Judges of the Card Rooms — TCGs & Poker

Matthew
Hello and welcome to this episode of Superhero Ethics. Paul Hoppe has been one of my longtime co-hosts and frequent guests. Among the many things we share, he and I have a love of card games. We’ve been playing poker together for many, many years. He was the one who first taught me Magic: The Gathering.
He kicked the habit almost 20 years ago, but I, of course, have kept that needle deep in my arm. Recently we were talking, and I was talking about how — as many of you have heard — I have been a judge for Magic: The Gathering and a number of other tradeable card games that I refer to as TCGs. I spent a lot of my time actually traveling the country and going to huge tournaments for Star Wars and the Arcane and Magic tournaments. A lot of it is just saying, hey, here’s what this card does and that card does, but sometimes there are some thorny issues that come up. There are some ethical questions about what is a judge, what is a judge supposed to do, and how do we handle certain issues. Paul and I had a conversation realizing there are some similarities with what Paul has done in his life. Part of his career — he has had many, many hats on his resume — was as the manager of a poker room, where, among other things, it’s a very different kind of card game, but still a card game and still with some cash prizes on the line, though in different ways.
Sometimes smaller, sometimes bigger than we get in a magic tournament — mostly bigger, but not always. But more importantly, as the manager of the card room, he was often forced to bring up ethical issues and to judge those issues. There are some things that have happened in the poker world recently, and some things that happened in the TCG world recently. Today we’re going to be talking about what are the ethical questions that come up around being a judge, being a manager, being a referee or umpire of these kinds of things. We’ll probably have a few comments about refereeing and umpiring in baseball as well as we go. So Paul, let me start by saying hello, welcome. What does the manager of a card room do?
Paul
So to clarify, it was a shift manager. There’s the manager of the card room who ostensibly runs the whole thing from an administrative standpoint. A shift manager is basically the person who’s in charge of the room during that shift. There are three eight-hour shifts. I was on moonlight — or graveyard, if you prefer — 11 p.m. till 7 a.m. Wonderful hours. They really are nice hours in the card room, but it’s just not incredibly healthy to wake up at 10:30 and be like, okay, take a shower, get dressed, zip in. I was like five minutes from the casino, which was awesome.
Matthew
10:30 p.m. to be clear is what we’re talking about here.
Paul
Yes. And to get home at about 7:30 and then be like, okay, now I’m going to sleep at 7:30 in the morning, a little while after the sun came up. But yeah, as a shift manager — especially since I was on the moonlight shift — I saw the manager one time in the 10 months that I was shift manager. So it really was my domain while I was there. And even without being a shift manager, just being a floor person in poker, there’s a chain of authority, essentially.
And there’s something that makes this different to me from governmental authority: people are voluntarily choosing to go to the poker room and to sit down and play poker following the rules of the room. That is an act with agency, just like being born in a place does not.
Matthew
I do not choose to be an American, but I chose to be a player at the Harrarh’s Casino in this city on this date at this time. And while it’s not the biggest print in the world, every single time I’ve walked into a poker room, fairly prominently displayed has been: here are the rules of the room. And often that’s handed to you on a piece of paper as well, or you’re asked to point it out. So there’s definitely not a sense of like we’re sneaking up on you with these kinds of things.
Paul
Right, exactly. In a poker room, there will be poker tables and you’ll get seated at a given table. Sometimes you have some choice in that. Sometimes you’re just like, I want to play this game, and they’re like, okay, go to table 11. At table 11, there will be a bunch of players and there’ll be a dealer. The dealer is the enforcer of the rules at that table until there’s a dispute. At which point someone yells floor, or they ask the dealer to call the floor, and then a floor person comes over. They explain things to the floor person and the floor person makes a ruling. Sometimes the floor says, let me go get the shift. Or if somebody gets a ruling and they don’t like it, they’ll go talk to the shift manager.
Because I was on moonlight, I was basically both the main floor and the shift. So there was definitely a my-way-or-the-highway kind of position where I could say, okay, this is what happened, this is what we’re going to do, and that’s it. You can file a gaming dispute and escalate, but those are almost never going to go anywhere. You can try to talk to the poker room manager — that has happened on occasion, but it didn’t happen on my watch.
Matthew
Because I hope that person is asleep at 3 a.m. in the morning.
Paul
Yeah. And these would be like appeals of a decision. There are some decisions at a poker table where you’re making decisions involving hundreds or thousands — or if there are higher-stakes games, tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars — in terms of where the money goes. Sometimes it involves video replay and going to the cameras.
In general, the procedure is the floor person or shift goes over, talks to the dealer, and asks: tell me what happened. The best procedure is to let the dealer give their account, then verify with the players — does that match everybody else’s experience of the facts? And sometimes people will say, no, no, this happened. Sometimes they’ll start making a bunch of irrelevant points. You kind of call your witnesses in order. Usually the floor will just side with the dealer if there’s some kind of dispute. But sometimes you go to the cameras, and ultimately you end up making decisions — there’s a bunch of money in the pot and you decide where it goes, or how the cards get dealt if there’s a mistake. There’s responsibility that comes with that, and also management of the employees when you’re the shift manager. But that’s not the main thing we’re talking about today.
Matthew
A lot of what you’re talking about very closely mirrors what happens on the floor of a large Magic: The Gathering or Star Wars Unlimited tournament. We have floor judges — not dealers — but the floor judge will go over and listen to the players and give a ruling. Then the players can appeal to the head judge or a support judge. When I’ve been support judge or head judge, it’s exactly the same process: I’m going to listen to my own judge, I’m going to listen to the players. I think there’s a certain rougher element in a casino than you’re going to get at a Magic or Star Wars tournament, so sometimes I’ll separate the players or talk to each of them individually if I think one of them is a little intimidated by the other. But yeah, it’s the same basic process: trying to figure out what happened, what are the facts, what are the opinions, and how can I give the most equitable ruling — either explaining the rules clearly, or explaining my reasoning for how I arrived at the best solution within the policy of the rules.
Paul
Yeah. And that last thing you mentioned, I think, is a critical step that is often overlooked by poker floors, dealers, or anybody making these sorts of decisions: explaining the logic behind the decision. I think it’s really important. There are some spots where there’s maybe not that much logic to explain, but a lot of times — and we’ll get into one of these examples, which I think…
Matthew
You’re not going to cancel on us, so how are you going to talk about that?
Paul
Yeah, that’s fine. It’s a constantly occurring thing in live poker that never happens in online poker. Like all of these things, every time a floor gets called, the question is: would I be having this issue if we were playing online poker? The answer is no. It’s usually something that’s been misinterpreted or someone’s done something against the rules in a way that wasn’t like — it’s not usually that they’re trying to cheat. It’s like they just did something out of order. But I do think if you’re able to explain your ruling — you don’t want to give a five-minute soliloquy — but you want to be like, okay, this is the rule, this is why we’re enforcing it this way. Or like, this would usually be the rule, but because this happened here, we’re going to do this.
The number one rule posted when I was flooring and shift managing was basically: the floor can do whatever they want in the interest of the game. As a floor, most places, you can just make whatever ruling you want because you think it’s in the best interest of the game. That’s very sweeping, Judge Dredd, I-am-the-law kind of powers. And it usually also says the ruling of the floor is final — which it isn’t necessarily if you go above them. But I do believe in explaining the thought process. And if someone wants to argue, it’s like, if you want to talk about it more, I’ll be over there — but this game is going to continue now.
Matthew
And this is something that really resonates. To be frank, I think as anyone who knows this podcast knows, we’re not just talking about this because it’s interesting to players of these two kinds of games. We’re talking about this because it says a lot about power and authority and how those are handled at all sorts of levels. Everything you said is again very consistent with TCG judging, because there is that level of the authority being final and the greater good of the game. I say that intentionally, knowing that that’s a very often abused phrase, but that is the goal.
I think this is sometimes true in poker too, but certainly also in Magic and Star Wars — especially Star Wars Unlimited, which I’m judging a lot. Magic: The Gathering and Pokemon have been around for 30 years, 20 years. Star Wars Unlimited has been around for three years and the judge program is even newer, and a lot of policy is still being developed. Quick breakdown: rules are like, this card does this with that card. Policy is what happens if you’re supposed to draw one card and you draw two. But a lot of it we don’t know yet, or it’s like, well, this doesn’t quite fit rule A or rule B, so we have to figure out how to apply it. There is that need for what we often call deviation — the head judge is allowed to deviate from the rules if they feel it fits the situation. But the counterbalance is always consistency and logic: we want players to know that we’re going to enforce the rules the same way all the time, so we don’t get situations of well, that judge ruled it this way and this judge ruled it that way.
For example, if as head judge I face a situation that I don’t think anyone’s really faced before, in the moment I’m probably just going to rule on it. But then I’m going to go to my judge community on Discord, or over a meal after the event, and say, hey, here’s how I handled this situation — how would you all handle it? Maybe they’ll say the way I handled it makes sense, or they’ll say actually we would have done it this other way. The idea is to keep that consistency. And I see the same thing is true in poker — people don’t want to feel like, oh, if I go to the night shift, it’s going to be done this way, but on the day shift it’s done that way.
