Home ruling help.

[LetsRock]

Wow! What a mess. We use 2 decks and this kind of thing has never happened and I hope it doesn't.

My ruling on this would be:

If there has been no action on the hand (no one called UTG's preflop raise), then I would return bets and redeal the hand. My reasoning for this is that UTG has absolutely no motivation for purposely "accidently" screwing his hand up - as far as he knew BB would fold and he'd take the pot down. It would likely be an honest mistake that doesn't cause any problems. He's the only one that would be punished by the error (he had cards that were good enough to raise with and now he gets 2 fresh cards).

If there had been action (someone called) on the hand, his hand would be dead and the pot would be delivered to the caller or contested amongst remaining players. You simply cannot allow somone to "kill" their own hand when it's convenient and allow him to "undo" his big bet. Even if it was an honest mistake (and I believe it was), the shuffler doesn't have any differrent rights than the rest of the table (except for a couple of extra seconds to act on his hand).