Two of the first five tournaments at this year’s World Series of Poker have already fell victim to the new rule that was implemented in an effort to keep tournaments from running into the morning hours, known as the Hard-Stop Rule. The first tournament that saw an additional play of added on was the $500 Casino Employee tournament, and joining the “Hard-Stop Club” on Saturday night was the $5k NLHE tournament.

The $5k NLHE tournament was stopped with Allen Bari holding a huge chip lead (9.1 million) over Sean LeFort (1.4 million), Nicholas Blumenthal (1.2 million), and Maria Ho (1.2 million) who now have to return to the Rio on Sunday to complete the tournament, which may disrupt their WSOP schedule –my guess is that at least two of those players planned on playing in the $1k NLHE—although the minimum of $255k which will be awarded to the 4th place finisher should more than make up for missing another event.

Both tournaments where the Hard-Stop rule has come into play were forced to call it a night during four-handed action. Basically the hard stop rule calls a halt after 10 levels of play during a single day –with breaks and such this works out to be about 12 hours. Since it was announced, the Hard-Stop rule has been met with disdain in most quarters, and considering both tournaments were down to four-handed play it seems that the WSOP may want to reevaluate the rule in the future and give tournament officials and the remaining players more say in the proceedings.

results courtesy of wsop.com

Tags: 1 Million, Bari, Blumenthal, Disdain, Guess, Lefort 1, Met, Place Finisher, Proceedings, Quarters, Rio, Saturday Night, Series Of Poker, Single Day, Tournament Officials, world series, World Series of Poker, WSOP Schedule

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