At a poker festival as massive as the World Series of Poker, the unexpected can and will occur. On Sunday, for the second straight summer, an event suffered a notable delay after players returned from a break to find their chips missing.
The latest snafu occurred during Event #11, the $600 No-Limit Hold'em Deepstack, when two players returned from an early-day break to find empty felt where their chips used to be. One of the two players is well-known in the poker world, ACR brand ambassador Rob Kuhn.
Kuhn, fortunately, had snapped a photo of his chip stack before going on break, which likely aided WSOP tourney officials in reconstructing what had happened, even though Event #11 went on hold for nearly an hour while security footage involving the missing stacks was reviewed. Kuhn posted a brief video on his Twitter account about the unexpected misfortune:
It turned out that for both Kuhn and the other impacted player, their stacks had been misappropriated accidentally by other players who had returned from the break to seats at the wrong table. In that sense the mishap differed from last year's somewhat similar delay, caused when a novice dealer pulled in all the players' stacks and combined them in the middle of table as the players went on an early break. That unfortunate dealer presumably thought the table's chips were somehow coming out of play, and he was quickly pulled from the floor once the problem had been identified.
Sunday's delay wasn't as serious as that, though Kuhn did note that there was no dealer at his table when he returned a few minutes early from the break, Dealers generally stay at their tables during WSOP events. Kuhn also offered a follow-up Twitter post once the situation was rectified:
Since the Deepstack tournament hadn't restarted following the break, WSOP officials had a relatively straightforward task in making sure Kuhn's and the other player's stacks were restored with the correct amount of chips.
Kuhn went on to finish 169th out of 6,085 entries in the event. His $2,422 payday more than quadrupled his initial buy-in.
Featured image source (Rob Kuhn at 2022 WSOP): Haley Hintze