You are laughing and smiling in a way that indicates to me that the ideal and the reality don’t always match up, which is also true in the games I judge.
Paul
So yes. And it sounds like you’re talking a bit about establishing precedent, or being aware of precedent. A lot of these things get codified into the rules or guidelines or policy of — you know, when you look at a rule and think, how did that become a rule? What did someone do that made someone decide this needs to be a rule? Because a lot of really obscure rules exist because somebody tried to take advantage of something and they said, okay, now we have to make a rule to prevent that.
But yeah, here’s one of my favorite poker stories — I wasn’t there; it was relayed on the Two Plus Two poker forums by Greg Raymer, who was the world champion of poker. I want to say 2004, right after the Moneymaker boom. The story is these people are playing at Foxwoods. There’s a common thing in poker fiction where somebody says, I’ll see your bet and raise you. In modern poker, that’s called a string raise. Once upon a time that was totally fine. There are certain things you can still do in modern poker — you can say raise and put in the exact amount of a call, then cut out your raise and put in more chips. Almost no one does that because it’s often going to be interpreted as a string raise. If you say call first, you can’t then raise — you’ve declared your action, verbal declarations are binding. You said call, boom, it’s a call, and you can’t put in any more chips.
Matthew
The logic being that when you say the first thing, you get a chance to see how people react and then…
Paul
Yeah, exactly. It’s like a form of angle shooting. Someone can start to respond to that action and then you’re like, wait, no, that’s not what I’m doing.
Matthew
And it slows the game down. It causes arguments. So we don’t do that anymore. Mostly.
Paul
So someone’s facing a bet at Foxwoods and they reach for their chips and they put them out in the wrong way — either a string raise or it’s not. They’re physically fumbling it. Floor gets called. The floor says, yeah, that’s going to be just a call. Okay, fine. That’s the correct ruling by most rule sets — I don’t remember the exact details, something may have had to do with the betting line, but it was ambiguous. It could’ve been ruled either way, but it got ruled a call. Fine.
Thirty minutes later, the same person does the exact same thing in the same spot.
Matthew
They call floor, they’re waiting for the floor to come over, and this guy leans over and he’s like, I’ll bet you 50 bucks that we get a different ruling.
Paul
And the other guy says, all right, you’re on. So we’re in the same card room, a different floor person comes over, they get the same description of the facts, and they make the opposite ruling — no, it’s actually going to be a raise. And everyone’s like, oh, but the last guy — settle up. Yeah, they quiet down, fine. It’s a raise. They keep playing. Thirty minutes later, this person does it again. Probably a drunk person.
Matthew
Or someone who just doesn’t really know how to handle their chips. Let’s say the bet was 50 and they’re trying to raise like 200. They call for the floor and the guy leans over again. He’s like, 100 bucks that we get a different ruling. And the other guy says, you mean different from the last one or different from the first one? He says, no, a third different ruling.
Paul
Yeah, I’ll take that bet — there are only two rulings. So the floor comes over and says, well, the call was 50 and you want to raise to 200, so we’re going to make it a min-raise and it’s going to be 100. That just invented a third possibility that didn’t make any sense.
Matthew
Was it different managers, or the same person doing it?
Paul
Three different floor people. Yeah. It’s a big room — a nice room, and you’ve been there. It’s the one in Connecticut with windows to the outdoors, pine trees. It’s beautiful, but it is not well run. And that’s a great example of how when you’re playing a game and something happens, you just want the ruling to be the same every time. When it’s not, people don’t like it.
Matthew
Because in moments like that, it feels arbitrary. And when power is exercised arbitrarily, first of all, you start to really wonder: do different floor people have different biases? Do they just tend to lean toward raising or calling? I have to imagine people joke about that. You said that happened at Foxwoods, right?
It did. And people might say, you know what, I’m going to go to Mohegan Sun instead. I think that’s also where what we said before about logic becomes so important. This is a much larger topic, but I think this is part of what we’re getting at. When people talk about fascism, when people talk about all of that, I love a lot of ideas of anarchy, but I do think there’s something to be said for voluntarily entering into situations where we all agree that there are some rules to follow to make things run well, and that we’re all going to agree that this person is going to be the one to say, here’s what the rule is and what isn’t.
Paul
Which is not un-anarchistic, for what it’s worth, because you’ve very importantly opted into an agreement.
Matthew
I used to think this was a dumb paradox. I’ve come to realize it makes total sense. The most well-organized and strictly-enforced conference I ever went to when I was doing political conferences was a three-day weekend on anarchism, which was fantastic. But yeah — having a logic also really matters. One thing I enjoy about the rule systems I get to judge for is that the game makers who publish the rules and policy work a lot with us judges, and when we say, hey, this doesn’t make sense, they’ll often change it. But they explain what the rule is and then they explain the philosophy of the rule. That also makes it easier to say — and I think this is sometimes a conflict — sometimes you’ll have judges who are like, okay, this situation technically applies, so we’re going to apply this rule, even though if you look at it, it goes completely against the philosophy of it.
Paul
The spirit of the law, essentially.
Matthew
And a lot of times I think the better approach — and I’ll happily acknowledge my bias here — is that when the rule is clear, obey the letter of the rule. And then sometimes you can say as the judge, I’m not doing this arbitrarily, I’m doing this because this is what the rule says. But also, in situations where we don’t know exactly what rule to apply or how to best apply that policy, here’s what the philosophy is, here’s my understanding of what the rulemakers are going for, and we can do it this way because that’s what makes the most sense in the situation.
Paul
And that’s maybe a little in the best-for-the-game sort of area, which you touched on. To me, one of the most important things when it comes to — I wouldn’t even call it enforcing rules, I’d call it adjudicating, or trying to determine how we’re going to proceed once a certain situation has arisen. You can choose to enforce the rules literally or you can choose not to. Maybe that’s less of a thing in magic judging, but certainly in poker, if I’m like, yeah, that’s the rule, but it’s terrible for the game right here and doesn’t make any sense — well, we’re just not going to do that. We’re going to do this other thing because I said so.
And to me, when you’re like, well, that’s the rule, my hands are tied — I think if you recognize your own biases and are concerned about them, that is the most straightforward way to be impartial when you can just invoke a single rule and say, this is the rule, that’s it. Sometimes that’s very called for. But other times I really want judges or floors or whoever is interpreting rules or making decisions to be people who have a real understanding and appreciation of the game. I want them to have the freedom and the judgment to say, yeah, whatever this most straightforward interpretation of the written rules just doesn’t work here. It just doesn’t make sense.
Personally, as your resident anarchist, I’m willing to say, yeah, I don’t care that that’s the rule — this is what makes sense. I’ll explain why it makes sense. But if I’m the floor and the shift, that’s how it’s going to be. And then there are other areas where there aren’t any rules at all, like when it comes to kicking people out. It’s just like, no, you have to go. Here’s a rack — put your chips in it and go cash out.
I was definitely very slow on the trigger to throw people out. There was one time I regret where somebody was verbally abusive and then ended up threatening someone and got kicked out by someone else. I was like, I should have headed that off earlier. But there was another spot where two people were arguing to a point where I told them both to leave, but I didn’t want them to leave together. One of them had mentioned his Second Amendment rights at some point, which — if that had happened on my shift, I might have given them a permanent ban.
Matthew
Are you saying that when two people are expressing aggression and possibly violent urges toward each other, telling them both to take it to the parking lot together is not the best idea?
Paul
Yeah, it’s just maybe not the best. And these are the situations where you call security — you just go like this, the cashier sees it, calls security, and security comes. This was maybe four in the morning when they switch the cash boxes, so there was already security there for another reason plus the security I called. So there are about 10 of them in the room, and there are these two belligerent guys who need to cash out but need to not cash out together.
And the security is lining the walls of the room, like 30 to 40 feet away from these two guys. And I’m just like, what are you guys doing? What do you think I called you here for — to just stand back and watch? And one of them, the head of the group that had come, started kind of needling one of the guys. I was like, are you trying to escalate it? So I actually physically put myself between the two people, let one of them cash out, then let the other one cash out a little bit later. We chatted a bit. The first guy actually came back and — he wasn’t really allowed back in the poker room — but he came back because he wanted to tip me 20 bucks for kicking the other guy out too.
Matthew
It’s funny. I was actually playing poker this past weekend and got a very visceral reminder of how TCGs are a lot stricter. Sometimes I might have mixed feelings about that, sometimes in problematic ways, but in part because — one thing we deal with that poses a whole other set of challenges as a judge, that you don’t have to deal with, is kids.
Paul
Well, we do have to deal with kids.
Matthew
Yeah, but our rules generally allow you to play at 10 years old.
Paul
They had a fake ID. Okay, let’s hope that gets reported.
Matthew
So often there’s a higher sense of we have to be careful about these things. There’s also a real sense that — and I don’t want to make a vast generalization across the board — but I generally don’t think of poker or casino owners as being the most woke individuals. In a lot of gaming spaces, there’s a pretty strong emphasis toward: anything that’s going to make people uncomfortable based on race or gender and that kind of stuff is not going to be okay. Not that I’m saying it would be okay in the poker world either.
