Horrible ruling at One Drop brings scrutiny to "I thought I saw this card exposed" ruling
There was a big 3-way all-in at the $1,000,000 Buy In WSOP One Drop event, involving Byron Kaverman, Fedor Holz, and Rick Salomon. Table was 5-handed at the time.
With 5 players left in the event, a short-stacked Kaverman shoved with A5 clubs Fedor called with TT. Then Salomon found he had AK hearts, but accidentally exposed the ace of hearts while looking at his hand.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DiaT8z8X4AAb-zd.jpg
The problem was that the exposure was fairly quick, and wasn't super-obvious. Salomon went all-in himself. Fedor was closing the action. No one was going to act behind, and there would be no postflop play. The other two players at the table were out of the hand.
Fedor said that he saw the ace of hearts in Salomon's hand.
Jack Effel, WSOP tournament director, made the peculiar decision to check Salomon's cards and exposed the ace of hearts when indeed that's what he had.
Fedor made the call, and ended up scoring a double-knockout despite the AK2 flop, when a T landed on the river.
The reason this decision was so bad was that nobody was left to act besides Fedor. If Fedor thought he saw an ace of hearts, he was welcome to factor that into his decision to fold or call the double-all-in, but there was no way this should have been verified for him.
Furthermore, since it was a double-all-in, Rick's cards would have been exposed anyway once Fedor was done acting. Therefore, exposing it before Fedor finished acting only served to give him more info. Even if Byron Kaverman had seen the ace of hearts clearly, he would have seen it AFTER he went all-in, thus it did not affect his decision.
In addition, people were a little bothered that Salomon exposed the ace in the first place. Was he trying to help Fedor in some way? Induce/discourage action? Poker pro DJ Mackinnon demanded answers, but he had to get them from Seth Palansky, because Effel has quit Twitter.
Of course, this logic is flawed because there was no reason to expose the card at this point with ONLY Fedor left to act, since Fedor was the only one acting after Salomon. No matter what Fedor thought he saw, there's no way it affected anyone else, as they had all acted BEFORE the exposure.
Several players pointed out that this ruling could set a very bad precedent for angle-shooting. If someone goes all-in and you're facing a decision, you can take a guess as to which cards you think they might have, and then claim you "might have seen" one of of them. Taking a very simple example, say I have KK in the first round of a $1500 NL event, where everyone is deep compared to the blinds. I get in a raising war with an opponent, who goes all-in. Obviously I'm happy to run out the KK against everything except AA. Before calling, I simply say, "Hey, I thought I saw him flash an ace. Can the floor verify and expose the ace if I saw the flash correctly?" If the floor does that and exposes an ace for me, then I know there's a good chance he has aces, and can lay it down. If the floor says, "No ace, you saw it wrong", then I know for sure I have him crushed (or at worst he has the other KK), and I snap call! Horrible!
Sadly, the WSOP doesn't want to admit they simply made a mistake with this ruling.
However, believe it or not, Effel technically followed the posted tournament rules with his decision.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DibE7nTUYAAbOpa.jpg
Clearly there should have been an exception made here, given the circumstances. The WSOP tournament rules also grant the power to the floorman or tournament director to make rule exceptions when common sense dictates it's proper to do so. This was one of those times.
