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To add another wrinkle, we also had taped "betting lines" in front of each player position and established that any hand is dead if it is placed in front of that line.



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Well house rules control over standard rules of course.

However, if I understand the situation, it looks like the guy with winning hand threw his cards forward of the betting line and so it would have been dead even if he'd tabled them face up.

For what its worth, I don't much like this rule as I'm commonly in the situation where at showdown I announce my hand, my opponent says "that's good" but waits to see it and I then flip my hand up. Frequently I flip them somewhat towards the board or the dealer at that point. Undoubdtely often that would be forward of the betting line and suddenly my hand, which I had been declared and which would be the winning hand, is dead for crossing the line.

Or am I misunderstanding your rule?

--Zetack

BTW when you say rules are rules, but what would you do, it would be helpful to supply the homegame rules and context like you did in this last post. If you have variant rules which are well publicized to your group, it makes our commentary based on the standard rules pretty irrelevant.



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Yeah, the rule is that if the cards are thrown over the line face-down it's a muck. Face-up is a show. In a perfect world, who-ever was dealing would collect these face-down mucked cards as players did disposed of them (as well as scoop bets into the center), and it would be much less likely to be fought by an unobservant player if the cards in question were now buried in a stack of discards and mucked hands...Face-up, especially at a showdown, would not be mistaken for a muck.

Also, yeah, I should have stipulated the wording of the house rule in the original post. But the comments are not irrelevant per-se, in deciding how to amend the rule (or eliminate it completely) going forward.

In any case, the consensus is that he SHOULD have won the pot if he knew that he had the winning hand when he threw his cards.

What if, for the sake of argument, he DIDN'T see his flush until after, but was really fast about realizing his hand and retrieving his cards? At what point, realistically, should a mucked hand be declared once-and-for-all a dead hand? When the next person acts? When the dealer pulls the cards? Not having seen it, it's impossible to know if it was or it wasn't known by that player wether he had a hand or not. Even among the first-hand accounts, there is testimony both ways. What rule can be put in place to make this variable irrelevant, yet still be fair to the spirit of the game? Or is it just not possible to have a definitive set of rules that would eliminate the need to have a non-playing judge in cases where there is a larger, more diverse group of players?