Paul
I mean, that has happened more recently.
Matthew
So I was at a small casino in Rockford, Illinois — it’s close to Madison, where I used to live and where my girlfriend lives — and we were playing poker together. I sat down and she was still waiting for a table, and there was clearly a conversation happening at the other side of the table about Gaza, Palestine, and Israel. Dealers will often step in and cut off political conversation pretty early. So I was a little surprised this was going on. And I heard some terms used where I was like, that sounds like it could be okay — wait, I think it’s the guy defending Israel who’s saying things, using a certain word, and I’m not sure what’s going on here. I’m normally going to step in, on the side of let’s not do genocide of Palestine, but still going to say let’s not be antisemitic about it either. But I was just like, what is happening at this table? I’m going to stay out of this.
But the dealer was right there, paying attention and ready to jump in. At some point they’re talking about, you know, well, they keep trying to send supplies to Gaza, Israel can’t help it. And then one guy starts to make a counterpoint, but he does it by saying, no, they’re starving Gaza — I mean, at least the Nazis never — at which point everyone at the table goes, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Paul
At least the Nazis. That’s where you know.
Matthew
You’re invoking moral superiority compared to the Nazis. I was just like… But the thing was, the one person who hadn’t even gotten involved in shouting him down for that reason — yeah — was the dealer. It was a pretty small room and I think the floor could tell something was going on. So I was just thinking, as a floor manager, at what point do you think you’d get involved with that kind of thing?
Paul
So there’s one place in the Bay Area that I used to play at that literally has a rule: no politics at the table. The dealer just says, hey, whatever — cut it off. But then I’d point out there are a litany of things that most people discuss thinking they’re apolitical, but I might not consider them that way.
Matthew
Where to get the best hamburger — some people might think that’s not a political conversation, but I imagine there could be some views on that.
Paul
Right, exactly. But then at other places, you could talk about whatever you want. At the point where racial epithets come out — and I’ll say there was one guy who was just the biggest pain as a player. He would get into these arguments. The worst part was he was often actually right about someone else doing something wrong, and I’d be like, you’re making a valid point, but you’re not making it in a valid way.
Matthew
I thought about this guy being like, starving Gaza is wrong — agreed — because even the Nazis didn’t do that. No.
Paul
It was a pain to deal with him. And there was a time he caused the game to break because he was upset about how someone behaved in a pot that had three dollars in it. By behaved, I mean they folded out of turn, which you’re not allowed to do. And I’m like, you’re right that they shouldn’t do that, but there are three dollars in the pot. Maybe check your level of grievance. This isn’t a game where people are buying in for $500 plus. Your relative stake to the pot here — just tip the dealer the pot and shut up and move on.
We would ban him for a month and he’d come back, because he never did anything truly awful. It was just a pain — like, you can’t keep doing this, you’re disrupting the game, but not in any really serious way. And then he called someone a word and we said, okay, you’re gone. Never welcome back. Then he went to play at another place in the Bay Area, called someone else a different word, and boom — gone from there too.
It often is like certain words — not expletives, you can say expletives and get a warning, but racial or gender or other kinds of epithets: you’re done. And that’s what they mean by a zero tolerance policy. Slash threats. In terms of that exact scenario you described — there is a difference between using a word broadly and using it at someone. That’s where, as the floor, when you see some animation, you need to kind of float over. And sometimes you can misdirect a bit.
Matthew
That’s where judgment calls really become important. We have similar rules — call someone a racial slur, you’re getting thrown out. But a situation that happened like 10 or 15 years ago, before I was a judge, was the kind of story that got told over and over as a way to discuss the letter of the law versus the spirit of the law. One person saying the N-word to someone else — not so great. At someone else. Yeah.
Paul
Oh yeah, by not so great you mean bye-bye.
Matthew
Yes, in my sarcastic New York way. Whereas somebody using it in the vernacular — like two friends who are both Black using that word. That has a very different context. Probably should be handled similarly in some cases, but also someone kind of singing to themselves, a rap lyric with that word — yeah, you have to look at all the levels of damage that occurred. It’s a much more complicated issue, but there’ve got to be some levels of how you deal with it.
Paul
Very obviously two different things.
Matthew
Right. And I want to ask you one other thing because it’s been a very thorny issue in our world, and I know free speech is something that’s really important to you. We have, in all the gaming worlds I participate in — especially Magic: The Gathering — a very intentional emphasis on being inclusive around LGBTQ issues, and we have a number of trans players. When a lot of the anti-trans stuff got started — I mean, it’s always been a thing, but in the last several years it’s become a lot bigger — there was an issue where a player was continually misgendering their opponent, and the opponent had said, hey, I’m she/her, please use my proper pronouns. The person refused and was kind of aggressively using the wrong pronouns when they didn’t have to. And when told, hey, come on, stop being a dick about this, they said, it’s my free speech — I can’t be compelled to speak about a person in a way that doesn’t feel right to me and my religion. How do you think you would handle that in a poker room, and how would most poker managers handle that?
Paul
Most poorly, probably. I do think probably better than before. But this is a spot that I think is somewhat unclear and there is room for discussion — not so much like both sides, but just… I think there is a level of complexity that is very rarely engaged with on either side. In that situation as described, where they’re clearly doing it deliberately as a dig at the other person, I think that’s obviously messed up. I feel very differently about pronouns than you do, and we can get into that. But in that situation as described, if it’s very clear the player is doing whatever they’re doing with the intention of insulting the other person and attacking who they are as a person, there’s got to be a rule covering that. And if there’s not, it’s obviously not in the best interests of the game, regardless of what characteristic about a person it is. You just shouldn’t do that. That’s not a nice thing to do, and it’s not something that should be accepted within a gaming space.
In terms of the poker table — my very first session as a shift manager, there was a dealer I didn’t recognize. I was like, we don’t have anybody with hair like that. And then I saw her from the front and she had changed her name, or come out. And I was just like, oh, okay, that’s who that person is. I might have had a little bit of a read one way or another. But this was somebody who had been, at least within the professional environment, presumably in the closet, or maybe there was a period of self-discovery — I can’t speak to that. We never really talked about it. We were friendly, very nice person, but not like friends outside of work.
There would be people at other tables who would say this or that. But I don’t remember any incidents that I was aware of of that sort of thing. And we had a trans waitress — it’s California, and this was seven or eight years ago, so a lot has happened in the broader public discourse. There were certainly plenty of unenlightened comments. And to me, the response there would be like, hey guys, come on.
Matthew
My goal there wasn’t to throw poker under the bus or say, look at how much more enlightened my games are by any means, because we’ve had a lot of our own issues to deal with in Magic and Star Wars. But to me, I think the place you got to is where we always try to go with the rules as well. I’m very big on trans rights and things like that. I know you and I have some disagreements about language and pronouns, but I know we’re both people who say, yeah, treat people well. And to me, when people tell you who they are, generally believe them.
Paul
Yeah. Unless they’re trying to get something from you.
Matthew
And like, if someone says this is my name, this is who I am — as long as it’s not, you know, some story from high school — but yeah, I think that idea of just… for me, what I’ll often tell judges is: I might have political feelings on this, you might have political feelings on this, and they might not agree. But I think as the person in power there, you can look and say, this person is trying to hurt this other person. And when we talk about rules about misgendering, people will say, oh, so I’m going to get penalized for doing it accidentally? No — there’s a high bar there; it has to be that you were intentionally doing it. But if you’re intentionally trying to hurt somebody, using the wrong pronouns or using them as a weapon — that’s an act of aggression that needs to be treated that way.
Paul
It’s used as a slur but with the alibi of, what, what? Right. Yeah. I’ll just very briefly on pronouns say: I have deeply, for a long time, believed that they, them, and theirs should just be generally accepted as neutral pronouns. Anyone should be able to use them any time about anybody, and when in doubt I generally use them about people when I don’t know much about them. I think it’s a good thing to default to, because then I would have been correct when referring to that dealer, who was being referred to with male pronouns mostly. But if you start with gender-neutral, then it’s like — I don’t know everything about everybody. People have things about themselves they’re not ready to tell me yet.
Matthew
I very much agree with most of that. What I’m about to say is not a disagreement — I think sometimes that can be taken as, the world would be easier if we just used they/them for everybody.
Paul
And I think for some people, I do think that’s objectively true.
Matthew
It’s objectively true if we weren’t in a situation where for some people, they’re fighting all the time to be seen as the gender that they are. Being positively affirmed in that becomes a positive thing. Anyway, that’s a whole topic. I appreciate the clarification. We only have a few minutes left, but let’s get to the YouTube thing you wanted to talk about, that started this whole thing, that I’ve now completely bulldozed over.
Paul
And I do have another pronouns-adjacent story — somebody misgendering someone because they were Chinese and originally had no gendered pronouns in their first language, and so kept doing it. And that’s the sort of thing that’s good to know, because then you’ll know when somebody is more likely to be doing it by accident.
Matthew
I had a fellow judge who’s from central Europe — I think Germany, but I’m not positive. They said to me at one point, hey, listen, I know I’m struggling to say they/them for you. I apologize. The way they explained it was that in their language — which I think is German, but might have been Czech — they/them pronouns are much closer to it, and so it feels like you’re dehumanizing a person by using that pronoun.
