Tournament poker is a skill game which is designed-as most games are-to allow participants to engage in a competition to determine who the best player is on any given day at a specific event. The result ends with the finalists rewarded with varying amounts of the prize pool money.
Excluding rare cases where the host venue adds cash to the prize money, most often, the at-risk dollars in poker tournaments are put up by the players themselves. In addition to this cost, there is also an entry fee which is essentially the venues payment for hosting the event. And the prize money usually has a percentage cut off the top to go to the tournament staff for running the event.
One area of particular concern caught my attention, and is my primary focus for this article. Both the Tournament Directors Association (TDA) and World Series of Poker rules make reference to the "interest of fairness," and floor personnel have carte blanche to make rulings that basically ignore the actual rules. I can truly understand the intent of such a rule; however as is true in most cases, when you allow too much discretion among a multitude of individuals, there can be problems.
I had a dealer explain recently that during a large tournament last summer, she had three different floor people make three different rulings on the same issue in one day. Player protests were met by declarations that these final rulings were being applied in the "interest of fairness." Clearly, that caveat is now also applied in the interest of keeping the game moving in large events, or because of uncertainty about an actual rule.
Here's the problem. Can ignoring any rule truly be done in the name of "fairness?" If you ignore a rule, and your ruling favors one player, it goes against the best interest of another (or others). That simply cannot be fair to all!
Remember, as a group, the players can place hundreds of thousands and in some cases, millions of dollars at risk. Following rules should not be taken lightly ... it should be absolute! What good is any rule if someone can step in and ignore it with a decision, however subjective or ill informed it might be? Personally, I hate the idea of anyone's subjective opinion becoming law in a given situation and having a negative effect on my pay day!
Can anyone tell me of any other competition in the world where participants risk as much as we do in some poker tournaments, and where they actually have a written rule that says, they can change or ignore the rules in mid game, simply because someone decides that's a fair thing to do?
I offer this as a truly fair solution. Why not have rules that cover every eventuality in a poker tournament? If you think it can't be done, you'd be wrong. The rules should be written and then followed to the letter, as in golf, chess, gin rummy, tennis, backgammon, and other games.
In the event that something truly obscure happens and no apparent rule applies, that one hand could be re-dealt. The action is noted with a new rule added to cover that particular eventuality in the future.
We're all adults here. The rules should be the rules! Floor personnel should be responsible for knowing the rules and applying them accordingly and correctly. Isn't that what we are actually paying them for in the first place when they cut their percentage out of our at-risk dollars? This way, players could carry their own rule book and verify that their money is actually being treated with real fairness!
We're talking big bucks here! The TDA meets in June of 2009. Maybe they can (and should) fix this.
