In online tourneys, one can simply click a button to “be away” and blinds are simply deducted from your holdings.
In a real tourney, how is this handled? I am under the assumption that no one is allowed to touch another person’s chips. Is the dealer allowed to do that?
Are you simply bypassed on the blinds (which I would find hard to believe)?
Or can you not leave the table if you’re in the blind?
If you’re not there, you’re out the money. Antes and Blinds.
Otherwise, you could just hide in the bathroom and wait for people to get eliminated, thus moving you up in the rankings, closer to paying places.
At the 2004 World Series, a player (Matthias Jorstedt?) overslept and lost something like 3 hours worth of blinds.
That was John “Murph Dog” Murphy. Since he was the chip leader, it didn’t hurt him too much.
And Phil Hellmouth routinely shows up an hour or two late on the first day of a tourney. It’s supposedly to psych out the rest of the players, or at least his table, by saying “I’m so good I don’t even need those chips to take you down.”
For a little more detail, the dealer continues to conduct your seat in a normal manner, dealing your cards, etc…once the preflop betting round gets to you, your cards are mucked and any blinds are taken…if you return to your seat before your cards are mucked you can participate. (I think some tourneys may declare your hand dead if you aren’t there when it’s dealt)
In general, at the WSOP, the blinds start so low in relation to your chips, and the levels are so long (2hours), that you could actually not show up on day one, and still have a stack left for day two. The usual schedule was to play from noon until 10pm…This year, because of the large field, they changed their mind and said that we would play until each day 1 “leg” was reduced from 2K to 650 or so. They also moved the start time to 11am, and made the levels 1 hr 40mins with a 20 min break after each. We found out this new format the night before the first leg.
And if you want to see a classic Phil Hellmuth “performance”, make sure to see the WSOP main event on ESPN this year.
Oh…and this year there was a new way to lose your blinds…by saying the “F” word, you earned a 10 minute penalty. You had to basically go stand in a corner.
This lead to some entertaining Mike Matusow moments, that I’m pretty sure were missed by the cameras…I promised to share my stories in cafe society once the TV coverage starts.
They reduced it to one hour, at least for some (not sure about all) of the levels, to keep the tournament time managable.
Woops, I noticed you appear to have gone, so you’d know better than me. I know last year I read a news item about reworking the blind structure/times, I assumed it was still in effect.
Was that a WSOP rule or a house rule? I recalled this article from Cardplayer which talked about Hellmouth getting penalized at a WPT event at the Commerce.
Stupid fucking rule.
I’m not sure, I think it was a WSOP rule…probably pushed by ESPN…I think the rule originated in the WPT because it was kind of created for television…I doubt the Rio casino has any rule about saying the F word per se.
I don’t recall Phil being penalized this year…but boy oh boy look out for Matusow,lol.
Like I said though…for some classic…and I mean classic Hellmuth antics, watch this year.
This last part is correct. I don’t know if there is a rule about not touching other people’s chips, at the tournaments I’ve played in, if someone is not at their seat the person next to that seat will often throw in the blinds. No one seems to mind.
Was there an incident at a final table when a player got another player he was heads up with penalized, allowing him to bleed off the other player’s blinds and antes for ten minutes?
Not so much a rule as considered extremely bad manners if the chip owner is there. Technically the dealer should be taking the blinds and antes from absent players but as you say, no one I’ve ever played with has cared if another player does it instead.
On PokerStars round games, you can leave the table without paying blinds, but if you miss 3 big blinds, you get kicked off the table. I don’t know how they handle tourneys.
Haven’t played PokerStars but every other online site I’ve played if you sit out at a tourney table you’re blinded off. Some of my friends from the PokerRoom/Hollywood Poker site tell me that at every other site they play, if you’re all in on a blind while away, your hand is mucked. they also tell me this is the way it’s done in live tourneys. I’ve never played a tourney in a casino so I don’t know. At PR/HP, away players all in on a blind play their hands (and seem to end up winning them more often than statistics would indicate, IMHO).
If you sit out in a ring game at PR/HP, you don’t pay blinds while you’re out but if you missed paying a blind while sitting out you pay it when you sit back in. Not sure if getting kicked off the table is dependent on rounds of blinds or time.