To ensure game integrity and mitigate cheating concerns, PokerStars is implementing several changes to its upcoming live poker tournament series.
PokerStars will implement the majority of the changes by the European Poker Tour Monte Carlo festival, which starts at the end of the month. The rest will be standard operating procedure by the EPT Barcelona stop in August.
The company’s most notable rule change concerns its dealers’ procedures. Instead of allowing dealers to use the traditional pitch, in which cards are briefly airborne on their way to the player, PokerStars will mandate that they use the slide method.
Slide dealing gained popularity in Australia and much of Europe. It is a different way for dealers to distribute cards. Instead of the traditional pitch,the dealer pushes or slides the card across the felt.
According to PokerStars’ statement, this change in dealing protocol, “Prevents phones or smart devices from having the chance of catching any card faces during a pitched deal.”
This potential form of cheating made the news last year when several men were caught utilizing tiny cameras and ‘microscopic earpieces that were so small, they could only be removed using a magnet’ in France last year.
Poker pro Matt Berkey discussed the issue on his Only Friends podcast, noting that removing devices like cell phones from the table isn’t enough, as one suspected cheater allegedly placed a tiny hidden camera inside of a ring. For Berkey, “You have to go to the core of the problem, which is the dealer’s pitch.”
The typical pitch can even result in game-integrity issues without high-tech devices involved if the cards fly high enough for a player to catch a glimpse with the naked eye.
Popular poker vlogger Andrew Neeme noted his preference for the slide deal on social media back in 2022. The post was quote tweeted by Poker Tournament Directors Association founder and World Poker Tour Executive Tour Director Matt Savage the day before PokerStars announced plans to adopt slide dealing.
Well @berkey11 thinks it’s easy to have the industry retrained. It definitely has an upside but there are issues that make it difficult like felts, humidity, speed, and training time to reach a competent level. https://t.co/GHBCMyCJjX
— Matt Savage (@SavagePoker) April 22, 2025
As Savage noted, special training is required for the slide dealing method. That is a probable explanation as to why it won’t be fully implemented right away.
“Slide dealing which will be rolled out over the coming months and implemented fully by EPT Barcelona in August, to bring consistency to its processes and regulations at all its live events,” said PokerStars officials in a press release.
For American poker players, this won’t change much. PokerStars only has a couple of American stops for its North American Poker Tour. However, the online poker site runs several popular live tournament series outside the United States.
They operate the EPT, the recently re-branded PokerStars Open, the Asia Pacific Poker Tour, and the Brazilian Series of Poker.
The record-setting Irish Poker Open, which just wrapped up in Dublin, is also affiliated with PokerStars.
While slide dealing will surely grab much of the attention, as it has been the talk of ‘Poker Twitter’ recently, this was far from the only rule change announced. Other updates include:
- Final tables will now play a set number of hands per level instead of playing at the same forced bets for a set time period.
- In addition to phones, smart accessories like watches, rings, glasses and wearable tech with the ability to transmit information will also now be disallowed at the table.
- New entries are now required to take a seat immediately, with the goal of cracking down on players lingering to avoid the blinds or otherwise gain an advantage.
- Shot clocks will now be used starting at level 11 in hyper-turbo tournaments
“These changes are all about integrity and player experience and safety”, said Toby Stone, EPT Tournament Director. “We’ve listened to what players want, what their concerns are about playing in tournaments nowadays and made changes that directly address those concerns. With what we are bringing in, players know they are playing on a fairer, more even playing field, and they aren’t being disadvantaged either by illegal action that is hard to detect, or behavior that is technically within the rules but perhaps not in the spirit of the game.”
Photo credit: Rational Intellectual Holdings Ltd. / Joe Giron.
