Remember Dragnet? Jack Webb played Sgt. Joe Friday on the old TV show, and the quotation above was his signature line. Every week the poker-faced detective found himself interviewing some witness to a dispute whose inclination was to stray off-point and ramble, offering subjective opinions and impressions instead of the hard facts ol' Joe was looking for – which was Friday's cue to deliver the line that became his trademark. At least once per episode, he interrupted someone to say, in his uniquely deadpan style: "Just the facts, ma'am."
A couple of columns ago, we discussed how poker dealers can help the floormen who are called to their tables to render a decision. That piece contained some tips on how dealers can most effectively "paint a picture" when describing and conveying the essence of a dispute, but in this column I'd like to focus on something crucial that we didn't get to last time. Two typical incidents I observed recently serve to illustrate why poker dealers would do well to heed the philosophy of Joe Friday.
In the first instance, a player left a game with more than three racks of chips, and since she was a person with a history of locking up profits by taking some of her winnings out of play, no one was surprised when she returned less than 15 minutes later and sat back down with just one rack. When three players protested – citing the house rule that specifies that a player returning after less than 30 minutes must return all chips to the table – she began sniping at the objectors, claiming that she'd lost two racks at another game of a higher limit, and could hardly be expected to play money she no longer had. At this point, a floorman was summoned, and the dealer reported what he assumed were the dispute's three most relevant circumstances, namely: (1) that a player had left with more than three racks and was returning only minutes later with just one; (2) that she had, however, apparently lost the other two racks in another game; and (3) that other players were objecting. The floorman ruled that under the circumstances, she could return to the game with just the one rack. Pop quiz: What's wrong with this picture – the one the dealer painted for the floorman?
If the answer isn't immediately evident to you, let's consider what occurred immediately following his ruling. As it happened, several folks marched straight over to that other table to do a little investigating. When asked about her having lost so much so quickly, the players in the bigger game reported that she had done no such thing; according to them, she'd been dealt no more than two or three hands, lost nothing, and left the game complaining about a lack of action. How, then, was it "apparent," as this dealer put it, that she had lost that money? He had no way to verify it, after all, so by taking an unsubstantiated assertion and presenting it to the floorman in the form of an actual fact, the dealer committed the classic mistake – in the parlance of TV police dramas – of "assuming facts not in evidence." And while floorfolks will sometimes deem it appropriate to grant players the proverbial benefit of the doubt, there is a conflict of interest if the dealer assumes that role too casually. By sticking to the facts – the observable ones that he has actually witnessed – the dealer serves the interests of impartiality, and thus serves the interest of fairness to all. But taking what is nothing more than hearsay from the mouth of one particular party in a dispute (one with a vested interest) and packaging it as a fact is, in effect, acting as an advocate for that one special interest.
Indeed, in this case it struck the other customers as biased, and since several of them had been complaining for weeks about this woman and several others who practice endless variations of the fine art of "rat-holing," it only escalated their frustration. It was hardly fair, they pointed out, that such players should collect the maximum number of chips when getting hit by the deck, while others had to listen to refrains of "all in" when their turn finally came. The floorman listened patiently, but the damage was already done. With all the resentment in the air, the discussion quickly degenerated, and within a few minutes the game broke up – and it was all so utterly avoidable.
In the second instance, I was playing hold'em when I ran across an old angle-shooter I hadn't seen in several years who, unfortunately, hasn't changed a bit. He's still placing his bets right next to other players' stacks to make it appear as though there's a raise, thus driving opponents out of the pot (for half-price), and no matter how many times he's warned not to do it, he pretends that it's the first time he's ever heard such a warning. He still hides his holecards in order to manipulate out-of-turn information; he still tries to take back some of his bets when the action behind him isn't what he had hoped; he still attempts to justify it by feigning ignorance of the action in front of him or of how much the betting amount was. When I first played with this fellow about 15 years ago, he was a middle-age man, and the only thing that's different now is that the passage of time has enabled him to add the finishing touch of a doddering, elderly innocence to his claims of what he "meant" to do or what he "thought" the situation was. It's now a very polished and convincing act – except to those of us who've had to sit through the performance a thousand times.
Make that a thousand and one, for when on this occasion a dispute ensued arising from one of his standard "Shots You Can Set Your Watch By," a floorman was summoned. As it turned out, I wasn't the only player at the table that day who was familiar with his routine, and I saw some exasperated facial expressions when the dealer breezily began his description of the incident by attesting that although the player had "technically" done such and such, it was because he had "thought" this and so, and had "really meant" to do this and that.
This caused me to break into a smile as I suddenly recalled a trip I made to Foxwoods a couple of years ago. A floorman there was called to make a decision at my table, and as soon as the dealer began a sentence with the words, "The player in seat No. 3 didn't realize … ," this floorman waved his hand in a commanding gesture that conveyed the message: "Stop right there." In the kind of weighty tone usually reserved for time-honored adages of wisdom, he then issued the following pronouncement: "Into the mind of another we cannot go." His grand delivery and formal syntax produced one pretty heavy pause, which was finally broken by a burst of hearty laughter. But his words stuck, and for several months, "Into the mind of another … " became a popular saying in the room, an instant classic. Everyone had a great deal of fun with it, invoking it as a good-natured way of reminding dealers that evenhandedness requires them to stick to what they know, rather than presuming to make clairvoyant judgments.
While wrapping this up, I turned the TV on and just saw a promo – no kidding – for a new Dragnet series, soon to debut as a midseason replacement. I'm tempted to speculate about some kind of cosmic meaning there, but I think I'll just stick to the facts … 