Doyle is wrong

Here's an interesting little story that I ran across night before last while preparing my WSOP write-up, taken from here.

Doyle's Complaint

Doyle Brunson was placed at a table with his son, Todd Brunson, the other
day in the $10,000 Limit Hold'em World Championship. Both Doyle and Todd are
still in today's event and it could happen again today. Doyle talked to
communications director Seth Palansky about the issue and in his opinion,
doesn't think it will happen. Palansky said he'd talk about it with others and
try and make some sort of ruling from it.

Brunson continued to talk about the topic with his table mates. He said
that he would never blatantly soft play or anything, but it's just common nature
that he wouldn't want to be sticking his son right in the middle of things if it
happened to come up. The table seemed to agree with him.

As it happened, they did get moved to the same table a little later, though it didn't last long.

First, there's the minor issue of why the communications director is sticking his nose into how the tournament runs. That seems out of his jurisdiction to me.

More fundamentally, though, why is there anything to rule on? The tournament rules specify that seats are to be assigned randomly. Nobody gets to pick and choose who they would like or not like to share a table with. There is a provision for making exceptions for players with special needs, but it seems to me that the clear implication of that is something like a wheelchair that will only fit at an end seat, or a visually impaired player needing to be in Seat 5 or 6 to see the community cards. A family member at the table can't reasonably be defined as a "special need" in that context.

Just imagine the pragmatic problems of allowing such a precedent. What relationships are close enough to merit an exception to randomization? Siblings? Cousins? Second cousins? Uncles/nephews? If spouses, how about engaged couples, or those in a long-term relationship who don't choose to marry--or a couple that would like to marry but can't because of any number of legal obstacles? How about best friends?

Moreover, what sort of system would you put in place for confirming the existence of any of those relationships? Suppose I see that I'm about to get moved to one of the "tables of death" that occasionally crop up in these things, with six or seven of the world's toughest pros looking for my donkey blood? Maybe I whisper to the floor guy that one of the other unknowns is my secret gay lover. How is he going to know if that's true or not? Ask the other player in front of everybody?

Also, it would obviously be easy to game such a provision. If your family member is at an otherwise soft table, you say nothing and take the transfer. If it looks like a killer table, though, you invoke the privilege. Is that not self-evidently a prescription for abuse?

There are obviously potential problems when two people with a preexisting close relationship share a poker table. But that's nothing new. It's been going on forever. We count on both their integrity and their basic drive to act in their own self-interest to blunt or erase any impact on how they play. If they are found to be soft-playing each other, there are already rules in effect for how to deal with that.

It's not a perfect system, but it's far better than opening the Pandora's box of allowing tournament officials to decide on an ad hoc, case-by-case basis whether to grant a player's wish not to be seated at a particular table.

If you're still not convinced, consider this. Doyle Brunson is randomly selected to fill the empty seat on Todd's right. He requests and is granted a waiver due to their filial relationship. So they select again, and now instead it's you that gets tapped on the shoulder to move from your juicy, cushy-soft table, where you're the big stack, to the shark cage filled with monster stacks, with Todd sitting on your immediate left for the rest of the day.

Now how do you like Doyle's proposal? Are you willing to make that sacrifice just so that he doesn't have to deal with whatever discomfort might come from having to compete against his son? I didn't think so.