then it is discovered that a player who has already folded had kept two cards from the previous hand? If the deck is "fouled" because it is missing cards, would we return the bets here as well?
Thanks for sharing this situation, and I'm going to ask around. But my gut tells me that we should rarely be voiding hands where substantial action has already occurred except in the most extreme of circumstances. You don't want to make it easy to void hands when everyone left in the hand had proceeded on good faith. Finding out that a card is missing, in my view, is not a reason to void a hand, unless one of the players left in the hand may have had specific knowledge of those cards and was in the position to take advantage of that knowledge.
K
