Why You Should Play in a Cardroom

Why You Should Play in a Cardroom
By Michael Wiesenberg

If you've never played in a cardroom, you may think you'll run into nothing but thieves and angle shooters (players who take advantage of other unsophisticated players by misleading actions that are technically not outlawed by the house rules, but are certainly unfair and unsportsmanlike). Actually, the truth is far from that. Most card players are great people. They help newcomers, they're polite, and they don't shoot angles, cheat you, or get out of line. There are only a few you have to watch out for. I'll talk another time about protecting yourself so that you won't get hurt on the rare occasions when you meet one of these low-lifes. Generally, though, a house dealer protects you from 90% of the already small amount of cheating that could go on.

If you want to get cheated, now, the place to play is in a home game. "Nonsense," you say. "My home game has only friends in it, people who have played together for years."

Is that so? I retort. You're more likely to get cheated in a home game than a cardroom. Part of the reason is due to the air of trust; but that is, unfortunately, not always warranted. I agree that there is no lower form of snake than the player who takes unfair advantage of the trust placed in him by his friends, but it's a sad fact that it's in private games where the shenanigans go on. In cardrooms the atmosphere is not so trusting, and so it's harder for a thief to get away with his tricks. Cardrooms also adhere much more strictly to rules than home games. Home games often don't even have rules. The players just rely on their abilities to straighten out any problems as they arise. Unfortunately, their group wisdom is not always the best; neither is it consistent.

No cardroom would ever permit players to "go light" in a pot when they run out of chips. All cardrooms play table stakes. But in a home game, some players "conveniently" forget to match their lights at the end of a pot unless reminded. But if they have to be reminded frequently, what happens the times no one thinks to remind them?

How about the guy who's losing a bundle in a pot against the big winner, the player who has most of his money? He needs a spade to make his hand in draw poker and win a very large pot. He sees that the player beside him has discarded a spade. He can see the card, because in home games players are sometimes not very careful about exposing cards. That discard has landed right in front of him. On his turn to draw, he asks for one card, which, when dealt to him, lands right next to that card sitting in front of him that he knows is a spade. No one will notice if he picks up the wrong card, but just in case anyone does, he can easily claim it was an accident. This could never happen in a cardroom with a house dealer, who makes sure discards are in his control.

Have there ever been extra chips at cash-out time in your game? Or were the banker's funds inexplicably short, so that he ended up winning not as much as was represented by his own chips? That could have been due to someone introducing extra chips, or not cashing in low denomination chips one week, because he knew the denominations change every week. Don't cash in a blue chip this week that represents a quarter because next week it might represent $5. Or in a game with those flimsy drugstore plastic poker chips, just bring in a few extra white chips of your own. Such a set costs maybe $2, and if white chips are worth $10 in your home game, you've just made a tidy little profit. Players can get away with this sort of thing for years with no one noticing, particularly when one or more of the bankers is a sloppy financier.

And how about Joe over there? Sure, you've played with him for years, but what do you really know about him? You know him only from the game. He talks vaguely about his job sometimes, but nothing you could really check up on, but then it never occurs to anyone to check on the others' stories. Joe always seems to win, but you don't think he plays that well. No one in your game is a professional player (unless maybe it's Joe), so no one has any way of knowing that Joe is quite capable of dealing bottoms. His moves would be picked up on right away in a cardroom, but in your home game everybody is paying attention to having a good time and nobody notices.

Don't fool yourself that it's easy to detect a thief. You can look right at some of the best while they're making their moves and not see a thing, so how do you expect to see something when you have no reason to expect it? Often the only way to detect cheating is by inference. You know someone doesn't play that well, yet he always wins, and a disproportionate share of those winning pots are on his deal. Does he have the opportunity to cheat? Maybe he is.

It's a problem you usually don't have to worry about in a cardroom. They have competent floormen, many of whom have had years of experience detecting cheats. Most of the thieves are known in the cardrooms and not even permitted to play.

Most cardrooms have dealers to further protect the players. It's hard to deal bottoms when you never handle the deck. In addition to knowledgeable personnel in cardrooms, many players who have been around for years know how to recognize the moves and would not tolerate thieves in their games.

So protection is one of the reasons to prefer a cardroom to a home game.

(Another is that many cardrooms never close, and the games and players are always there whenever you feel like playing. But that's another story.)