A novel media access control (MAC) protocol named distributed-control polling (DCP) is described and analyzed. It has been designed to bring together the most interesting features of distributed-control MAC protocols and centralized token-passing MAC protocols. From the fully distributed MAC protocols, DCP acquires the capability to guarantee both a complete utilization of the medium capacity and an access delay of only a few slots at light loads. From the centralized token-passing MAC protocols, DCP inherits a more predictable and fair behavior at heavy loads. The basic ideas of the proposal are: a cycle for acquiring transmission rights and a balancing function between reservations and empty slots. The analysis shows that DCP inherits a more predictable and fair behavior at heavy loads. The analysis shows that, at heavy loads, DCP approaches a polling system with G-limited service and zero reply interval. At light loads DCP behavior is close to that of the distributed queue dual bus protocol.< >