[El Diablo]

Bolivia,

While I don't necessarily have a problem with someone taking over in a tournament, let me toss out these two considerations:

Live tournament: You are called away for some emergency. What happens? You can't have a friend take over your chips. For as long as you're gone, you're blinded away.

Online cash game: Your internet goes out at a no DP table. You lose the hand, lose the money. That's part of the cost of doing business on the Internet.

Taking into account that both of those things happen all the time, I think it would be perfectly reasonable for online sites to have unambiguous rules that say that one individual has to play a tournament, and if for some reason he is unable to continue, he forfeits.