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No player can remove chips from the table until he is quitting the game, period. But as with most rules in poker, enforcement is very spotty and capricious.  Even more so with this particular rule, because most cardrooms actually prefer to look the other way when players rathole their chips. It allows the suckers to stretch out their bankroll and stay in the game longer, which benefits the casino. The ones who are hurt by ratholing (and the reason this practice is illegal) are the other players, the good players, who have now lost the chance to win those chip away from the sucker.

In a limit game, ratholing (while still illegal) doesn’t matter all that much. The money that can be won in any given pot is, by definition, limited, and it’s fairly rare for anybody to be put all in. No, where ratholing becomes a major offense is in the big-bet games, particularly no limit. Typically what happens is that some fishy player gets lucky on a few hands, or perhaps just one, and suddenly finds himself sitting in front of a huge stack of chips. Rather than risk losing all those pretty chips on one unlucky hand, which of course can easily happen in a no-limit game, this player — let’s call him Mr. Squirrel —  decides to stash away some of his chips back into his pocket (either all at once, or drip by drip in little increments), in order to protect his win. And if he keeps on doing this, effectively it’s as though he is playing on a perpetual short stack — in spite of however much money he may have won for the night.

By playing on that eternally short stack, Mr. Squirrel can now limit his risk. Knowing that he cannot lose too much on any one hand, he can push all in the early rounds, and thus be assured of seeing all the cards right through to the river. This hurts the better players in so many ways. One, it deprives them of the chance to win the ratholed chips away from this player — at least anytime soon. Two, it deprives them of the chance to intimidate Mr. Squirrel and push him out of the pot with a large bet, which of course is one of the most crucial weapons in the arsenal of any no-limit player. Now they can’t bluff him, they can’t semi-bluff him, and they can’t push him off a draw — because all the chips that should have been in play and at risk in front of Mr. Squirrel are instead lying safe and sound, all cozy inside his pocket.

Now assuming that Mr. Squirrel is a bad player (which he almost certainly is, at the very least he is playing too scared and conservative), then it’s only a matter of time before he reaches back into his rathole to pull out more chips. In the long run, the good players will win that money away from him — it’s only a matter of when and how. For this reason, some of the better players prefer not to make a fuss if they witness a sucker like Mr. Squirrel ratholing chips. Don’t upset the fish is the philosophy here. In this line of thinking, the most important priority is to simply keep the fishy players in the game, happy and gambling — and if they do a little unethical ratholing along the way, so be it. This is yet another reason why enforcement of the no-ratholing rule is so haphazard. It almost never gets enforced unless other players at the table complain about it.