Tournament Directors Association Adopts Some New Rules

The Tournament Directors Association (TDA) began a little more than a year ago when several tournament directors and cardroom managers renewed the age-old discussion about getting members of the poker industry to agree on some common rules. Tournament executives Matt Savage and Dave Lamb, and Linda Johnson and I, spearheaded the organization of what was to become a fairly large group of tournament directors and players interested in achieving one goal: standardizing tournament rules. You may recall that when Linda Johnson was the publisher of Card Player, she tried several times to standardize regular daily rules. She met with so much resistance that she had to abandon the fight. It seemed that everyone was in favor of getting on the same page with the rules - as long as the page was their own. Few wanted to budge, so that effort eventually died, at least for the time being. Another idea surfaced soon thereafter: Maybe tournament directors could get on the same page and be willing to bend a little in the interest of bettering the industry. Guess what? They did, and it worked.

Last year, after much preparation in gathering many of the tricky rules and procedures that needed to be addressed, a meeting was called and about 40 tournament directors from around the country attended. Fourteen rules were agreed upon, and the properties that entered into the agreement with the TDA followed those rules for an entire year. The group of tournament directors has since grown, and it convened again in July to review the original 14 rules and look at some additional rules. Unbelievably, the group agreed to a total of 37 rules, including keeping the original 14! This was deemed to be a real success.

So, what does this mean to you, the player? It means that there are certain basic procedures and rulings that will be the same regardless of where you play a tournament. Of course, not all casinos will adopt the TDA rules, but enough are TDA members that the ones that aren't are at least listening and adopting the rules with which they feel comfortable. For example, casinos that are TDA members and have adopted the 37 rules all play a dead button.

There are 37 things you can count on: Over the course of the next several columns, I will review these rules. There are some very interesting and progressive things that the group agreed to try, and the members should be commended for having the foresight to realize that these things will be good for the industry by making the playing field friendlier.

The first 14 rules are carryovers from last year, but being reminded of them can't hurt. Also, they're a reminder of how things used to be before conformity, and how much smoother things are now. Of course, there are still holdouts who refuse to make any changes, but they seem to be the minority now.

The first rule concerns chip racing, when taking the smallest-denomination chip off the table at the end of a round. Do you remember how we used to race? We changed up the chips either by coloring everyone up or by allowing one player a windfall by winning all of the odd chips. Then, a new procedure was introduced that allows any player in the race to receive only one chip, regardless of how many high cards he receives. This way, the chips are redistributed, but no one gets all of the chips anymore. This rule was unanimously agreed to by all of the directors.

Next on the docket was the problem of the odd chip, that pesky extra chip that has to go somewhere in a split pot. It was agreed that the odd chip will go to the high hand in a split-pot game, to the closest player left of the button in one-winner flop games, and to the high card by suit in nonsplit-pot, stud-type games. No longer are dealers trying to sort through all of the cards to find the low card by suit on the low end and/or the high card by suit on the high end. This is a much quicker method that is still random.

We will take a look at all of the rules, and some of them are very interesting. You will be pleasantly surprised to see how much smoother your poker tournaments will proceed with standardized rules. Class dismissed.

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