I am back with some breaking news once again from a hand that played out at the WSOP.
This time, we have a hand posted by Patrick Leonard that shows a player seemingly in the tank after Leonard had moved all-in.
The clock was called, 30 seconds counted down, and what you can hear in the video is the floor person say, "dead hand,” and then the player say, “call.”
End result: The player was apparently allowed to call and won the hand.
There’s a lot of controversy over this, obviously, because it feels like the hand should have been dead because the words 'dead hand' were said.
Let’s break It down
Every time something like this happens, I'm always a little bit slower to rush to judgment than other people because I don't know the whole story.
Yes, it seems pretty damning in the video. I have heard from other sources that the player put chips in before saying call, but that hasn’t been verified.
I don't know if this is true, so, for the sake of this and to avoid it seeming like I always blindly defend the people who do what I do, we're going to take it at face value and assume that exactly what we saw is what happened.
So, what should happen here?
As a floor person, if I'm issuing a clock, I say the next number to indicate the end of the previous. So it's three seconds and then 2.9, 2.8, 2 seconds, etc, then the second I say dead hand, they’ve had their whole clock.
The reason you can't give somebody any sort of delay in this situation is that when you say the words “dead hand,” the player now has every right to react as though they have won the hand. If you give any sort of pause, you let that player react, then let the other person decide whether to call.
So, what can we do when this happens?
Ask for a second opinion
Ask for another ruling. Request to have another floor person come over to the table. You don't have to be rude about it or revolt. You just ask for a second opinion.
And to WSOP's credit (in my experience), they've been very good about bringing in someone else to make a ruling if people have questions about what happened or don't think it is right.
The phone recording that Pads showed, if I'm being honest, I wouldn't look at it. Why? Because you're not letting every person in that tournament use video recordings as replays to verify decisions. I always preach consistency, and giving one table the ability to use instant replay but denying many others that right would not lead to consistent decisions.
Hammer's opinion
I know I’ll get some flak for this, but I would personally give a little bit of grace to these floor people. They're working very long hours. They're a month into this tournament, and they are going to make some mistakes.
It doesn't mean they're underqualified, bad, or that we need to revolt. What it means is that they're human beings and sometimes make mistakes. Yes, they should be held to standards and problems should be fixed as they arise, but this is a huge event, and the chances of something going wrong at some point are very high.
In the future, if something like this happens, seek another opinion, and, hopefully, we will get the right ruling as often as possible.
Justin Hammer is the Live Events Director for PokerAtlas, an online tournament director for the Texas-based poker app Hijack, and a tournament director at Thunder Valley Casino Resort. He also works as a consultant and is a minority owner of Desert Bluffs Casino in Kennewick, Washington.
For more info visit PokerAtlas.com, HijackPoker.com, and bluffs.poker. Follow Justin on X.
