The entire topic of when to put chipstacks on the table without the player / chip-owner present will likely be reviewed in detail at the 2015 Summit. The TDA receives numerous inquiries on this subject, with various scenarios...
Here's an interesting one recently received, re-printed here anonymously:
Message Body:
I have a question regarding the amount of chips that are wrongly introduced into a poker tournament. Recently I directed a tournament where there were 15 ghost players that had never entered the tournament.We discovered 3 hours into the tournament that this should not be and we had blinded off a total of 102 075 of their chips which we could obviously not take back. So there was a total of 1.21% more chips than there should have been. Obviously we took the remaining ghost stacks off the tables. While we know this is bad, we did not believe this to be devastating. Now the question I have is what percentage of chips wrongly introduced to a poker tournament does it have to be for it to become devastating. When I say devastating I mean that we have to cancel the poker tournament and refund everyone's money in order to maintain the integrity of the game.
Thank you.