A poker rules myth propagated again

I think there has been good reason to praise, in general, the coverage of the World Series of Poker by the live bloggers working for PokerNews. But once in a while, frankly, they just don't know what they're talking about.

Here's the post from earlier today that prompts that observation:

To Tell the Truth

Those that may be new to live tournament poker may not know that it is
against the rules to talk about your hand truthfully before showdown. For
example, if you are on the turn and getting ready to bet or call a bet, you
cannot tell a person what you actually have. If you were to tell a player that
you have a king and then show a king either at showdown, or at any point, then
you would receive a one-round penalty.

This rule was just explained to a table by our floor staff. After hearing
the explanation, a player stated, "In poker, it's OK to lie, but it's not OK to
tell the truth."

Welcome to poker.

But that's not the rule.

It's hard to know exactly how to apportion the blame for getting this wrong and, once again, putting out this erroneous information to the poker-playing public. Perhaps the floor person explained it badly. Perhaps the players misunderstood what he told them. Perhaps the field reporter for PokerNews heard it wrong. Perhaps the blogger writing up the post introduced some errors of his own. I can't tell. But I can tell that the result is misinformation.

I've previously explained in boringly excruciating detail what's wrong with this common myth, so I won't trouble y'all again about it. Go back and read that post if you're interested. For now, here's what PN got wrong:

PN said, "[I]t is against the rules to talk about your hand truthfully before showdown." That is not the rule. If it were, you could be penalized for saying, "I'm really strong here," or "I like my hand," if those were deemed to be truthful statements. Heck, you could pick up a penalty for saying, "I have two hole cards."

PN, with apparent approval, quoted a player as saying, "In poker, it's OK to lie, but it's not OK to tell the truth." That, too, is not the rule. As I detailed in my previous post on this subject, it would be trivially easy to disclose one's hand to an opponent, should one choose to do so, entirely with lies about what one is holding. But disclosing one's hand by lying is just as much against the rule as disclosing one's hand by telling the truth. The prohibition is against disclosure, not the means by which one might accomplish the disclosure.

PN wrote, "If you were to tell a player that you have a king and then show a king either at showdown, or at any point, then you would receive a one-round penalty." This isn't entirely wrong, but it's not entirely right, either. There is some squishy, unclear area about exactly how much one can "disclose" about one's hand before it violates the rule. For example, in some situations it might be irrelevant whether one has a king, and if so, such disclosure may not amount to much more than saying, "I have two cards." Therefore, it is not clearly correct, as a blanket statement, that truthfully announcing that one has a king will always incur a penalty.

Furthermore, the penalty may not necessarily be sitting out for one round. It might be merely a warning. Or, if the infraction is deemed unusually flagrant or affects the outcome in some way that is highly prejudicial to another player, the tournament staff might choose to impose a more severe penalty, even on a first offense. They have a lot of discretion about penalties. (See WSOP rule 46 here.)

That's a lot to get wrong about one rule, in one post.