A set of amendments to PokerStars’ live event rules was recently announced under the banner of ‘keeping poker safe.’
Four main changes were revealed, which will be fully enforced at this summer’s European Poker Tour (EPT) Barcelona festival, with a ‘soft launch’ at this week’s EPT Monte Carlo. These four rules relate to:
- Forgoing a tournament clock at final tables and playing a fixed number of hands per level instead.
- Slide-dealing instead of pitching cards.
- Expanded restrictions on the use of smart devices.
- Stricter seating rules.
“We’re changing all the time. It's not static, it's ever evolving,” says long-standing Tournament Director Toby Stone, currently overseeing events at EPT Monte Carlo. “Some of these updates were a reaction to the cheating scandals that have been going on over the last year. There were a lot of articles about this stuff in the poker world, and obviously it's a small world and everybody knows each other, so we’re always looking to improve things wherever we can.”
PokerStars’ live events have a reputation for smooth operation and a good player experience, but — to borrow a familiar analogy — while many may see the calm swan gliding across the water, few get a glimpse of the legs powering away beneath the surface. Logistical challenges are part of it, but so is continually reviewing and updating what's acceptable at the tables and what's not.
PokerOrg sat down with Stone in Monte Carlo to get some insight into how and why these updates came to be and some of the challenges they present at an organizational level.
For more detail on each of the rule updates, over to Toby Stone himself...
Hands per level (no tournament clock) on final tables
The idea of hands per level, instead of a tournament clock, came from players. With a clock, people can abuse the time; some tables go slow, and some tables go fast. If you’re a short stack who’s one or two hands away from paying the big blind, with a few minutes on the clock, you can just tank.
I understand the strategy behind it, but it still sucks; it's awful. So using hands per level for the final table is an attempt to fix that.
I’ve tried to figure out, on average, how many hands per level are played in different kinds of tournaments. You can’t just say it’s one hand every two minutes; it’s going to vary depending on the tournament being played. You have to have a bespoke number of hands for all the types of different tournaments that we have, from 10-minute hypers to PLO, mixed games, the Main Event, and so on.
So I put together what I think is a guideline and right now I'm tracking every final table, counting the average hands per level, and after this I'll make adjustments because I know I haven’t got it right. I'm probably relatively close, but I haven't got it exactly right just yet. After this event, I'll go through all that data and we'll make adjustments for the next one.
I think the additional benefit is that players can actually strategize more. Now, they know exactly how many hands are going to play at this level, what moves they can make… these players are going to know this better than me. So I think it's better for them, and so far I think it’s sped the game up a little bit.
At the moment it's only the final table, and I'll tell you why: you try to figure out a way to do it on two tables! There are solutions, but they cause more problems than they solve.
For example, when we get down to 16 players, you could expand the payouts so that there are no more jumps — 16th down to 12th could pay the same — but no player is going to want that.
Then, say, you could do something similar to hand-for-hand, where each table plays five hands, for example. But say I bust on the first hand and you bust on the last one; you went a lot deeper than me, but we’re not going to be able to do the payouts until all those hands are done. That means players don't know what they’re playing for.
I'd love to find a way to do this on the final two or three tables because I know there's so much stalling. It’s one of my pet hates, but I don't have a solution for it now.
Slide-dealing
You can have a phone on the rail catching the cards as the dealer deals, with that info relayed back to the player. The technology exists, so this is in reaction to that: slide-dealing essentially fixes that problem.
Now, no one can see what the cards are. And because I was a slide dealer, initially, for me it was a natural fix. I know other operators might have a bigger challenge with this, but for me I have more or less the same dealers for most PokerStars events in Europe, so it makes it a relatively easy thing to do. They’re already a very good team of dealers, renowned for being some of the best dealers in the world.
So for the last year, pretty much since the last EPT Monte Carlo, we’ve been training for slide-dealing. We also had to change the baizes because we couldn’t slide-deal on the old baizes, so we've had to progressively change all of these, train all the dealers, and now we're about 90% there.
We were aiming to be 100% slide-dealing from this event, but with the cancellation of EPT Paris, we lost an opportunity for training, so now it’s going to be Barcelona. But we’re nearly there. At the moment the Main Event and any tournament that’s in the money have side-dealing. But from Barcelona onwards, we’ll be 100% slide-dealing in most stops.
Expanded restrictions on smart devices
Obviously, this goes back to those cheating scandals. You can have cameras in rings, something in a button on your shirt, smart glasses... who knows what potential cheating options there are now or that are coming in the future? So we are trying to limit that.
We're not going to ban smartwatches, but smart glasses is a ban. We don't want people recording others at the table. For me, as a player, if someone's recording me, then they can go back over all my hands and maybe get an advantage, or maybe they're going to post it on Twitter and then everybody can see how I played my hands… I don't think most players like this, and you can do that with smart glasses, so recording at the table is just a no.
If you've got a media badge and want to record at the table, that’s covered in our terms and conditions, but for any player to be able to record, no good is going to come from that. So we just expanded that electronic devices rule to try to cover ourselves for the future. It's not going to stay the same — more things will happen, and we'll have to keep adjusting to what's going on, but hopefully it helps.
Stricter seating rules
Some player will come to the table, they’re in seat number 5, but they see the button’s on seat number 1 and they don’t want to pay the blind when they first sit down, and I get that. But we get a lot of complaints from players at the table: ‘Why is he doing that? I didn't get the chance to do that, I was sat down at the start.'
We want to encourage people to come for the start of the tournament because we want to start it. We don't want players standing around waiting for the blind to pass.
This is a tricky one, because the only way to completely solve it is by walking every player to their table as soon as they buy in. We obviously don't have the resources to do that.
So, the rule now is that if you come to the table, that's you telling us, ‘I've come to play.’ If you've not come to sit down, you’ve no business being in the room, so we're going to force you to sit down. We’ve actually been doing this for the last year, unofficially, but now we've got it written down.
Another important part of this, which no player has actually complained about, is that I don't think that person standing there and not taking their seat has a right to see all the action. They’re getting information, but they have no right to it.
You want information? Sit your ass down!
EPT Monte Carlo is running now, until May 10.
Images courtesy of Manuel Kovsca/Jules Pochy/Eloy Cabacas/Danny Maxwell/Rational Intellectual Holdings Ltd.
