Quote:
Originally Posted by psandman
Even if you think a player should be able to be eliminated in a race off .... we are talking about a rather rare occurrence and when it does happen the player is given a single chip of the lowest denomination making the likelihood of it impacting play significantly rather remote.
I just don't think this rates high as an issue (in all my time dealing I have actually had the issue arise at a table I was dealing exactly once ....)
I think if anything were to be changed about the chip race procedure it should be the rule that a player can only win one chip. This impacts almost every race off and gives extra equity to players with fewer odd chips.
For anyone that isn't familiar with the history of the rule, here is how it changed around 1999. The old (pre-99) rule was that there would be a race for all the odd chips. That is everyone would get 1 card for each odd chip and whoever had the highest card by suit would get all of the odd chips, so this could be a windfall to a short stack. At that time some rooms permitted a player that was facing elimination to receive a single chip rather than participate in the race (some didn't offer the option and the ones that did still eliminated the player if he lost the race). Then there was a movement that said "this isn't fair, someone is gaining a lot form the race" so it was determined that there would be multiple winners so that nobody would gain more than a fraction of what would be the new smallest chip in play. At the time it was observed that perhaps it was unfair to not let someone win more than one if they had two aces as they had earned the right to more cards. At that time nobody addressed if you could be raced out of the tournament (I would speculate that the rooms that previously allowed the player to opt of the race to automatically receive a chip, but it is hard to remember things that happened almost 20 years ago that didn't impact me).
