You Make the Call

Correcting an overchipped table after the start of play

There haven\’t been too many difficult floor decisions this year. There was supposedly a confusing situation during the heads-up tourney where two players took the wrong seats after the break and played out a few hands before the mistake was realized … but other than that, the most difficult theoretical situation was handled rather quickly and decisively without much alteration to tournament purity:

The event was one of last week\’s big-field $1,500 NLHs … and the problem began with a single table in which every player started with an extra 1k in chips. Conclude what you will about donkament ethics and how the \”prisoner\’s dilemma\” applies to poker … but no one said a word, and cards went in the air with every player at one table given a 33 percent starting-stack advantage.

It was supposedly about 20 minutes into play when a dealer recognized the problem. Floor supervisor Jimmy Sommerfield made the quick decision to rectify things by removing 1,000 chips from each player\’s stack. Sounds simple enough, and in this situation it really was — very few chips had moved around, and not many decisions affected by falsified stack sizes. And besides, every one of them at the table was technically a dishonest bastard, so what are they gonna say?

But what if a few more hands had passed, and one of the players had only 900 chips remaining?

Every floor person I spoke with said, yeah, yeow, that\’s a tough one … and ultimately would defer as high up as possible, to top-dog TD Jack Effel, for a ruling. But if they had to make the decision themselves, it was a 50-50 split on whether that short-stacked player would simply be eliminated, or allowed to continue play with the same 900 chips, thus leaving an extra 1,000 chips in the tournament.