06.26.09
Show One Card
In high stakes online poker they all agreed to show one of their cards if they won a pot. At first, it was the winning player’s choice of the card to show at the casino online, but then the losers and others at the table started calling for certain cards. Eventually, the dealer was given the license to turn one card up at random after the pot was scooped.
In some card and online poker rooms there is a “show one show both” rule. This is not to be confused with the “show one show all” rule where a player showing his cards to one player must then show everyone. In “show one show both” a player is forced to table both of his cards if he exposes one of them. I assume this was so people could not try to tilt people after they won a pot by giving off the illusion that they had bluffed or had a much weaker hand than they actually did. The player’s deciding to show one card usually had a strategic means for doing so, and the rule was made so that the end of the hand marked the end of the bluffing…I suppose. Most card rooms do not have this rule in place. If an opponent wants to show one card, they are giving information away for free. Who would argue with that?
So in this agreement, the players were first allowed to choose their exposed card. Once feathers began to ruffle, they decided that the dealer would choose a random card. This led to information that some players may not have given otherwise. Sometimes it exposed the nuts, sometimes a possible bluff, and sometimes a definite bluff.
Knowing one of your opponents cards after the fact does not help you at all in the hand that was just finished. There’s no getting your cards out of the muck and making a deal. If you were bluffed, you now have to live with losing the hand and knowing you were bluffed. But the information can be useful to future hands in this session or possibly at another point in time. Any information is good information. A lot of times if you see one card, you can make a good guess about the other. But keep in mind, if a player decides to show you a particular card they probably have a reason for doing so.