Paul
Right. Yeah, there are three genders in German, and one is the neuter.
Matthew
Yeah. So anyway, YouTube. Go ahead.
Paul
So there were two rulings recently on a live poker hands show — it’s not so much the details of these exact hands, they are a story that just occurs over and over in poker. A poker bet is not like a sports bet. When you bet, you’re essentially daring the other person — hey, I dare you to put this money in and compare your hand to mine at the end. And so you do that, and when the last bet has been made and called, then we have the showdown.
Against a bet, you can fold — you just throw your cards away, you give, you win the pot — I mean you concede. But at the showdown, you table your cards or you don’t table your cards. Tabling your cards means you literally take them and place them face up on the table — that’s the rulebook definition. If both players or multiple players table their cards successfully, then we have the showdown. And here’s the thing: cards speak. Everybody at the table looks at the hands, the dealer says, this hand wins, and they start to push the pot over. And if somebody says, whoa, whoa, that’s wrong — this other hand is actually a straight that you missed, or whatever — like, oh, whoops. And the dealer pushes it to the correct person. And the other person’s like, why’d you say anything, you weren’t even in the hand? Well, actually by rule you have a responsibility to speak up — see something, say something. So there’s that.
But then what often happens is one player tables their cards and then the other player doesn’t, or they muck them. And some people are like, well, they folded — but you can’t fold at showdown. Once all the bets have been completed, there’s no more betting. There’s showing your cards, tabling them, or mucking them.
Matthew
I can clarify: a fold is when, if you want to keep playing, you have to pay this amount, and a fold is saying, okay, I will not keep playing.
Paul
Exactly.
Matthew
And at showdown, there are no additional bets.
Paul
Right. So online, either all the cards get flipped up, or just the winning hand gets shown, or there’s an order that people are supposed to show in depending on the action — or if there’s no action, based on where the dealer button is. And online, just the winning hand gets the pot — the computer generally doesn’t make mistakes. There might have been one or two instances where there was a bug, but live, what happens is one person tables their hand and the other person maybe starts to muck their hand, or they choose not to show.
And then people say, oh, but you mucked already. They pushed their cards forward. Or they’re like, well — the muck is called the muck because during play, a few people fold and the dealer collects those cards in the middle, and that pile is called the muck. It’s a pile of cards where we don’t know whose cards are whose because we don’t look at folded hands. So when somebody mucks, the dealer is supposed to take those cards and stick them in the muck, at which point that player is not going to receive a portion of the pot, even if they realize they had a straight — tough luck. What happens sometimes, in these two instances: one player mucked their cards forward, the dealer picked them up and put them on top of the muck, and then the player took them off the top of the muck. And the floor person might have had some notion that if the cards touch the muck, they’re dead. That has been the case in some card rooms.
One of the complicating factors is different rooms have different rules. Somebody will play in a room for five years and say, well, I know the rules, and it’s like, that doesn’t mean you know the rules of another card room.
The modern prevailing rule is: if the cards are retrievable — like even if they’re sticking in it but you can identify which ones they are — as a floor I would come to the table and say, okay, what’s going on? Well, they mucked the winner, but these are their cards. And then I would say, does anybody dispute that these are their cards? And if everyone says no, those are the cards, and the other person says, but they should be dead, they touched the muck — I’d say, that doesn’t matter. The muck is not magical. If we are certain what their cards are, they will play. We’ll turn them face up, and if it’s the winning hand, they get the money.
People just have this idea that once something has been done, no, that’s it, we can’t change anything, it’s too late. Probably because one time their cards got mucked and they lost the winner. But even in a spot where eight people are saying it was their cards and the other person says, oh, I don’t know, maybe — I’ll say, we’ll take these cards, we’ll table them, I’ll take the pot and set it aside, go to the cameras, look at the hand. If I’m certain those are their cards, they get the pot. If I’m not certain, they’re dead.
And my view has always been: when the winning hand doesn’t get the pot at showdown, something has obviously gone wrong. Tabling your cards is not some strategic act. You played the hand. The hand is over. Now we’re just figuring out who won it.
Matthew
Well, especially because there can be shenanigans at this point. I remember seeing a situation where two people got to the end of the hand and one person had a good hand, but if the other person had a flush, they knew they lost. And then someone says, flush, right? So the one person said, well, I have aces up, but if you have a flush, you beat me. And the other guy said, I do have a flush. So the first person mucked their hand. And then the other guy went, I’m just kidding, I don’t have a flush, but I’ll take the pot.
Paul
Right. And if those cards had already been in the muck, then as a floor you’re in a tough spot — well, you shouldn’t muck unless you see the winning hand. But also, you completely violated the rules by claiming to have a hand you don’t have. And sometimes they say, oh, I thought I had a flush, I was wrong. In that situation, usually you’ll give the pot to the person who tabled their hand at the end, and it sucks. But then depending on how sure you are that it was an angle, you can either kick them out and ban them for life, or — I mean, in that spot, if it was clearly an angle, I’d be like, okay, you can either give them the pot because you lied about your hand, or you can take the pot and go home and never come back. Because you’re entitled to it by rule, but you broke the rules in such an egregious way that unless you immediately make it right — if you just give them the pot, it’s like, okay, you tried to cheat them but then thought better of it — or whatever.
Matthew
In our games, we have something called the communications policy, and a fairly strict penalty can be given for a communications policy violation. If you give someone false information and they take an action based on that false information, we’re normally going to back up and give them another chance to make their decision.
Paul
And if we find things are irreversible?
Matthew
Yeah, and if someone has, say, scooped up their cards — which is kind of like mucking — sometimes you have to get more deeply involved. Sometimes it’s going to mean changing the result of the match, or if you think someone’s doing it intentionally, that’s absolutely cheating.
Paul
You probably don’t have cameras to go to most of the time, right?
Matthew
We don’t. Well — actually, that’s a whole other set of ethical questions, because for the most part we don’t, except at the big levels where there are one or two matches that are what’s called on coverage — being streamed with commentary. And sometimes there’s a question like, should a judge interact with the chat if people are saying, hey, I think that’s cheating? You get into all sorts of issues there — again, consistency.
Yeah, like you don’t want rules to be broken, but does it change the nature of the game if this one match is being much more strictly watched than others? And how does that affect things? We’ve had situations where cheaters have been caught because of that. And now among other things, there’s kind of a rule like you have to be willing to go on coverage if we want you to, to avoid people saying, oh, I don’t want to be on coverage because I’m shy. And I think there has been some leeway for that too.
But yeah, it gets into all sorts of things. In poker, at least at major casino events, you do have video recording you can go to. But if it’s a tournament in a bar…
Paul
Right. Yeah. There’s no cameras, yeah. There are some famous — I think you can let me know if you know what I’m talking about.
Matthew
So, decades ago — I said almost 20 years ago, but it was well over 20 years ago, probably close to 30 years ago or more — I sold all of my Magic cards to Zvi Mowshowitz, who Magic: The Gathering players may know as a world champion. And I’m pretty sure there’s some…
Paul
Video or picture of him where he’s playing and the guy next to him is looking at his cards, or something like that. I think it was like a meme or just something that happened. But that’s a thing in poker too — are you looking at their cards, did you see their cards? If we’re playing heads up and you show me your cards, well, I’m going to see them. Whether there’s a responsibility to avoid looking or whatever, and some people are like, well, I told them once or twice, so now… that’s a whole other thing.
Obviously in card games — especially when you have imperfect information — there are just so many ways that people can deliberately or sometimes accidentally circumvent rules. My quick question before tapping out for the day: do you think more of the rulings you’ve made have to do with someone trying to break the rules on purpose for some gain, or is it more often that something just goes wrong and you’re trying to figure out how to proceed?
Matthew
I would say 95% of the time it’s the second.
Paul
And I spent a lot of time mentoring judges and teaching judges. A lot of judges come in really eager to find cheating. And I think cheating actually happens and we have to be watching for it. I’ve twice been involved with situations where people were cheating — we had to throw them out or disqualify them at a tournament.
Matthew
But one of the things I’m constantly reminding people is this: there are a number of different cards that involve drawing a certain number of cards — Ancestral RecallClaude’s response was interrupted.Try again393 SHE Rulers of the Card Room.mp3.txttxt====================================================
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Matthew
Hello and welcome to this episode of Superhero Ethics. Paul Hoppe has been one of my longtime co-hosts and frequent guests. Among the many things we share, he and I have a love of card games. We’ve been playing poker together for many, many years. He was the one who first taught me Magic: The Gathering.
He kicked the habit almost 20 years ago, but I, of course, have kept that needle deep in my arm. Recently we were talking, and I was talking about how — as many of you have heard — I have been a judge for Magic: The Gathering and a number of other tradeable card games that I refer to as TCGs. I spent a lot of my time actually traveling the country and going to huge tournaments for Star Wars and Lorcana and Magic tournaments. A lot of it is just saying, hey, here’s what this card does and that card does, but sometimes there are some thorny issues that come up. There are some ethical questions about what is a judge, what is a judge supposed to do, and how do we handle certain issues. Paul and I had a conversation realizing there are some similarities with what Paul has done in his life. Part of his career — he has had many, many hats on his resume — was as the manager of a poker room, where, among other things, it’s a very different kind of card game, but still a card game and still with some cash prizes on the line, though in different ways.
