The Case of Tollerene's Missing Chips
Ben "Bttech86" Tollerene plays the biggest online cash games in the world, often exchanging pots worth hundreds of thousands with the likes of Alexander “PostFlopAction” Kostritsyn and Viktor "Isildur1" Blom, but right now he's testing his live skills at the World Series of Poker. Well, actually, he's waiting to test his skills as his chips have gone missing. Let us explain.
Tollerene and another player from Table 33, Jason Morgan, were late coming back from the dinner break. During that ten minutes or so that they were gone, Table 33 broke. In that instance, the tournament staff moves the unattended stacks to the new table and leave a note for the returning players. Apparently Morgan returned first and took his new seat. Minutes later Tollerene did the same thing. Seems simple enough until Tollerene discovered that there was only a stack of around 14,000 waiting for him when he went to dinner with 21,000.
Tollerene alerted the staff who set about trying to figure out exactly what happened by reviewing security footage. This took some time and all the while a calm and collected Tollerene waited patiently. He chatted with the likes of Jeremy Ausmus, Brett Richey and Jason Koon theorizing what could have happened.
Did someone take his chips, be it intentionally or by accident? He was seated in Seat 8 while the other unmanned stack was Seat 3, plus there was a discrepancy between the stacks, so how could the other player not notice?
Eventually that other player was identified as Morgan, who had been playing at the five seat on Table 11 since his return. However, his stack only had around 14,000, which added to the confusion. When asked about which seat he had come from and the stack he left behind, Morgan responded that it was Seat 3 on Table 33 but that he wasn't exactly sure of his stack as he had lost a massive pot in the last hand before the dinner break and left a bit tilted.
As the staff continued to work through the situation, Level 7 came to an end approximately 45 minutes after Tollerene's return. That is when the staff made the decision to take an impromptu break to figure things out. By this time, numerous tables had overheard discussions and began to speculate as to what could have happened and what would happen.
Upon returning from the break, the staff determined that Morgan had accidentally picked up the wrong seating assignment upon returning from the dinner break.
To correct the mistake the staff reseated Morgan to Table 13 Seat 8, which is where the stack of 14,000, minus blinds, awaited him. To make things right, they deducted it a further 7,000, the amount he had lost from Tollerene's stack. They then allowed Tollerene to take his seat at Table 11 and brought the stack there from 14,000 up to 20,400, which they reasoned was Tollerene's stack at the time of the mistake minus estimated blinds.
Tollerene, who kept his cool even after missing an entire level of play, sat right back down and got down to business. Morgan did the same, albeit with a much smaller stack.
{Update} Lynn Gilmartin spoke with Ben about the incident on the following break: