Bigger Deal

London rocks. The welcome party for the London EPT  was on a Thames cruise boat and former EPT champion Brandon Schaefer and I were discussing the town as we passed the Tower of London. Brandon shook his head in disbelief: “I’ve been to 35 countries and this is my first time in London. What was I thinking?” The Tower of London – the crown jewels and the brutish end to Anne Boleyn’s life. And that’s just scratching the surface of one facet of this amazing city. Just south of the hotel where we’re staying, a blocks-long cluster of Persian and Lebanese restaurants creates a hallucinogenic aroma of spices and grilled meat into the wee hours.

The Grosvenor Victoria is a wonderful venue for the EPT. It sports a spanking new poker room that takes up the entire 2^nd (“3^rd” to the Americans) floor, great tables, beautifully lit, everything you could want. And the management has been wonderful. I came over Monday night around 11:00 PM to clear up a few details. Ran right into Jeff Lee, the poker room manager. He greeted me warmly and introduced me to the casino manager, Martin Ramskill. I explained what I needed to Martin, who walked me down to the head cashier, Tony Peters. So I got personal assistance from three senior guys at 11:00 PM – that’s what I call service.

But hey, I’ve got a personal flaw – I always see the thing that’s wrong in any given situation. So here goes:

How can a club that virtually introduced poker to the UK have such obtuse and convoluted dealing and pot building procedures in their cash games?

Allow me to demonstrate – if I can. Suppose it’s a pot-limit hold’em game with £5 and £10 blinds. The small blind puts out one £5 chip, big blind puts out two £5 chips – so far so good. But now the insanity starts. The dealer, having dealt the cards, pulls the blinds to the center, and points at the under-the-gun guy. Well, I guess it’s good that he’s pointing at him, because with the blinds pulled in, who knows whose turn it is? So the UTG folds and now the next guy raises to £35. His bet stays out there. Now somebody calls behind him by putting out two £25 chips. The dealer takes the £15 change from the pot and returns it to him. Consider this: you now have four players in the pot, who have invested £5, £10, £35, and £35 respectively. In front of them, they have £0, £0, £35, and £50. [1]

How could anybody possibly know who has invested how much in the pot? Where the action is?

This is not an isolated incident – this procedure (or a close variant) is clearly approved and taught here. Bets are pulled in as they happen, and a player has to know how much it is to him, or hear the dealer’s statement over the general cardroom chaos. And he better hope the dealer’s right because there’s no visual way to verify the dealer’s claim of the action on him.

It seems to me that a dealing protocol should have a couple of basic goals:

1.  Make it easy for the dealer and the players to know how much each player has invested in the pot.
2.  Simplify reconstruction of the action should there be any question.

Well, pulling the bets in immediately and making change out of the pot pretty much guarantees that you’ll never achieve either of those goals.

What boggles my mind is that achieving these goals is not rocket science. At the risk of sounding nationalistic, virtually every U.S. casino and cardroom follows a procedure that works beautifully:

1. Each player keeps his bet(s) in front him.
2. When the dealer sees the same amount of money in front of all remaining players, the pot is right and the round is over. Do whatever you’re supposed to do next, i.e. put out the next card or announce a showdown.

Doing it this way means that when the action reaches you, if you’re not sure of how much it is to you, you look to the nearest stack to your right. The difference between that stack and how much you have out in front of you is how much it is for you to call.

Now, the insane protocol I’m watching here at the Grosvenor Victoria is not unique to it; I see this sort of thing happen all the time throughout UK casinos. But I promise you that as “The Vic” goes, so goes British poker. If the clearly capable and intelligent managers here would implement the “American” dealing protocol, it would sweep across Britain in no time at all.

Until they do that, though, the dealers here will be asking players, “How much did you have in the pot?” [2]

For what it’s worth, even the British players I’ve talked to agree that the American protocol is clearly better. You know, it’s okay for y’all to adopt something from us – we’ve adopted plenty of you, including the language (sort of). And we’ll never have anything near as historically cool as the Tower of London.