Sometimes smaller, sometimes bigger than we get in a magic tournament — mostly bigger, but not always. But more importantly, as the manager of the card room, he was often forced to bring up ethical issues and to judge those issues. There are some things that have happened in the poker world recently, and some things that happened in the TCG world recently. Today we’re going to be talking about what are the ethical questions that come up around being a judge, being a manager, being a referee or umpire of these kinds of things. We’ll probably have a few comments about refereeing and umpiring in baseball as well as we go. So Paul, let me start by saying hello, welcome. What does the manager of a card room do?
Paul
So to clarify, it was a shift manager. There’s the manager of the card room who ostensibly runs the whole thing from an administrative standpoint. A shift manager is basically the person who’s in charge of the room during that shift. There are three eight-hour shifts. I was on moonlight — or graveyard, if you prefer — 11 p.m. till 7 a.m. Wonderful hours. They really are nice hours in the card room, but it’s just not incredibly healthy to wake up at 10:30 and be like, okay, take a shower, get dressed, zip in. I was like five minutes from the casino, which was awesome.
Matthew
10:30 p.m., to be clear, is what we’re talking about here.
Paul
Yes. And to get home at about 7:30 and then be like, okay, now I’m going to sleep at 7:30 in the morning, a little while after the sun came up. But yeah, as a shift manager — especially since I was on the moonlight shift — I saw the manager one time in the 10 months that I was shift manager. So it really was my domain while I was there. And even without being a shift manager, just being a floor person in poker, there’s a chain of authority, essentially.
And there’s something that makes this different to me from governmental authority: people are voluntarily choosing to go to the poker room and to sit down and play poker following the rules of the room. That is an act with agency, just like being born in a place is not.
Matthew
I do not choose to be an American, but I chose to be a player at the Harris Casino in this city on this date at this time. And while it’s not the biggest print in the world, every single time I’ve walked into a poker room, fairly prominently displayed has been: here are the rules of the room. And often that’s handed to you on a piece of paper as well, or you’re asked to point it out. So there’s definitely not a sense of like we’re sneaking up on you with these kinds of things.
Paul
Right, exactly. In a poker room, there will be poker tables and you’ll get seated at a given table. Sometimes you have some choice in that. Sometimes you’re just like, I want to play this game, and they’re like, okay, go to table 11. At table 11, there will be a bunch of players and there’ll be a dealer. The dealer is the enforcer of the rules at that table until there’s a dispute, at which point someone yells floor, or they ask the dealer to call the floor, and then a floor person comes over. They explain things to the floor person and the floor person makes a ruling. Sometimes the floor says, let me go get the shift. Or if somebody gets a ruling and they don’t like it, they’ll go talk to the shift manager.
Because I was on moonlight, I was basically both the main floor and the shift. So there was definitely a my-way-or-the-highway kind of position where I could say, okay, this is what happened, this is what we’re going to do, and that’s it. You can file a gaming dispute and escalate, but those are almost never going to go anywhere. You can try to talk to the poker room manager — that has happened on occasion, but it didn’t happen on my watch.
Matthew
Because I hope that person is asleep at 3 a.m.
Paul
Yeah. And these would be like appeals of a decision. There are some decisions at a poker table where you’re making decisions involving hundreds or thousands — or if there are higher-stakes games, tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars — in terms of where the money goes. Sometimes it involves video replay and going to the cameras.
In general, the procedure is the floor person or shift goes over, talks to the dealer, and asks: tell me what happened. The best procedure is to let the dealer give their account, then verify with the players — does that match everybody else’s experience of the facts? And sometimes people will say, no, no, this happened. Sometimes they’ll start making a bunch of irrelevant points. You kind of call your witnesses in order. Usually the floor will just side with the dealer if there’s some kind of dispute. But sometimes you go to the cameras, and ultimately you end up making decisions — there’s a bunch of money in the pot and you decide where it goes, or how the cards get dealt if there’s a mistake. There’s responsibility that comes with that, and also management of the employees when you’re the shift manager. But that’s not the main thing we’re talking about today.
Matthew
A lot of what you’re talking about very closely mirrors what happens on the floor of a large Magic: The Gathering or Star Wars Unlimited tournament. We have floor judges — not dealers — but the floor judge will go over and listen to the players and give a ruling. Then the players can appeal to the head judge or a support judge. When I’ve been support judge or head judge, it’s exactly the same process: I’m going to listen to my own judge, I’m going to listen to the players. I think there’s a certain rougher element in a casino than you’re going to get at a Magic or Star Wars tournament, so sometimes I’ll separate the players or talk to each of them individually if I think one of them is a little intimidated by the other. But yeah, it’s the same basic process: trying to figure out what happened, what are the facts, what are the opinions, and how can I give the most equitable ruling — either explaining the rules clearly, or explaining my reasoning for how I arrived at the best solution within the policy of the rules.
Paul
Yeah. And that last thing you mentioned, I think, is a critical step that is often overlooked by poker floors, dealers, or anybody making these sorts of decisions: explaining the logic behind the decision. I think it’s really important. There are some spots where there’s maybe not that much logic to explain, but a lot of times — and we’ll get into one of these examples…
Matthew
You’re not going to cancel on us, so how are you going to talk about that?
Paul
Yeah, that’s fine. It’s a constantly occurring thing in live poker that never happens in online poker. Like all of these things, every time a floor gets called, the question is: would I be having this issue if we were playing online poker? The answer is no. It’s usually something that’s been misinterpreted or someone’s done something against the rules in a way that wasn’t — it’s not usually that they’re trying to cheat. It’s like they just did something out of order. But I do think if you’re able to explain your ruling — you don’t want to give a five-minute soliloquy — but you want to be like, okay, this is the rule, this is why we’re enforcing it this way. Or: this would usually be the rule, but because this happened here, we’re going to do this instead.
The number one rule posted when I was flooring and shift managing was basically: the floor can do whatever they want in the interest of the game. As a floor, most places, you can just make whatever ruling you want because you think it’s in the best interest of the game. That’s very sweeping, Judge Dredd, I-am-the-law kind of powers. And it usually also says the ruling of the floor is final — which it isn’t necessarily if you go above them. But I do believe in explaining the thought process. And if someone wants to argue, it’s like: if you want to talk about it more, I’ll be over there — but this game is going to continue now.
Matthew
And this is something that really resonates. To be frank, I think as anyone who knows this podcast knows, we’re not just talking about this because it’s interesting to players of these two kinds of games. We’re talking about this because it says a lot about power and authority and how those are handled at all sorts of levels. Everything you said is again very consistent with TCG judging, because there is that level of the authority being final and the greater good of the game. I say that intentionally, knowing that’s a very often abused phrase, but that is the goal.
I think this is sometimes true in poker too, but certainly also in Magic and Star Wars — especially Star Wars Unlimited, which I’m judging a lot. Magic: The Gathering and Pokemon have been around for 30 years, 20 years. Star Wars Unlimited has been around for three years and the judge program is even newer, and a lot of policy is still being developed. Quick breakdown: rules are like, this card does this with that card. Policy is what happens if you’re supposed to draw one card and you draw two. A lot of it we don’t know yet, or it’s like, well, this doesn’t quite fit rule A or rule B, so we have to figure out how to apply it. There is that need for what we often call deviation — the head judge is allowed to deviate from the rules if they feel it fits the situation. But the counterbalance is always consistency and logic: we want players to know that we’re going to enforce the rules the same way all the time, so we don’t get situations of, well, that judge ruled it this way and this judge ruled it that way.
For example, if as head judge I face a situation that I don’t think anyone has really faced before, in the moment I’m probably just going to rule on it. But then I’m going to go to my judge community on Discord, or over a meal after the event, and say, hey, here’s how I handled this situation — how would you all handle it? Maybe they’ll say the way I handled it makes sense, or they’ll say actually we would have done it this other way. The idea is to keep that consistency. And I see that’s true in poker too — people don’t want to feel like, oh, if I go to the night shift it’s going to be done this way, but on the day shift it’s done that way.
You are laughing and smiling in a way that indicates to me that the ideal and the reality don’t always match up, which is also true in the games I judge.
Paul
Yes. And it sounds like you’re talking a bit about establishing precedent, or being aware of precedent. A lot of these things get codified into the rules or guidelines or policy — when you look at a rule and think, how did that become a rule? What did someone do that made someone decide this needs to be a rule? Because a lot of really obscure rules exist because somebody tried to take advantage of something, and then they’re like, okay, now we have to make a rule to prevent that.
But yeah, here’s one of my favorite poker stories — I wasn’t there; it was relayed on the Two Plus Two poker forums by Greg Raymer, who was the world champion of poker. I want to say 2004, right after the Moneymaker boom. The story is: these people are playing at Foxwoods. There’s a common thing in poker fiction where somebody says, I’ll see your bet and raise you. In modern poker, that’s called a string raise. Once upon a time that was totally fine. There are certain things you can still do in modern poker — you can say raise and put in the exact amount of a call, then cut out your raise and put in more chips. Almost no one does that because it’s often going to be interpreted as a string raise. If you say call first, you can’t then raise — you’ve declared your action. Verbal declarations are binding. You said call, boom, it’s a call, and you can’t put in any more chips.
