WSOP Takes Aim at Stalling with New Clock Rules

This was published 12-05-2017

The World Series of Poker is the latest poker tournament to apply methods that were structured to speed up play and has announced that it has changed the rules for the 2017 series that will profoundly change the way that players can put “on the clock”.

Several poker tournament series have endeavored to speed up the pace of play and prevent stalling over the past few years.   The Action Clock, a tablet-like timer set was put into operation in the poker table in front of the dealer in the World Poker Tour’s WPT Tournament of Champions.

“Shot Clocks” has been introduced by PokerStars in almost all of their tournaments at $10,000 and higher, starting at PokerStars’ Championship Bahamas.  Among the first to make use of timers and time extension chips was the ARIA High Roller series with the Super High Roller Bowl.

Poker superstar Daniel Negreanu, a participant in all of the above tournament series, has been pushing for changes that reduce tanking in poker and recently wrote in his blog that he believed that it would be only a matter of time before a clock was added to at least a few WSOP events.

Negreanu wrote that he did not enjoy playing most hold’em tournaments without a shot clock and that in any of the no limit hold’em events that he does happen to play, he will take advantage of his right to call for clocks on any habitual tankers.

The WSOP have introduced a rule change for 2017 that will allow players to call the clock on other competitors quicker, and a tournament supervisor may put a clock on any player that is felt to be deliberately stalling, without any prompting from a player at the table.  The WSOP, however, feels that the use of the clock should be based on “the game situation”.

According to Greg Himmelbrand, a professional poker player, the only negative that he sees is the potential for a vindictive tournament supervisor to abuse the ability to call a clock on a player without another player requesting one.  He went on to say that he expects that it will only be used in blatant stalling situations and that it will help keep the game going.

 

 

 

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