Supervisor rulings

[Sculph]

I've seen a few threads on here about rulings and supervisor decisions, and thought I'd say my piece. I don't have a specific view on the contentious ones that are featured here, as I wasn't there, but ....

It seems to me that all the cardroom managers and floors are in a pretty impossible position. As soon as a ruling is called for, almost by definition someone is going to end up pissed off, or else there wouldn't have been a ruling needed in the first place.

You end up with two overall points of view - either the rules should be enforced rigidly in all situations, or common sense should be applied. Leaving aside the fact that obviously these two are totally incompatible, you've then got another problem.

Very rarely, once you get to rulings stage, is the decision straightforward even if you decide to go 100% with the rules. Add on top of that the fact that the manager doesn't get the straight story, and also has a time pressure to act under, and you get the idea of how hard the situation is - always remembering you're guaranteed to upset someone 90% of the time.


People always moan about consistency - and I mean always, at all levels - if it was that easy to achieve, everyone would achieve it. The fact is that every decision is subtly different, yet still after every decision, the loser will complain about inconsistency, by comparison with a slightly different case where the pressures were slightly different.

When you also allow for simple error on the part of the manager, plus the impossibility of communicating every decision and every circumstance between the various managers, I think you have to take a view that it's a bit like football at the highest level - you're going to get the rough end of the stick at times, but it has to even out. It's no use complaining about your view of a wrong ruling - other than the let off steam - because you can't change it.



Having said that, I reckon there's a bit more room for players to sort it out between themselves. I saw in a game at Aspers a while ago one of those situations where the ruling is only going to go one way, but the fair option was the other. Player A raises not quite enough to put player B all in, B goes over the top for his last couple of hundred, player A exposes his cards before calling. Floor called, cards mucked, player B cheating tosser wins pot.

In my view it's clear what player B should have done, but once you get a ruling called for (short of the manager explaining B's options before making the ruling, emphasising what a reasonable approach would be) then it's over. I'd like to think that in this situation I wouldn't have waited for player B outside to have a -well - lively debate, but I'll settle for the idea that he'll try to pull the same trick with the wrong person and end up shitting his own teeth in the future.