How do you get banned for life from the World Series of Poker According to Tournament Director Jack Effel, “You don’t take someone else’s chips.” This is apparently what happened to the player who escorted from the Amazon Room during the third level of play in the $1,000 NLHE on Saturday afternoon.
Several players at our table noticed a fiftyish-looking man with gray hair, wearing a baseball cap, being escorted from the Amazon room by three Harrah’s security guards. The player in seat one asked Jack Effel, when he walked by a half-hour later, what happened to the guy, “so I don’t do the same thing.”
Jack explained that Baseball Cap was in a hand with another player when the announcement came that level 2 had ended and the 20-minute break was starting. As is usually the case, the players not in the hand got up and left the table. The two remaining players played out the hand and our culprit happened to win it. As the dealer pushed the pot his way and he started raking it in, he just pulled the chips in with one hand. He set his other hand down in the spot next to him as if he was using it for leverage to lean forward to pull in the chips. In fact, he placed that hand over a stack of chips of the player next to him (who had left the table like all the others for break). As he was pulling in the pot with one hand, he noticed the dealer’s eyes move off him and at that moment pulled in the chips that were underneath his other hand. To the naked eye it just looked like he was pulling in the chips with both hands.
I don’t know whether the adjacent player returned and noticed the missing chips or if this was discovered some other way, but a look at the tape confirmed it and the offending player was gone.
Jack Effel concluded the explanation by saying, “He’ll be banned from the World Series forever.