Or if you’re trying to raise and you put in too few chips, you can’t then go back and keep putting more money in.
Matthew
The logic being that when you say the first thing, you get a chance to see how people react and then you can…
Paul
Yeah, exactly. It’s like a form of angle shooting. Someone can start to respond to that action and then you’re like, wait, no, that’s not what I’m doing.
Matthew
And it slows the game down. It causes arguments. So we don’t do that anymore. Mostly.
Paul
So someone’s facing a bet at Foxwoods and they reach for their chips and put them out in the wrong way — either a string raise or it’s not. They’re physically fumbling it. Floor gets called. The floor says, yeah, that’s going to be just a call. Okay, fine. That’s the correct ruling by most rule sets — I don’t remember the exact details; something may have had to do with the betting line, but it was ambiguous. It could have been ruled either way, but it got ruled a call. Fine.
Thirty minutes later, the same person does the exact same thing in the same spot.
Matthew
They call floor, they’re waiting for the floor to come over, and this guy leans over and says, I’ll bet you 50 bucks that we get a different ruling.
Paul
And the other guy says, all right, you’re on. A different floor person comes over, they get the same description of the facts, and they make the opposite ruling — no, it’s actually going to be a raise. And everyone’s like, oh, but the last guy — settle up. They quiet down, fine. It’s a raise. They keep playing. Thirty minutes later, this person does it again. Probably a drunk person.
Matthew
Or someone who just doesn’t really know how to handle their chips. Let’s say the bet was 50 and they’re trying to raise to like 200. They call for the floor, and the guy leans over again: I’ll bet you 100 bucks that we get a different ruling. And the other guy says, you mean different from the last one or different from the first one? He says, no, a third different ruling.
Paul
Yeah, I’ll take that bet — there are only two possible rulings. So the floor comes over and says, well, the call was 50 and you want to raise to 200, so we’re going to make it a min-raise and it’s going to be 100. That just invented a third possibility that didn’t make any sense.
Matthew
Were these different managers, or the same person?
Paul
Three different floor people. It’s a big room — a nice room, and you’ve been there. It’s the one in Connecticut with windows to the outdoors, pine trees out there. It’s beautiful, but it is not well run. And that’s a great example of how when you’re playing a game and something happens, you just want the ruling to be the same every time. When it’s not, people don’t like it.
Matthew
Because in moments like that, it feels arbitrary. And when power is exercised arbitrarily, you start to really wonder: do different floor people have different biases? Do they just tend to lean toward raising or calling? I have to imagine people joke about that. You said this happened at Foxwoods, right?
It did. And people might say, you know what, I’m going to go to Mohegan Sun instead. I think that’s also where what we said before about logic becomes so important. This is a much larger topic, but I think this is part of what we’re getting at. When people talk about fascism, when people talk about all of that — I love a lot of ideas of anarchy, but I do think there’s something to be said for voluntarily entering into situations where we all agree that there are some rules to follow to make things run well, and that we all agree that this person is going to be the one to say, here’s what the rule is and what isn’t.
Paul
Which is not un-anarchistic, for what it’s worth, because you’ve very importantly opted into an agreement.
Matthew
I used to think this was a dumb paradox. I’ve come to realize it makes total sense. The most well-organized and most strictly-enforced conference I ever went to when I was doing political conferences was a three-day weekend on anarchism, which was fantastic. But yeah — having a logic also really matters. One thing I enjoy about the rule systems I get to judge for is that the game makers who publish the rules and policy work a lot with us judges, and when we say, hey, this doesn’t make sense, they’ll often change it. But they explain what the rule is and then they explain the philosophy of the rule, which also makes it easy to handle situations where — and I think this is sometimes a conflict — sometimes you’ll have judges who are like, okay, this situation technically applies this rule, so we’re going to enforce it, even though if you look at it, it goes completely against the philosophy of the rule.
Paul
The spirit of the law, essentially.
Matthew
And a lot of times I think the better approach — and I’ll happily acknowledge my bias here — is that when the rule is clear, obey the letter of the rule. And sometimes you can say as the judge: I’m not doing this arbitrarily, I’m doing this because this is what the rule says. But also, in situations where we don’t know exactly what rule to apply or how to best apply policy, here’s what the philosophy is, here’s my understanding of what the rulemakers are going for, and we can do it this way because that’s what makes the most sense in the situation.
Paul
And that’s maybe a little in the best-for-the-game area, which you touched on. To me, one of the most important things when it comes to — I wouldn’t even call it enforcing rules, I’d call it adjudicating, or trying to determine how we’re going to proceed once a certain situation has arisen. You can choose to enforce the rules literally or you can choose not to. Maybe that’s less of a thing in magic judging, but certainly in poker, if I’m like, yeah, that’s the rule, but it’s terrible for the game right here and doesn’t make any sense — we’re just not going to do that. We’re going to do this other thing because I said so.
To me, when you’re like, well, that’s the rule, my hands are tied — I think if you recognize your own biases and are concerned about them, that is the most straightforward way to be impartial when you can just invoke a single rule and say, this is the rule, that’s it. Sometimes that’s very called for. But other times I really want judges or floors or whoever is interpreting rules to be people who have a real understanding and appreciation of the game. I want them to have the freedom and the judgment to say, yeah, the most straightforward interpretation of the written rules just doesn’t work here. It just doesn’t make sense.
Personally, as your resident anarchist, I’m willing to say: I don’t care that that’s the rule — this is what makes sense. I’ll explain to you why it makes sense. But if I’m the floor and the shift, that’s how it’s going to be. And then there are other areas where there aren’t any rules at all, like when it comes to kicking people out. It’s just: no, you have to go. Here’s a rack — put your chips in it and go cash out.
I was definitely very slow on the trigger to throw people out. There was one time I regret where somebody was verbally abusive and then ended up threatening someone and got kicked out by someone else. I was like, I should have headed that off earlier. But there was another spot where two people were arguing to a point where I told them both to leave, but I didn’t want them to leave together. One of them had at some point mentioned his Second Amendment rights, which — if that had happened on my shift, I might have given them a permanent ban.
Matthew
Are you saying that when two people are expressing aggression and possibly violent urges toward each other, telling them both to take it to the parking lot together is not the best idea?
Paul
Yeah, it’s just maybe not the best. These are the situations where you call security — you just go like this, the cashier sees it, calls security, and security comes. This was maybe four in the morning when they switch the cash boxes, so there was already security there for another reason, plus the security I called. So there are about 10 of them in the room, and there are these two belligerent guys who need to cash out but need to not cash out together.
And the security is lining the walls of the room, like 30 to 40 feet away from these two guys. And I’m just like, what are you guys doing? What do you think I called you here for — to just stand back and watch? And one of them, the head of the group that had come, started kind of needling one of the guys. I was like, are you trying to escalate it? So I actually physically put myself between the two people, let one of them cash out, then let the other one cash out a little bit later. We chatted a bit. The first guy actually came back — he wasn’t really allowed back in the poker room — but he came back because he wanted to tip me 20 bucks for kicking the other guy out too.
Matthew
It’s funny. I was actually playing poker this past weekend and got a very visceral reminder of how TCGs are a lot stricter. Sometimes I might have mixed feelings about that, and sometimes that strictness can be applied in problematic ways, but in part because — one thing we deal with that poses a whole other set of challenges as a judge, that you don’t have to deal with, is kids.
Paul
Well, we do have to deal with kids.
Matthew
Yeah, but our rules generally allow you to play at 10 years old.
Paul
They had a fake ID. Okay, let’s hope that gets reported.
Matthew
So often there’s a higher sense of: we have to be careful about these things. There’s also a real sense that — and I don’t want to make a vast generalization across the board — but I generally don’t think of poker or casino owners as being the most progressive individuals. In a lot of gaming spaces, there’s a pretty strong emphasis toward: anything that’s going to make people uncomfortable based on race or gender is not going to be okay. Not that I’m saying it would necessarily be okay in the poker world either.
Paul
I mean, that has improved more recently.
Matthew
So I was at a small casino in Rockford, Illinois — it’s close to Madison, where I used to live and where my girlfriend lives — and we were playing poker together. I sat down and she was still waiting for a table, and there was clearly a conversation happening at the other side of the table about Gaza, Palestine, and Israel. Dealers will often step in and cut off political conversation pretty early, so I was a little surprised this was going on. And I heard some terms used where I was like, that sounds like it could be okay — wait, I think it’s the guy defending Israel who’s saying some things, and I’m not sure what’s going on here. I’m normally going to want to step in on the side of let’s not do genocide of Palestine, but still going to say let’s not be antisemitic about it either. But I was just like, what is happening at this table? I’m going to stay out of this.
But the dealer was right there, paying attention and ready to jump in. At some point they’re talking about how, well, they keep trying to send supplies to Gaza, it’s not Israel’s fault. And then one guy starts to make a counterpoint, but he does it by saying, no, they’re starving Gaza — I mean, at least the Nazis never — at which point everyone at the table goes, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Paul
At least the Nazis. That’s where you know.
