Deuce-to-Seven Draw Event Ruling Leads to Fireworks at WSOP
The chaos in sued when some players arrived after the noon start time. The players who had pre-registered for the event were being blinded off as expected. Due to the blind structure for the event, the stacks were dwindling quickly.
At the same time, players who registered late, not pre-registered, were given a starting stack near the actual beginning stack of 10k. This gave an obvious advantage to players who arrived and registered late, instead of even with those who had pre-registered, but were running late.
During the first hour of play many players became vocal about the confusion around this rule. Andy Black eventually led the other players in becoming so vocal about this, that the tournament organizers were forced to stop the clock with only 23 minutes remaining the second level, so that the floor supervisor could call tournament director Jack Effel, at home, to resolve the issue.
In an interview Andy Black stated: "It shouldn't take a revolution by the players to get them to stop the clock like this. What does everybody lose (by stopping the clock) to get a resolution?"
Effel directed the supervisors to Rule 81 of the official WSOP rule book:
"Late registrants for any event may incur a chip penalty. Players will lose one round of blinds/antes dead money into the pot for every 15 minutes late after a tournament has begun up to a maximum of three (3) round of blinds/antes."
The penalty in this case came to 1800 chips. Daniel Negreanu questioned the ruling, given he had registered late and was given a stack with more than 7,200 chips. Negreanu was informed the players were responsible for pointing out discrepancies before the hand was dealt.
"You couldn't possibly make a worse ruling," said Negreanu, loud enough so other players around him could hear him clearly.
"You have no idea how bad that ruling is," followed up Howard Ledener, who was one table away from Negreanu.
Adding to the issue for Negreanu, he doubled up on one of his first few hands. Instead of costing him only 950 chips he was actually short 1900 chips.
When play began again the players appeared to give up their fight over the rule, but at least one player was wandering the floor trying to find out why Effel wasn't at the location himself. "We need to get Jack Effel down here right now." said the player.
The game continued with out further incident until day 3 when Rafi Amit won the bracelet. His heads up competition against Lenny Martin was relaxed and positive way to end a controversial game.