That ruling was terrible but watching Kassouf tankfold the 86 with 2 all ins in front of him
(I just watched the first 2 episodes) was so tilting so let's call it karma ^^.

In all seriousness the WSOP has such a bad record regarding rulings, it still stings that Gaelle Baumann didn't make the November 9 due to one of those.

I thought the problem with Kassouf was that he kept badgering her over and over saying the same thing so she couldn't think the hand through. I'm all for talking to the opponent and trying to confuse/put them off but surely after you have had your say you should show some respect and let them think.

(View it while it's still there.)

Yeah, I'm a bit bitter about her exit too. She is clearly a top tourney player, excellent demeanour, and great skills.

The problem with the hand you are referring to is that someone will end up getting a rough deal. I truly think Koroknai just made a mistake. I really don't think it was an angle. Do you really bust him from the tournament that way? It's tough. Sure Gaelle gets a terrible ruling, but surely for the spirit of the game, they made the best decision.

I also think Jack was right to do something with Kassouf. It was likely that the one orbit penalty stopped him from future outbursts, which while totally legal IMO are just bad for the game and not nice for most players at the table. I have more issue with him saying it was for taunting, as I didn't see any taunting. If he had just said "Im the boss around here and you need to calm it down a bit, go and take a break for an orbit and think about your fellow players" it might have been better.

You say they are known for poor rulings, but I think I disagree. We might see one or two poor rulings every year, sure. But how many rulings were made? A few thousand I bet. To get all but a few correct is pretty good I think. I ran a 10 table tournament once, it was no fun. To manage the main event takes a lot of organisation and skill.

Wow, almost 30 posts until I get in.

No.

Not all home and private games are good. Some are complete trash, they give nothing to the players, the rake is too high, no food, ****ty dealers, etc

If that's the case, then we would never send players there, no matter how much they offer us. That's what the quote was implying.

Or, if the game is a good game, but starts to get negative reviews, then they'll go on the watch list. If they don't right any wrongs that have been reported, or make an effort while we investigate, then it's bye bye.

Some home games are run like a casino. Some are like a frat house.

However, now all games will be held to a standard. And everyone in the community will be able to hold you to the standard, both players and hosts.

Just 2 Sunday's ago, a very problematic player started a fist fight at my regular Sunday game. He was new to me, but someone else said to me the second he walked in that he was trouble. And then he goes and starts a fiat fist fight like an *******. The problematic player is now blacklisted.

Community standards and accountability is most important to me. If a game makes a really ****ty ruling or does something shady, the community will know about it. If a player is problematic everywhere he goes, doesn't honor debts when he goes on credit, etc, then the community will know about it.

And it works the other way around as well. If a game has exceptional service, excellent dealers, great atmosphere, beautiful massage girls and waitresses, well then the community will know about that too and I'd wager that would be the highest rated game in the community.

After watching it again I tend to agree with you. I tried to put myself in the position of one of the players at his table and even if I wasn't involved in any hands with him I would probably feel inclined to hit him in the face after some point. I like table talk and having a character at the table but damn, if he got under my skin after watching him on tv for a few minutes I can't imagine having him at a table for a whole day.


I think there have been a few more "big ones" over the years which I can't recall at the moment (aside from the also infamous Friedman vs Bort) but I understand it's a very slim percentage in the grand scheme of things. As for the Baumann vs Koroknai hand I still think they botched it.

There are always going to be big ones, just from the shear number of hands played, players who are new or nervous, dodgy players looking to angle shoot or game the rules, I would set the line at 13,000 "floor" calls over the course of the summer. 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.

Kassouf - You are being disruptive to your fellow players - one round penalty.

Koroknai - Unless we can prove this is an angle, there is no scenario where I would bust a player from a 10k tourney that close to the end for an honest mistake. I can't come up with a better solution than they did FWIW. Its a **** spot for sure. Had the dealer made better control of the muck pile, we could probably retrieve his cards and play his hand out... but thats hindsight. Not sure if any attempt was made to re-contruct the hand, but that should be the starting point. It's strange he had a hand strong enough to go all-in with and yet he couldn't remember when asked what it was.

