So I was playing a live event over the weekend and I had a situation occur after moving to a new table I've never heard of or seen before. Ideally I'm looking for someone with floor experience to answer but if anyone has seen something like this I am curious what your TD/Floor staff ruled in the following situation:
Late stages in a live tournament, there are 3 levels left until end of day 1, with 30 minute clock. Hero is moved to a new table. Seat 1 is villain in question.
Hero opens on the cutoff, villain is on the button. Hero does a standard open, nothing exciting, villain tank calls. We go to the flop, now this is where the situation begins before the flop is dealt, a player not in the hand mutters "He's been tanking all day, it's getting ridiculous", which is followed by several players agreeing.
Hero continues about half of pot, villain tanks. After 20 seconds pass table calls clock. Villain uses his entire time and folds. Next hand, villain again tanks preflop, immediately the same player calls clock, again as we reach the floop the same player calls clock again on the villain. After calling clock 3 times in as many streets of action the floor gives a verbal warning to the player who has called clocked 3 times.
Now this is where my main question begins. The next hand the villain tanks, clock is called immediately again, but by a different player. The entire table begins to take turns on calling clock for every action the villain makes. I have never seen a situation like this ever before where 8 out of the 10 players at a table proceeded to target a single player. So my question for any TDs/Floorstaff or perhaps a player who has seen this happen before, is how do you as a TD deal with this situation? Can you give penalties for the entire table and allow the table to continue with only 2 players? I understand this is a very niche situation but I am really not sure how to effectively deal with this situation, and thought it was an interesting situation.
Spoiler TD's action:
TD ended up just processing every clock call as they came in, because it was a new player every time, and they did not take decisive action to stop the clock calling, which in my mind was essentially targeted bullying and wasted a huge amount of time. I really think this was a terrible decision on the floors part.