Matthew
You’re invoking the idea of moral superiority compared to the Nazis. I was just like… But the thing was, the one person who hadn’t even gotten involved in shouting him down for that reason was the dealer. It was a pretty small room and I think the floor could tell something was going on. So I was just thinking, as a floor manager, at what point do you think you’d get involved with that kind of thing?
Paul
So there’s one place in the Bay Area that I used to play at that literally has a rule: no politics at the table. The dealer just cuts it off. But then I’d point out there are a litany of things that most people discuss thinking they’re apolitical, but I might not consider them that way.
Matthew
Where to get the best hamburger — some people might think that’s not a political conversation, but I imagine there could be some views on that.
Paul
Right, exactly. But at other places, you could talk about whatever you want. At the point where racial epithets come out — and there was one guy who was just the biggest pain as a player. He would get into these arguments. The worst part was he was often actually right about someone else doing something wrong, and I’d be like, you’re making a valid point, but you’re not making it in a valid way.
Matthew
I thought about this guy being like, starving Gaza is wrong — agreed — because even the Nazis didn’t do that. No.
Paul
It was a pain to deal with him. There was a time he caused the game to break because he was upset about how someone behaved in a pot that had three dollars in it. By behaved, I mean they folded out of turn, which you’re not allowed to do. And I’m like, you’re right that they shouldn’t do that, but there are three dollars in the pot. Maybe check your level of grievance. This isn’t a game where people are buying in for $500 plus. Just tip the dealer the pot and shut up and move on.
We would ban him for a month and he’d come back, because he never did anything truly awful — it was just a pain. Like, you can’t keep doing this, you’re disrupting the game. And then he called someone a word and we said, okay, you’re gone. Never welcome back. Then he went to play at another place in the Bay Area, called someone else a different word, and boom — gone from there too.
It often is certain words — not expletives; you can say expletives and get a warning. But racial or gender or other kinds of epithets: you’re done. And that’s what they mean by a zero tolerance policy. Same with threats. In terms of that exact scenario you described — there is a difference between using a word broadly and using it at someone. That’s where, as the floor, when you see some animation you need to kind of float over. And sometimes you can misdirect a bit.
Matthew
That’s where judgment calls really become important. We have similar rules — call someone a racial slur, you’re getting thrown out. But a situation that happened like 10 or 15 years ago, before I was a judge, was the kind of story that got told over and over as a way to discuss the letter of the law versus the spirit of the law. One person saying the N-word to someone else — not so great, right? At someone else.
Paul
Oh yeah, by not so great you mean bye-bye.
Matthew
Yes, in my sarcastic New York way. Whereas somebody using it in the vernacular — like two friends who are both Black using that word — that has a very different context. Or someone kind of singing to themselves, a rap lyric with that word — yeah, you have to look at all the levels of damage that occurred. It’s a much more complicated issue, but there’ve got to be some levels of how you deal with it.
Paul
Very obviously two different things.
Matthew
Right. And I want to ask you one other thing, because it’s been a very thorny issue in our world, and I know free speech is something that’s really important to you. In all the gaming worlds I participate in — especially Magic: The Gathering — there’s a very intentional emphasis on being inclusive around LGBTQ issues, and we have a number of trans players. When a lot of the anti-trans stuff got started — I mean, it’s always been a thing, but in the last several years it’s become a lot bigger — there was an issue where a player was continually misgendering their opponent, and the opponent had said, hey, I’m she/her, please use my proper pronouns. The person refused and was kind of aggressively using the wrong pronouns when they didn’t have to. And when told, hey, come on, stop being a dick about this, they said, it’s my free speech — I can’t be compelled to speak about a person in a way that doesn’t feel right to me and my religion. How do you think you would handle that in a poker room, and how would most poker managers handle that?
Paul
Most poorly, probably. I do think probably better than before. But this is a spot that I think is somewhat unclear and there is room for discussion — not so much like both sides, but there is a level of complexity that is very rarely engaged with on either side. In the situation as described, where they’re clearly doing it deliberately as a dig at the other person, I think that’s obviously messed up. I feel very differently about pronouns than you do, and we can get into that. But if it’s very clear the player is doing what they’re doing with the intention of insulting the other person and attacking who they are as a person, there’s got to be a rule covering that. And if there’s not, it’s obviously not in the best interests of the game, regardless of what characteristic about a person it is. You just shouldn’t do that. It’s not something that should be accepted within a gaming space.
In terms of the poker table — my very first session as a shift manager, there was a dealer I didn’t recognize. I was like, we don’t have anybody with hair like that. And then I saw her from the front and she had changed her name, or come out. And I was just like, oh, okay, that’s who that person is. I might have had a little bit of a read one way or another, but this was somebody who had been, at least within the professional environment, presumably in the closet, or maybe there was a period of self-discovery — I can’t speak to that. We never really talked about it. We were friendly, very nice person, but not like friends outside of work.
There would be people at other tables who would say this or that. But I don’t remember any incidents that I was aware of of that sort of thing. And we had a trans waitress — it’s California, and this was seven or eight years ago, so a lot has happened in the broader public discourse since then. There were certainly plenty of unenlightened comments. And to me, the response there would be like, hey guys, come on.
Matthew
My goal there wasn’t to throw poker under the bus or say, look at how much more enlightened my games are by any means, because we’ve had a lot of our own issues to deal with in Magic and Star Wars. But to me, I think the place you got to is where we always try to go with the rules as well. I’m very big on trans rights and things like that. I know you and I have some disagreements about language and pronouns, but I know we’re both people who say, yeah, treat people well. And to me, when people tell you who they are, generally believe them.
Paul
Yeah. Unless they’re trying to get something from you.
Matthew
And if someone says this is my name, this is who I am — as long as it’s not, you know, some story from high school — I think the point is just: there are times where, for me, what I’ll often tell judges is: I might have political feelings on this, you might have political feelings on this, and they might not agree. But I think as the person in power there, you can look and say, this person is trying to hurt this other person. And when we talk about rules about misgendering, people will say, oh, so I’m going to get penalized for doing it accidentally? No — there’s a high bar there; it has to be that you were intentionally doing it. But if you’re intentionally trying to hurt somebody, using the wrong pronouns as a weapon — that’s an act of aggression that needs to be treated that way.
Paul
It’s used as a slur but with the alibi of, what, what? Yeah, right. I’ll just very briefly on pronouns say: I have deeply, for a long time, believed that they, them, and theirs should just be generally accepted as neutral pronouns. Anyone should be able to use them any time about anybody, and when in doubt I generally use them about people when I don’t know much about them. I think it’s a good thing to default to, because then I would have been correct when referring to that dealer, who was being referred to with male pronouns mostly. But if you start with gender-neutral, then it’s like — I don’t know everything about everybody. People have things about themselves they’re not ready to tell me yet.
Matthew
I very much agree with most of that. What I’m about to say is not a disagreement — I think sometimes that can be taken as, the world would be easier if we just used they/them for everybody.
Paul
And I think for some people, I do think that’s objectively true.
Matthew
It’s objectively true, maybe, if we weren’t in a situation where for some people they’re fighting all the time to be seen as the gender that they are. Being positively affirmed in that becomes a really meaningful thing. Anyway, that’s a whole topic. I appreciate the clarification. We only have a few minutes left, but let’s get to the YouTube thing you wanted to talk about, that started this whole thing, that I’ve now completely bulldozed over.
Paul
And I do have another pronouns-adjacent story — somebody misgendering someone because they were Chinese and originally had no gendered pronouns in their first language, and so kept doing it. And that’s the sort of thing that’s good to know, because then you’ll know when somebody is more likely to be doing it by accident.
Matthew
I had a fellow judge who’s from central Europe — I think Germany, but I’m not positive. They said to me at one point, hey, listen, I know I’m struggling to say they/them for you. I apologize. The way they explained it was that in their language — which I think is German, but might have been Czech — they/them pronouns are much closer to it, and so it feels like you’re dehumanizing a person, treating them as an object, by using that pronoun.
Paul
Right. Yeah. There are three genders in German, and one is the neuter.
Matthew
Yeah. So anyway, YouTube. Go ahead.
Paul
So there were two rulings recently on a live poker hands show — it’s not so much the details of these exact hands, they are a story that just occurs over and over in poker. A poker bet is not like a sports bet. When you bet, you’re essentially daring the other person — hey, I dare you to put this money in and compare your hand to mine at the end. And so you do that, and when the last bet has been made and called, then we have the showdown.
Against a bet, you can fold — you just throw your cards away and concede the pot. But at the showdown, you table your cards or you don’t table your cards. Tabling your cards means you literally take them and place them face up on the table — that’s the rulebook definition. If both players or multiple players table their cards successfully, then we have the showdown. And here’s the thing: cards speak. Everybody at the table looks at the hands, the dealer says, this hand wins, and they start to push the pot over. And if somebody says, whoa, whoa, that’s wrong — this other hand is actually a straight that you missed, or whatever — oh, whoops, and then the dealer pushes it to the correct person. The other person says, why’d you say anything, you weren’t even in the hand? Well, actually, by rule you have a responsibility to speak up — see something, say something. So there’s that.
