Great post. I'll break it up into parts:
Quote:
Originally Posted by RecreationalPlayer
...I would set the line at 13,000 "floor" calls over the course of the summer.
This is so interesting that I'm sitting at my office with stuff to do yet totally pondering this number. I assume this includes even fairly simple rulings. So anytime a floor staffer comes over to settle something, the counter goes up by a click. Does it count the times a player calls a clock?
I couldn't even begin to pick an over or under. If I were to ballpark it, I'd estimate very roughly that I've played a total of 5,000 live hands in my life. Hard to say for sure because I don't know how many hands per hour they deal. (Obviously, I'm ruling out home games and other settings that would not have a floor staffer.)
In that admittedly tiny sample, I can recall three instances of the floor coming to my specific table to make a ruling, not counting stuff like bubble saves and chops. No idea if that sounds high or low, but if we could extrapolate it to the number of table-hours at the WSOP, where would that put the total?
(I'll let someone more adventurous try to estimate the number of hands dealt just in the Main Event.)
Quote:
To get every decision correct with a game and rules that are as complex as poker is pretty much impossible. There should always be a tendency to apply common sense to every decision and where the decision-maker can apply an approach that is in the spirit of the game I think they should.
+1
A few things that make it even tougher:
1.
The floor staffers often have to rule on something they didn't actually see. Quite often, they're coming over after the fact, and relying on the dealer or other players to describe the situation. While this can still be a cut-and-dry matter, such as a simple application of a rule, it can be brutally tough if it involves making a judgment call.
I get this kind of thing all the time as an official scorer for a professional baseball team. People will come up to me and ask, "How would you score this?" or "Should this be a hit or error?" (For what it's worth, scorers are probably the most guilty of this by doing it to other scorers.) Even after a battery of follow-up questions, I'll always preface the answer by saying something like "Based on how you're describing it..." or "Still not having seen it myself..." It's ultimately impossible for me to say for sure unless I can see the play with my own eyes, and even then I'm making assumptions or applying what is still my imperfect judgment.
2. The floor will sometimes base decisions on
an ongoing pattern of behavior rather than an isolated incident. The Kassouf hand probably falls under this category. I'm behind on the telecast so I skipped ahead to Episode 4 to see it for myself. I was among the "he got penalized for THAT??" crowd, for sure. However, if this is something he had done throughout the tournament, sometimes pushing the boundaries more than he did here, then yeah – Effel was probably right to step in.
It's just tough to swallow because the final straw on the camel's back is not often the largest one.
3.
Though required to play, English is not everyone's first language at the WSOP. As its first initial suggests, the WSOP has become an international affair, with some participants having rudimentary understanding of the language. And while it still falls upon them to know the rules, it can create some tough situations when the floor gets called over.
The English language has subtleties that could be tricky for others. Envision a situation where Player A shoves. Player B tanks and ponders out loud, muttering something like, "I'm sure I'm good, I want to call here." If Player A doesn't have a great command of the language, he might think it's a declaration of a call and then table his cards. Hilarity ensues.
More specifically, though, I'm thinking of the
Cantu-Losev "pump fake" hand from 2008. Now, I happen to think Losev was attempting an angle in that case, and that he was mum not only because of his poor English but because he knew he had done wrong. However, it illustrates another challenge for floor staff: think how often they can't get both sides of the story because at least one side cannot be effectively communicated.
That one was a mess, and it makes me wonder if it shouldn't have resulted in some new, albeit controversial, rule change about mucked/unretrievable cards. Perhaps it would be an amendment to Rule 69, which ends with "if the cards are clearly identifiable." If they're not, then you deal out the board with the raiser either playing the board (a suggestion I've heard a LOT), or playing two randomly pulled cards from the muck.
Ultimately, the floor had to go with my point No. 1 above: reconstructing the situation based on something he couldn't have seen (or more accurately, heard): did Baumann say "call" before Koroknai mucked. Not knowing for sure, he had to apply Rule 89 (now 90) and WSOP fans still talk about it.
So perhaps another rule change would be to revise Rule 90 such that the raiser can't be the one who kills the hand before the raise is called. As a result, the all-in would have been binding, and we go back to the revised Rule 69 to determine how it is run out.
Like you said, all hindsight, and there was simply no good way to rule at the time. Besides, every time a rule is revised to clarify one situation, it creates other gray areas, new ambiguities, and more confusion. (As an aside, this is why the NCAA Manual has gotten so large over the years.)
Last edited by Wilbury Twist; 09-23-2016 at 04:24 PM.
Reason: Added link to Cantu-Losev hand.