Curious announcement by Venetian TD

[Wongboy]

Is it common to have straight chops between 10-12 players in a tournament? I see this referenced alot, but it really seems like the large chip stacks are getting screwed if there is any reasonable spread between chip counts.

I have only participated in 3 live tournament deals and those negotiations have always involved different payouts based on relative chip stacks.

[MicroBob]

I haven't played in many live tournaments. But I've seen and heard about some amazingly bad deals.

One was with 4 players remaining. The chip-leader covered the other 3 guys combined.
He had maybe 60% of the chips while the other 3 had perhaps 15-18% each.
They chopped evenly 4 ways.

[gettym]

a buddy of mine chopped a $140 buyin tourney last week 12 ways, 1st got $1700 and the rest got about $1250

[Wongboy]

[ QUOTE ]
I haven't played in many live tournaments. But I've seen and heard about some amazingly bad deals.

One was with 4 players remaining. The chip-leader covered the other 3 guys combined.
He had maybe 60% of the chips while the other 3 had perhaps 15-18% each.
They chopped evenly 4 ways.

[/ QUOTE ]

One of my rare deals, I was chip leader and there were 7 players left (50 entrants, paid 3 places). 2 of the shorter stacks kept pushing for a deal and had been doing so since the FT started. I finally said, "OK, I have 30% of the chips, so I'll take 30% of the prize pool". They quickly agreed, and split the rest evenly despite the fact that the #2 chip stack had three times as many chips as the lowest chip stack.

I was happy with 2nd place money, but I did feel sort of bad for the #2 guy who was obviously not very skilled at making a deal.

[grdred944]

I agree with those who said, redraw. That really is not a tough decision to make, as is the notion of going 11 handed. HOWEVER, I also think it is pretty nitty of the TD to make the announcement in the way he did the following evening -- regardless of how many locals are involved.

[RR]

[ QUOTE ]
Anthony did fine. Going 11-handed instead of hand-for-hand was a fine choice. I also in his shoes might have done a redraw for seats to mix up the final two tables. But you CANNOT punish me for folding crappy hands as we're on/near the bubble. If 5 morons at my table all say they're going to fold around to the blinds, I can't stop them, but I can sure throw a fit if someone tries to disqualify me for their behaviour.

[/ QUOTE ]

What they need to look at is how they arrived at that point. Many things have to go wrong in how a tournament is condcuted beofre it gets to a point where one table is willing to collude against the other table. Without playing htere to know what else is wrong entertaining the idea of a deal across more than one table is just a bad idea. I would prefer that deal making be eliminated, but that isn't really practical. I do feel deals should be limited to the final table as there is just too much confusion going on to get multiple table to agree to something and be able to be certain that everyone understands the deal and the nobody was coerced or tricked into agreeing to the deal.