When to put "unmanned" chipstacks on the table...

[MikeB]

The entire topic of when to put chipstacks on the table without the player / chip-owner present will likely be reviewed in detail at the 2015 Summit. The TDA receives numerous inquiries on this subject, with various scenarios...

Here's an interesting one recently received, re-printed here anonymously:

Message Body:
I have a question regarding the amount of chips that are wrongly introduced into a poker tournament. Recently I directed a tournament where there were 15 ghost players that had never entered the tournament.We discovered 3 hours into the tournament that this should not be and we had blinded off a total of 102 075 of their chips which we could obviously not take back. So there was a total of 1.21% more chips than there should have been. Obviously we took the remaining ghost stacks off the tables. While we know this is bad, we did not believe this to be devastating. Now the question I have is what percentage of chips wrongly introduced to a poker tournament does it have to be for it to become devastating. When I say devastating I mean that we have to cancel the poker tournament and refund everyone's money in order to maintain the integrity of the game.

Thank you.

[WSOPMcGee]

The answer here is - IT DEPENDS. Does the TDA need to address it? NO. It's the organizers explicit duty to inform players when their chips will go into play.

In this example, 3 hrs is well within a reasonable amount of time considering the availability and variability of late registering.

Also I hope someone returned an email to this fellow TD and let them know that the only good reason to cancel a tournament and issue refunds to all players is if the tournament is compromised (as in the example of added value chips - wsop term) by a person or persons illegally introducing chips into the tournament to gain an advantage.