You are the Tournament Director: Exposing Your Hand

During a $1000 NLH Freeze out we are down to two tables and a pot develops. On the flop player A bets and player B moves all in. Player A starts to think and then turns over his two hole cards to get a reaction from his all in opponent. How do you rule?

Matt Savage Matt:
Again a TDA rule, if you expose your cards before action is complete you will receive a penalty. Now, obviously he’s trying to get a reaction and in our rules anymore we don’t kill these hands because there are so many situations where a guy could expose his cards but I would allow the hand to play out and I would issue a time penalty.

Thomas Kremser Thomas:
The hand is live and Player A will get a time penalty away from the table.

Jack Jack:
Player A has a live hand. If he calls he will receive a 20 minute penalty starting the next hand.

Liam Flood Liam:
His cards are dead. I insist on telling people on televised poker events that if they turn their cards up or show their cards to the other players their cards are dead. I over-emphasize it.

Mel Mel:
God this happens a lot in smaller tournaments to gain a reaction from players. My ruling would be that player A’s hand is not dead, however he has to make a decision within 30 seconds. It’s another stroke pulling tactic that needs to be enforced into TDA rules or IPF rulings when they get done.

Marty Wilson Marty:
I rule his hand’s dead. If he hasn’t declared what he’s doing his hand’s dead. If he shows his hand to someone else his hand is dead and he’s shown his hand to everybody. It’s not just the opponent he’s getting a reaction off but everyone else at the table; someone may declare ‘I passed one of those’ etc.

The Mob Verdict

The standard rule (generally) for this 10 years ago was that it was ok to turn your hand over. Then (generally) it changed to the ruling that the hand was dead. Now, as you can see, it can vary greatly from country to country and card room to card room. One thing that we are all in agreement with is that the player should be penalised in one way or another. Matt and Thomas give a time penalty. We assume that this would increase for serial repeaters. Jack interestingly only give the time penalty if he calls and we’re not sure we agree with that.

Matt explains why the hand is not automatically killed and if a hand was accidentally or innocently exposed it wouldn’t necessarily be right to kill it.

Liam and Marty both call the hand dead and Marty makes good reasons why.

Mel gives the player 30 seconds to call and Joe feels that this might be hard to police. Barny says it is a good and imaginative idea which helps to offset the advantage of gaining extra information while falling short of killing the hand. It is no harder to police than another situation where a clock is put on a player.

To start with Joe was in the same camp as Liam and Marty but after further thought he prefers time penalties that get progressively more severe. This is because we have seen several situations where it is not completely apparent whether the hand was turned over intentionally, whether the player was trying to shoot an angle or gain an advantage or if it was innocent or accidental.

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