Three Ways to Improve Poker Tournaments

I am pretty much a poker-tournament junkie. The poker explosion seems virtually restricted to tournaments, so, clearly, I'm not alone.

I love the strategy, competition, and excitement a tournament provides. But, I think poker tournaments could be improved. Here are three examples of things that could be done differently:

1. Standardisation of rules. Which other game apart from poker has different rules in different countries? Can you imagine the chaos if the offside rule in football was different in England and Italy? Well, wherever you go in the world, there are subtle differences in the rules of poker.

Let me give you an example from recent EPT events. At Copenhagen, when there were 10 players remaining, they played two tables of five until they lost a player. Meanwhile at Deauville, when they reached 10, the tournament director decided to play one table of 10. That's not much difference, you might think, but if you have a short stack while playing at a full table, it gives you longer to find a situation to double up. I'm not saying which decision is right; I'm suggesting that it would be preferable to have the same ruling every time, so everyone knows what is going to happen.

2. How annoying is it when the bubble or the final table of a tournament is approaching and some players desperate to reach the next level slow down play to a crawl? Well, my friend Paul Alterman came up with an idea to put an end to this nonsense.

Simply stop the clock when the bubble approaches. That, along with hand-for-hand play (which is already the norm in most tournaments) would render time-wasting and procrastination pointless. It's a brilliant solution to a perennial problem, I reckon.

3. Let all players share the benefits of the poker boom. At the moment, only a select few are reaping the benefits of the poker boom: the casinos, television companies and those who work for them, and the select few players who win or finish highly in the events or get significant TV time and score sponsorship deals.

Surely it's time for all players to benefit slightly from the massive exposure of poker in the media. After all, it's the players who provide the action.

A small step could be that if an event is going to be featured on TV, it could be juice-free for all of the entrants. That way, even a player who busts out on the first hand has been given a small "payment" for participating.

Poker is a great game. We are experiencing a boom, and loads of new players are being attracted to the game. But, we should not rest on our laurels. Finding ways to improve can only continue to improve our popularity and attractiveness to sponsors and television.

Heard at the Bar

At the moment, sponsors of poker players in Europe are confined almost exclusively to online poker sites.

But, it seems that many of these sites are starting to think of different ways to spend their marketing budgets, adding money to certain tournaments and putting some of their customers into the big live events.

So, don't be surprised in the near future to see some of the biggest names in poker being sponsored by companies that have more tenuous links to the game. Players may soon wear shirts emblazoned with slogans promoting energy drinks, airlines, grooming products, bookmakers, sunglasses, or alcohol.

For the first time, I kind of regret being passionately anti-smoking. I can't think of another firm that would be remotely interested in sponsoring a fat poker player nicknamed "The Camel."