Hold'em: give the seat holding the dealer button its own middle back #121

Merged
jheaps merged 1 commits from fix/holdem-dealer-chip-eats-its-seat into master 2026-09-09 15:18:47 -06:00
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Author SHA1 Message Date
jheapsandClaude Opus 5 edf159325b Give the seat holding the button its own middle back
On a fresh table the button is on seat 1, and seat 1 is where the first player
goes. Tapping it did nothing.

The dealer chip is a 22px disc, and a 22px disc is half the 44px a fingertip
needs, so it carried an invisible pad to catch the tap. The pad was moved twice
looking for somewhere to grow that wasn't already spoken for: outward first,
where it hung over the seat next door and gave that seat the button; then
inward, over "its own seat, which is a large target that can spare the corner".

The seat could not spare it. Measured on a 390px phone, a 72x46 puck: the pad
ran from the puck's own centre to its right edge and from its top to 3px off its
bottom, and the chip's handler calls stopPropagation. The seat holding the
button kept 52% of its face — 130 of 276 sampled points went to the chip, its
exact middle among them. Every other seat kept 97%. The button moves every hand,
so the dead puck went round the table with it.

And the chip it went to had nothing to say. Its only answer is "give the button
to this seat", and this is the seat that has it. The seat menu already knew that
and hides "Give the button" there; mid-hand the same no-op would have taken the
blinds off the felt and re-posted the same chips to announce that nothing
happened.

So the pad is gone rather than moved again — a fixed pad cannot be safe at every
puck size, and no finger reaches any chip now: the ghosts are pointer-events:
none without hover, and the one live chip is this one, which is now inert to the
pointer and still there to read. Giving the button is the long-press menu on
touch and the revealed ghost on a mouse, both unchanged. makeDealer returns
early on the seat that already has it, so the keyboard can't re-post blinds to
move the button nowhere either.

The sweep had a check for exactly this — "a seat's centre belongs to that seat",
written when the pad was reaching outward — and it ran clean through all of it,
because `seat.contains(hit)` waves through anything inside the seat and the chip
is inside the seat. The check written for this bug could not see the second half
of it. A control inside a seat is a rival for the tap now, and against the old
stylesheet it fails seven scenarios.

982 unit tests, 6 of them new; the layout sweep is 320 audits with the one
pre-existing failure (a $1,300 chip behind seat 11 on a twelve-handed 360x640
all-in).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015bnp7xKUPFFSpwkYNFaPgb
2026-09-09 15:10:55 -06:00