He was just being inconsiderate. Like you said, giving her no time to think.

I don't think he broke any explicit rules. He was just doing something that was in bad taste. When you're in a tournament like the Main Event, you're on track to make a deep run, and your tournament life is on the line, then I think you should be a little more respectful to your fellow players.

I don't think Jack made a bad ruling -- just his reason why was bad. That wasn't taunting. Taunting implies a negative, hostile element to it. Kassouf was just playing his game.

Jack should have said something along the lines of being disrespectful, not giving her time to think. She asked you nicely to stop talking to her so she could think and you keep badgering her. Now you're disrupting the game, cool it off or you're gonna get a penalty.

The bottom line is that he was disrupting the game for the woman. Definitely not taunting, but disrupting.

If nobody complained, I see no problem at all. If someone does complain (as they did) then it's a clear disruption.

The problem is, where do you draw the line about what's disrupting and what's not?

Great post. I'll break it up into parts:

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.)

+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.)

After hearing Terrence talk in details about his dream guest for the show I got really curious, so I rewinded, to try and catch the name, but it's actually never said! :-)

Could someone (Terrence?) let us know who that amazing podcaster is?

Thanks, and congrats on the win! I don't know much about MMA, but I do know that 3 and 0 is impressive: Well done!

My favorite part (besides the win, of course) was: "Who comes out to Bob Marley?"

I always forget how aggressively Asian T is

Tim Ferriss

Great, thanks!

Funny hearing Adam wonder out loud about players dealing with Kassouf: "Why can't they just tune him out?"

That was an entirely enjoyable interview, full of insight and background on what we saw on TV, and offering a glimpse of a difference between a live player's arsenal vs. an online player, yet I had trouble NOT tuning him out because of his speech pattern. It became white noise at times and yet I wanted to listen.

Of course, Terrence is 100 percent right: we'll never know what it's like for Josephy, Benger, et al unless we're sitting with a player like that on a Day 6 of the Main Event. Two unique conditions converging with possible logorrhea is a perfect storm of tilt that is hard to understand unless we're in it.

Edit:

Good thing you didn't play How Much You Got with Kassouf. You'd add another 15 minutes to the show running time.

A normal person playing HMYG:: "It looks like... cash and chips? Or just cash? Okay, I have $1,200 on me."

Kassouf playing HMYG: "I normally don't carry a lot of money but I got in a great cash game last night and I didn't put the winnings in my box, normally I would but I didn't last night but after a great cash game where my speech play got a guy to lay down what I'm sure was top pair, I suppose it could have been two pair but I think it was top pair, but my speech play which is not meant maliciously and contains no intent won my a huge pot but I never got my winnings to my box so I'm carrying more money than normal nothing against people who do carry a lot of cash if that's what they prefer then that's fine with me but my preference is to not carry so much cash but winning that huge pot with my speech play in last night's cash game put an inordinate amount of cash in my pockets which I would normally not do I have nothing against people who do but I'm not one of those people, no hard feelings, I just don't normally carry a lot of cash but right now I have a lot because of that big pot. So you guys were guessing in American dollars and my money is in pounds so I suppose I have to do some quick math to convert to dollars, which normally I wouldn't carry so much on me, nothing against people who carry around a lot of cash but I don't. So based on the pounds that my speech play won me, not with any malicious intent or insulting but just to get a guy to lay down to pair, maybe better, then converting to U.S. dollars would mean about $1,600, maybe more. I don't know the exact conversion from pounds to dollars so that's only an estimate and besides it's more than I would ever carry but that's what I have after winning that huge pot with my speech play. So that's how much I have with me right now but normally I wouldn't carry that much, no offense to people who do, it's just not my preference and I have nothing against people who carry cash, I just choose not to except for right now because of the great cash game."

No.

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