But then what often happens is one player tables their cards and then the other player doesn’t, or they muck them. And some people are like, well, they folded — but you can’t fold at showdown. Once all the bets have been completed, there’s no more betting. There’s showing your cards, tabling them, or mucking them.
Matthew
I can clarify: a fold is when, if you want to keep playing you have to pay an amount, and a fold is saying, okay, I will not keep playing.
Paul
Exactly.
Matthew
And at showdown, there are no additional bets.
Paul
Right. So online, either all the cards get flipped up, or just the winning hand gets shown, or there’s an order that people are supposed to show in depending on the action — or if there’s no action, based on where the dealer button is. Online, just the winning hand gets the pot. The computer generally doesn’t make mistakes. There might have been one or two instances where there was a bug, but live, what happens is one person tables their hand and the other person maybe starts to muck their hand, or they choose not to show.
And then people say, oh, but you mucked already — they pushed their cards forward. The muck is called the muck because during play, a few people fold and the dealer collects those cards in the middle, and that pile is called the muck. It’s a pile of cards where we don’t know whose cards are whose because we don’t look at folded hands. So when somebody mucks, the dealer is supposed to take those cards and stick them in the muck, at which point that player is not going to receive a portion of the pot — even if they’re like, oh, I had a straight. Tough luck. What happens sometimes — in these two instances — one player mucked their cards forward, the dealer picked them up and put them on top of the muck, and then the player took them off the top of the muck. And the floor person might have had some notion that if the cards touch the muck, they’re dead. That has been the case in some card rooms.
One of the complicating factors is different rooms have different rules. Somebody will play in a room for five years and say, well, I know the rules, and it’s like, that doesn’t mean you know the rules of another card room.
The modern prevailing rule is: if the cards are retrievable — like even if they’re sticking in it but you can identify which ones they are — as a floor I would come to the table and say, okay, what’s going on? Well, they mucked the winner, but these are their cards. And then I would say, does anybody dispute that these are their cards? And if everyone says, no, those are the cards, and the other person says, but they should be dead, they touched the muck — I’d say, that doesn’t matter. The muck is not magical. If we are certain what their cards are, they will play. We’ll turn them face up, and if it’s the winning hand, they get the money.
People just have this idea that once something has been done, that’s it, we can’t change anything, it’s too late. Probably because one time their cards got mucked and they lost the winner. But even in a spot where eight people are saying it was their cards and the other person says, oh, I don’t know, maybe — I’ll say, we’ll take these cards, we’ll table them, I’ll take the pot and set it aside, go to the cameras, look at the hand. If I’m certain those are their cards, they get the pot. If I’m not certain, they’re dead.
And my view has always been: when the winning hand doesn’t get the pot at showdown, something has obviously gone wrong. Tabling your cards is not some strategic act. You played the hand. The hand is over. Now we’re just figuring out who won it.
Matthew
Well, especially because there can be shenanigans at this point. I remember seeing a situation where two people got to the end of the hand and one person had a good hand, but if the other person had a flush, they knew they lost. And then someone says flush. So the one person said, well, I have aces up, but if you have a flush, you beat me. And the other guy said, I do have a flush. So the first person mucked their hand. And then the other guy went, I’m just kidding, I don’t have a flush, but I’ll take the pot.
Paul
Right. And if those cards had already been in the muck, then as a floor you’re in a tough spot. Well, you shouldn’t muck unless you see the winning hand. But also, you completely violated the rules by claiming to have a hand you don’t have. And sometimes they say, oh, I thought I had a flush, I was wrong. In that situation, usually you’ll give the pot to the person who tabled their hand at the end, and it sucks. But then depending on how sure you are that it was an angle, you can either kick them out and ban them for life — I mean, in that spot, if it was clearly an angle, I’d be like, okay, you can either give them the pot because you lied about your hand, or you can take the pot and go home and never come back. Because you’re entitled to it by rule, but you broke the rules in such an egregious way that unless you immediately make it right — if you just give them the pot, it’s like, okay, you tried to cheat them but then thought better of it.
Matthew
In our games, we have something called the communications policy, and a fairly strict penalty can be given for a communications policy violation. If you give someone false information and they take an action based on that false information, we’re normally going to back up and give them another chance to make their decision.
Paul
And if we find things are irreversible?
Matthew
Yeah, and if someone has scooped up their cards — which is kind of like mucking — sometimes you have to get more deeply involved. Sometimes it’s going to mean changing the result of the match, or if you think someone’s doing it intentionally, that’s absolutely cheating.
Paul
You probably don’t have cameras to go to most of the time, right?
Matthew
We don’t. Well — actually, that’s a whole other set of ethical questions, because for the most part we don’t, except at the big levels where there are one or two matches that are what’s called on coverage — being streamed with commentary. And sometimes there’s a question like, should a judge interact with the chat if people are saying, hey, I think that’s cheating? You get into all sorts of issues there — again, consistency.
Yeah, like you don’t want rules to be broken, but does it change the nature of the game if this one match is being much more strictly watched than others? And how does that affect things? We’ve definitely had situations where cheaters have been caught because of that. And now among other things, there’s kind of a rule like you have to be willing to go on coverage if we want you to, to avoid people saying, oh, I don’t want to be on coverage because I’m shy. And I think there has been some leeway for that too.
But yeah, it gets into all sorts of things. In poker, at least at major casino events, you do have video recording you can go to. But if it’s a tournament in a bar…
Paul
Right. Yeah. There’s no cameras, yeah. There are some famous — I think you can let me know if you know what I’m talking about.
Matthew
So decades ago — I said almost 20 years ago, but it was well over 20 years ago, probably close to 30 years ago or more — I sold all of my Magic cards to Zvi Mowshowitz, who Magic: The Gathering players may know as a world champion. And I’m pretty sure there’s some…
Paul
Video or picture of him where he’s playing and the guy next to him is looking at his cards, or something like that. I think it was like a meme or just something that happened. But that’s a thing in poker too — are you looking at their cards, did you see their cards? If we’re playing heads up and you show me your cards, well, I’m going to see them. Whether there’s a responsibility to avoid looking or whatever, and some people are like, well, I told them once or twice, so now… that’s a whole other thing.
Obviously in card games — especially when you have imperfect information — there are just so many ways that people can deliberately or sometimes accidentally circumvent rules. My quick question before tapping out for the day: do you think more of the rulings you’ve made have to do with someone trying to break the rules on purpose for some gain, or is it more often that something just goes wrong and you’re trying to figure out how to proceed?
Matthew
I would say 95% of the time it’s the second.
Paul
And I spent a lot of time mentoring judges and teaching judges. A lot of judges come in really eager to find cheating. And I think cheating actually happens and we have to be watching for it. I’ve twice been involved with situations where people were cheating — we had to throw them out or disqualify them at a tournament.
Matthew
But one of the things I’m constantly reminding people is this: there are a number of different cards that involve drawing a certain number of cards — Ancestral Recall is the one everyone remembers. You pay one blue mana and draw three cards. There are now a number of blue spells like that. You pay one blue mana and do something similar, but not quite as good. It might be like: look at the top card, put that to the bottom, then draw a card. Or it might be the reverse of that. And often people will have both of those cards in a deck. There are times when doing it one way or the other is incredibly advantageous, and a player will do it the wrong way in a way that’s advantageous.
And a judge in training will be like, oh, but they should know the difference — of course that must be cheating. And my response is: okay, if this is round one of a tournament, let’s look at it one way.

But if they’ve been playing Magic for 10 hours today, guess what, mistakes happen. Dexterity errors happen. People are exhausted and they make dumb mistakes no matter how good they are.
And we also had a lot of things that at first seemed like they were communications policy violations, until we realized the player was not a native English speaker. Things like that.

So yeah, we have to be more vigilant about cheating, and that’s an important thing to do. And there have been times where people will to this day say they were not cheating when the ruling was that they were. But I think most of the time it’s not cheating. It’s people making either dumb mistakes or ignorant mistakes — or because the computer told me to, or because another judge said so. Or as you said, that sounds like it could be cheating — but if you say online poker or online Magic or online Star Wars, the game does certain things for you automatically.
Paul
Yeah. People don’t learn the live skills if they only play online.
Matthew
Exactly. There’s a lot more that we could talk about. But I know Paul, you need to go. People are probably like, hey, Paul seems to have some cool thoughts about poker — where could I find more of Paul’s thoughts about poker, especially ones that might apply to other parts of life?
Paul
I’m writing something called Friday Night Is My Monday Morning. It’s a weekly newsletter — I think this is week 22 or 23, coming up. It comes out every Friday. It’s at zenMadman.com. You can subscribe, or you can just come to the website when you feel like it and it’s the blog there.
Matthew
Yeah, definitely check it out. I’ll have that in my show notes. Of course, check out my other podcast, Star Wars Generations, where we did episode-by-episode coverage of Maul and a lot of other cool things going on. Please check all that out.
Go to TheEthicalPanda.com. Thank you so much for tuning in. We have spoken. I am the law.