I know.
It happened anyway, someone was winning a little bit and drinking a little more and then the innevitable. Player gets up to go to the ‘bathroom’ between hands and is found 5 minutes later, dead to the world, on the couch. About $40 on his end of the table and the rest of us scratching our heads since we intended to play winner takes all.
What is the typical resolve for just such a scenario?
Take out his blinds as they go around, and fold his cards in the face of any bet.
Really? I can see that backfiring too. What if he’s still not depleted when the big showdown occurs? You know, he’s still got $15 dollars sitting there and the last two or three guys are ‘all in’. Only one guy wins and then he’s still got the $15 sitting there.
Plus, the rest of us were not in any shape to deal with this for more than a couple minutes/hands if you know what I mean. 
“Hey Floorman! Bring us a live one!”
In a tournament (such as the World Series of Poker), there are built-in bathroom breaks. If a player is absent otherwise, the event follows what Treis said (blinds paid, cards folded). If the player returns, he continues with whatever stake he has left.
However I assume this is a home game. As poker books recommend, have a set of written rules for such games.
In my home game, the player is assumed to have stepped away from the table with his money.
What would happen in a home game if the $40 disappeared in blinds, then the guy woke up and disputed the amount?
In a winner take all environment?
He’d be pissed.
But back to the point I made a couple of posts ago, if you’re depleting his money (via blinds) and he isn’t completely exhausted when the game ends, who gets the balance of his money?
This was agreed by all the players?
I don’t understand. How can the game end when two players still have money?
Assume the players have agreed to play winner-takes-all with no breaks.
One player passes out.
The game continues, depleting his stack through blinds.
If the player remains exhausted, then all his money goes to the winner.
If the player recovers before all his money has gone, he’s now a live player and the game continues.
“All you need is a chip and a chair.”
well, you would have to have the last player left go through the motions of playing hands with the absent person. the absent person would still continue to automatically fold all his hands until he either returned or was completely blinded off
The onus is on your buddy, he committed a party foul and has to accept responsibility for whatever consequences may come as a result of said party foul. Including, but not limited to, shaving of a head, marksalot tattoo on the face, massive wedgie and so on.
This is not an issue of poker rules, rather it’s an issue of your friend not being able to handle his liquor! 
Yes.
Which two? After an all-in (let’s assume there me, John, and the passed out guy’s $15 left at the table - everyone else is out of chips. I go all-in, John goes all-in. My full house beats John’s flush. I win, we’re done, except for the little matter of that $15 sitting in the corner where the passed out guy was sitting.
Oh, so the winner of the all-in would get the $15 since he’d just be raking in the blinds the rest of the way against an empty chair anyway, right?
Here’s what we did, sound fair?
What we did was give the guy back his buy-in ($20) and disperse the remainder of the funds evenly.
For a home game, what matters in the end is a solution that makes everybody happy.
However, since you ask… your solution was not fair to the other players, because the drunk got to keep a buy-in he most certainly would have lost. It sets a precedent for letting players walk away from a tourney they are losing and keeping their buy-in. In my opinion, you should have followed the standard rule for tournament play, as others have described. (If it had been a ring game, you should have simply left his pot untouched.)
I guess to some extent this was offset by dispersing the rest of his pot, but again, this penalizes the winner by further shrinking the final haul.
It seems as if your primary concern was not making the drunk upset, which would have been the least concern on my mind. Even for a home game, that behavior is completely unacceptable. It’s selfish and disruptive.
I want to comment on your other concern, that because his pot was relatively large (2x the buy-in), the process of burning his blinds might not have depleted his pot before a showdown. Unless your tourney had fewer than six players, that’s unlikely.
How so? If they leave with enough to get the buy-back returned then they’re technically not loosing.
Right, the winner wound up $20 light, but still $80 richer than when he started.
But this wasn’t a ring game, it was a tourney, and unless the rest of you were the worst players in the state, a guy who was too drunk to make it back from the bathroom wasn’t going to win.
So the next time you guys play, send me $20 off the top. You’ll still be $80 richer.
Again, I think that as long as everybody is happy, you can do whatever you want at a home game. But you asked if we thought it was the right solution, and the overwhelming answer is “no.”
If it’s a $20 buy-in and the total take is $100, that means there were only five players. I can’t imagine that a five-handed game could last much more than an hour. Did he really go from zero to passed out that quickly?
Six, I wouldn’t count getting back your own buy-in as winnings.
Yes, he was getting pretty angular right after that glass of Jack and water went down.