Tournament Directors

Articles

You are here: Home › Poker Articles & Features › You are the Tournament Director Series 3 › Articles › Mixing Chip Stacks

You are the Tournament Director Series 3: Mixing Chip Stacks

This one was posted on the Mob Forum by ‘onehand’ and happened in a self deal MTT at the Circus Casino Nottingham.

A friend of mine was in a big pot for a few thousand chips which he wins when the dealer (who is also playing but is not in the hand) pushes over all the chips that my mate had won from the hand and by mistake gets all his own chips mixed up in them. So basically my mate has about 7,000 from winning the hand and 4,000 given to him from the dealer. How he managed to mix his chips in with the pot is beyond me!

Anyway after a few seconds when my mate starts staking his chips the dealer realises what he has done and asks for his chips back to which my mate says ‘Hold on, I didn’t take your chips and you cant tell me exactly how many you had! So the table starts giving my mate some shit, so he calls over one of the organisers for a ruling and this guy says "its up to the table, but he don’t have to give the chips back if he don’t want to". My mate gets shit for the next 5mins about this and in the end they all settle for the guy getting 4,000 back.

I’ve never seen this happen before, sounds like the guy could have been on a con or something, its one easy way to make some free chips.

Anyway what would the correct ruling be?

Matt Savage:
I think it would be best to try and recreate the amount that the player had by all accounts of the players and dealer. I would definitely say if there is debate on how much it is I would pay the low number as it was his mistake for not paying attention.

Thomas Kremser:
I would use by best efforts to reconstruct the pot and give back the “dealer” his chips. I would involve all the players at the table to help to get the pot right.

Dave Lamb:
The correct and fair ruling is that we all know your friend is not entitled to chips that are not part of the pot. If I dropped a chip on the table surface and it rolled into the pot, it is still mine. Re-create the betting to determine how many chips were in the main pot and give the rest back to the generous but errant dealer.

Jeff Leigh:
The ending to this seems quite reasonable in the circumstances. I can see no advantage for someone to push his own chips into someone else’s unless he thinks he can blag a greater amount than he already had. In most instances where this type of thing happens it is generally accidental and at best the transgressor might end up with what he started with, it is a dangerous game to play and you are unlikely to get away with this type of scenario too often before being barred from playing.

Jack Effel:
Reconstruct the pot to the best of everyone’s knowledge at the table. This should not be too difficult. If the amount can be determined by reconstructing the pot, the chips ($4,000 in this case) definitely get returned back to the other player. In these types of situations, you just need to keep focused, and work it out.

Thomas Lamatsch:
If this situation is recognized after few seconds and no hand was played after, I would reconstruct the pot and try to get out together with the table how many chips are mixed up with the pot. In any case always with the agreement of the player, who was winning the pot and never to his disadvantage.
One more reason for never let the dealer play and deal at the same time.

The Mob Verdict

It seems like all our tournament directors are in general agreement here. David Lamb points out that the player has no right to those chips and of course he is correct. The pot should be reconstructed as best as possible. Matt says that if everyone can’t agree on exact amounts then the lower suggested calculation should be used as it was the dealer’s own error and that seems fair enough. It is important for everyone to try and be fair when doing this though.

It is always preferable to have a separate dealer if at all possible and this is one of the reasons why but it has to be accepted that sometimes a separate dealer isn’t always an option and that players have to work the best they can within the self deal game.

Click here to coment on this article