Showing Mucked Hands

Douglas "Swish" Reemer: We win, and they get the chicks. That sucks, dude.
Joseph R. Cooper: I'm telling you, it's jobs. We gotta get jobs. Then we get the khakis. Then we get the chicks.

”BASEketball”

Funny little thing happened last night. I get yet another one of those emails “You have been away from our poker room for ages, here’s $10 free to come back”. I love those emails, but never EVER have any of them led to me actually making some money.

Why? Because without fail I end up putting it all in on a SNG, and without fail I end up with a bad beat to bubble out. The story this time, I raised aggressively pre-flop with 99, post flop on a 528 rainbow board, and then put it all in when a 6 hit the turn. The villain calls with ATo, and hits an ace on the river. If he didn’t hit that ace, he would have had T25 left.

But I guess I deserve it for putting that entire bank roll on the line in one game. That site’s $10 present lasted about 5 minutes.

I never liked them anyway.

Moving on, I had a recent discussion about poker this morning (fancy that). What are the opinions of other bloggers when it comes to seeing hands at showdown? I’ll explain it farther – when all the betting is completed on the river, and the first player to show their hand has the best hand, all the other players much their hands. Does the winning player have a right to ask to see their hands?

My thought was no they don’t – a mucked hand is dead and has no claim to the pot either. If however, you want to see the other players hands you can wait until after they have exposed their hand to show your own (provided you are later in the order than them). But If you show a winning hand and everyone else mucks, those cards are gone.

Also, it would be considered bad poker etiquette to ask to see mucked cards that have not been exposed to any player.

Decide what your thoughts are now, and then read on.

We are talking obviously about live play here, as it is pretty hard to ask an online player to reveal their hand after they have mucked – although some sites allow this through the hand histories.

From farther inspection, it seems that you do have a right to request the hands be shown IF you believe there may be collusion. Which I think is fair enough – however if you are checking for collusion on every single hand, that’s pretty much abusing the rule.

I don’t know what the official rules of poker are (if there are any), but I did find this link here, which is an extract from Caro & Cooke's Rules of Real Poker. Is this the generally accepted rule?

Aside from the above conundrum, this little research led me to another potential gold mine of information – a correct and coherent interpretation of the often misused “Show one, show all” rule. I present the following:

“If after final action a hand is shown to one player at the table, then any other player at the table may ask to see the hand, and it shall be shown.”

So there we go. I know most people are aware of the correct use of this rule, but in the spirit of my bringing more people to your home game lessons, this is the correct meaning of this rule. It doesn’t mean that after your bet has not been called, and you show one hole card that you must show your other hole card. It means if you show your cards to one player at the table – any player – then when another player – any player – asks to see them the cards have to be tabled.

It doesn’t matter if the player asking or the player you showed are involved in the hand or not, the rule stands.

Again, I know I am mostly preaching to the converted here, but I bet there are at least a few people out there who have had to argue on this point before. Now you have a better source to refer to for the right answer. The better source being Caro & Cooke's Rules of Real Poker, not me of course.