Starfleet personnel were prohibited from violating this Prime Directive, even to save their lives or their ship -- unless doing so would correct an earlier violation or accidental contamination of an alien culture.  The Prime Directive carried with it the highest moral obligation.

But there’s no need to leap four centuries into the future to find a Prime Directive in operation.  All that’s required is sitting down at a poker game.  Poker, like Star Trek, has a few directives that override and supersede all others.  In fact, many of the rules, procedures, and etiquette encountered at the poker table were distilled from these two directives.

I’ve never heard them referred to as poker’s prime directives before, but like many of you, I was weaned on Star Trek, and the idea of an overriding, overarching directive somehow makes perfect sense.

Poker has two prime directives.  They are equally important, and without either one, there could be no game.  With both directives in play and competitors who adhere to the spirit of these two directives as well as to the letter of the law, a game can run smoothly and problem-free.

The two directives are very simple, although each provides substantial food for thought.  The more you think about these rules, the more you’ll see in them.  Poker’s prime directives are:

Let’s look at each directive in a bit more detail, which will help put them into some perspective for you as well as assist in seeing how they apply to so many facets of poker.

Poker is not a team competition, and each player is responsible for playing his hand without advice or assistance, either directly given or provided inadvertently

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The ramifications of this directive are broader than you might imagine at first glance.  Not only does this mean that you cannot ask your neighbor, who may or may not be involved in the hand, what you should do or how you might play your hand -- that goes without saying -- but your neighbor bears a responsibility not to assist you.

If you folded your hand while others are still contesting a pot, it is a serious breach of ethics to mention the cards that you folded.  It provides information that may help one of the other players or may hinder another.

It is also the reason why it’s so critically important for players to act in turn.  If you toss your hand into the muck before it is your turn to act, you have given some significant information to all the players who act after you do in the betting order.

Perhaps the fact that you folded out of turn will provide the wherewithal for an opponent to raise, because now he is the last person to act and believes he may be able to steal the pot.  If you hadn’t acted out of turn he might have called -- or even folded his hand -- because he would have had to make an inference about your intentions before he acted.  Since you might have had a powerhouse hand instead of a weak one, that possibility alone might have caused your opponent to believe he had a much smaller chance to bluff successfully.  It may even have tipped the scales in favor of his folding, and dramatically changed the outcome of that hand.

If you look at the flop in a Texas holdem game and see two hearts on board, you are violating the one player per hand rule if you mention to another player that you folded a hand with two hearts in it.  If you’re overheard, one of your opponents -- who might also have two hearts in his hand and is trying to determine whether to continue on in the pot with his flush draw -- will now have additional information regarding the odds against completing his hand.

It’s one thing to draw for a flush when nine unseen cards of your suit are theoretically available to you.  It’s quite another thing entirely to learn that your chances have been significantly reduced because you know that your opponent has folded two of those nine hearts that were heretofore unaccounted for.

A spectator, or another player, who looks at someone’s hand and mutters, “Whoa, dude; you’ve got a straight draw,” is clearly violating the one player per hand rule.  So is a dealer who makes comments regarding the nature of the cards in sight, or gives advice to a player on how to play his hand.

All of the rules and punishments for cheating at poker are, in fact violations of the one player per hand rule.  Collusion by two players, marked cards, signals, cold-decks -- you know; you’ve seen all the movies -- are methods cheaters employ to circumvent the one player per hand rule.

It’s one player per hand, first, last, and always.  No hints, no comments, no statements, however innocently rendered, that might lift the fog from one player’s eyes and provide information to him that he did not infer or deduce for himself.

Poker is predicated on the assumption that the best hand should win the pot at the showdown, where it’s no longer one player per hand when it comes to reading and determining the best hand.  While it is always up to the dealer to determine the winning hand , or winning hands in a high-low split game, dealers are human and mistakes are made.  Brains lock up from time to time, even for experienced players and dealers, and each player at the table has an ethical responsibility to speak up in order to ensure that the winning hand takes the money, even if the player holding that hand overlooks it.

While mistakes don’t occur all that often in Texas holdem games, Omaha/8 is a game where even the best of dealers are sometimes guilty of misreading a hand.  But regardless of the game, it is the hand itself that determines who wins the pot, not statements from players about which hand they believe is the best one.

Moreover, you are not violating omerta, breaking any code of silence or other unwritten rules, and you are surely not ratting out another player by chirping up when you see a pot about to be incorrectly awarded.

In casinos, public cardrooms, and in online poker, games are always based on the fact that “cards speak.”  But in home games, you’ll frequently come across “declare” games, in which players at the end of the hand must declare whether they are betting on a high hand, a low hand, or both.

You’ll never find a declare game in a casino.  They are too rife with arguments and dissent, and because “cards speak” provides an authoritative philosophy for awarding the pot to the best hand, poker has evolved in that direction.

Even in home games, cards speak most of the time.  The only time they don’t is in a game using declarations, and then it’s still a case of cards speaking, but only after the holder of those cards has declared in one or more directions.