Holdem tourney last night

[jonnyv]

I had my first large Holdem tourney last night with 56 players in all. It went pretty well with a few bumps in the road, but was a sucsess. I will talk about some of the problems and ask for some feedback to improve for the next one.
The tourney was to start at 5:00pm and at 4:59pm six more players showed up at the last minute when their friends called them from a cell phone to tell them to come because of all the people and the big payout. I was not going to allow them to play, but decided they would have to play at a table of seven with me on their table.
Everyone started with 3000 in chips and the blinds started at 25-50 and doubling every half hour. After seven people busted out I moved five of us to full tables (two from the seven of us busted out), and it worked much better. I kept the tables even by making the big blind on the full table move on the next deal to the short table.
The blind structure made you play since it doubled every half hour. I was a little distracted by playing and running the tourney at the same time and busted out 20th when I went all in with pocket queens and got busted out by a lag with A-8. By 10pm it was down to 9 and the blinds were 1000-2000. By, midnight the tourney was over when the blinds were 4000-8000. With a fifty dollar buy in first place took home 1100 and second 550.
I think that the blind may have been too aggressive and am wondering if anyone has better structure. We had one really drunk kid that was holding up the game and pissing everyone off. He finnally busted out, but would not leave and just about got into several fights. We finally got him to leave, but I was way too nice to him with the way he was acting, but did not want to ruin the night. How would you handle this situation?
We used two decks at a time and one was shuffled as the other one was being dealt. This sped up the game.
We did not have any food or beer and paid out 100 percent of the money. I now feel that after all the time I put in and buying another set of chips I should have asked for donations or took some off the top. What is a fair amount here?
I now know how much work is involved and how much time it takes to put one of these things together. It is also hard to run the tourney and play at the same time. I think I will cut the players down to 30 next time so it will be more managable. I had 40 people signed up and had 16 just show up out of the blue. I will enforce a sign up ahead of time or you will not get in the next time. We did have a side game of 1-2 no limit going also and I sat down and made 60 dollars on the first two hands. Wish I could have played longer, but had to run the tourney.
Any other ideas to make the next one run better?

[LetsRock]

If your tournament lasted 7 hours, you probably could have been a little more aggressive with the blinds. A half hour is a pretty long time between blind raises for most tourneys.

I'm amazed that you had the resources (tables, chairs, chips, cards) to accomodate 16 unscheduled players. For our home tournies, we have X seats and it's first come first serve for reservations (we even try to get the money up front). If you have no reservation, you can show up and see if a seat is open (no-show), but no guarantees.

It is very diffcult to run a tourney bigger than one table and play in it, there's so much to pay attention to that your game will inevitabley suffer.

If you put a bunch of $ out of your pocket to organize the tourney, then you should definately get reimbursed. I don't think anyone will have a problem with skimming the costs off the top of the pool to cover costs AS LONG AS THEY KNOW ABOUT IT IN ADVANCE. Don't decide on the spur of the moment to pay yourself out of the prize pool - that would not go over well. Asking for donations is another way to go about it, but with only 2 winners you're going to have a hard time getting enough out of them.

It's tough dealing with obnoxious players (drunk or otherwise) but you have every right to kick anyone out at anytime if you have rules in place saying that proper behavior is expected and expulsion from the tourney (no refund) is one of the penealties for this. Make sure you have a clear set of rules and that the players have access to them before the tourney - there's nothing worse than trying to handle something on the fly when there's money at stake.

As a general rule, you want to randomly select the person to get moved - don't just take the big blind away. WE always just high-card the table that is moving a player and then try to put him at the new table as close to his table position as is possible. If they end up sitting in the blinds (and they didn't come from the blinds) allow them to let the button pass before playing at that table. (I hate the way on-line tourneys will randomly seat you and you can wind up paying blinds in 3 or 4 consecutive hands because of it.)

Sounds like everything went pretty well, especially for your first tourney. It will get easier with experience and after a while you'll be able to run them on auto-pilot.

[jonnyv]

Great advice Lets Rock. We built four tables with the intension of selling them as I had one of my own. They cost about 100 to build and we have had several people interested in them. Three of us have the composite chips so we had enough to cover for everyone. Just wondering if you could clarify how to move people to a new table. When you say you take a random person I think some would argue that this is not fair. We wanted to avoid any problems so we did it with the blinds. I will have to add no obnoxious player rule to the next tourney to avoid the drunk problem again. I like the donation idea since you really do spend a lot of time and some money on running these. I also think I will get one person who will not play to help with the tourney to avoid the concentration issue. Also no more than a 40 person tourney and maybe just limiting it to 30. I think the blinds were o.k. since we like to have it last until midnight and let people get their monies worth. It also worked out to convert a table for the losers to play at so they could make a night of it.

[slamdunkpro]

I don't know what your buyin was , but next time make it $XX +$10. Then use the $10 / player to recover costs. If there is money left over start a "free roll" pot.

[LetsRock]

[ QUOTE ]
Just wondering if you could clarify how to move people to a new table. When you say you take a random person I think some would argue that this is not fair.

[/ QUOTE ]

Random is the fairest you can possibly get. Most players that pay attention to the other players hate to change seats during a tournament - all of your reads and any effort you've put into creating an image go right out the window.

Automatically pulling the BB off the table can have other implications at the table. The best method is to draw for the move (or have the dealer deal everyone 1 card) and have the high card move. It doesn't get fairer than that.

Our regular group had already bought the chips before we started doing tourneys. I bought them and had everyone chip in a couple of bucks everytime we played (including myself) until the chips were paid for. It took about 8 months to finish the "chip charge" and there was a fair amount of whining just about every session, but it worked out the best. Those who used them the most, paid the most and the "once in a whilers" chipped in a little as well.

If I was buying supplies to setup a tourney, I would add X per player to cover the cost. I don't think anyone has a problem with it so long as it's up front.

If the pace of the tourney worked well for you, then don't change it. The biggest problem with tournies is getting a table to free up quickly so the railbirds can get a side game going.

[Rick Diesel]

Hey jonny,

For the first tournament that you ran, I would definitely consider this a success. I hold one every-other month, with my third tournament to be held on this Friday, April 23rd. I have two of my friends help me run it. I put one of them in charge of securing the place (we use the party room in his apartment building) and beer, the other one is in charge of food and other aesthetics, and I am in charge of all poker related items (rules, blind structure, starting chip counts, etc.)

We had our first tournament a couple of months ago with 24 people for a $50 + $10 buy-in. This turned out great, as the $240 rake worked out to be exactly enough to rent the room ($75), buy a keg ($50), order some pizzas ($75) and pay other expenses like cards ($40). All three of us recruited players until we got to the 24 player maximum, and the tourney went off without a hitch. For this one, we paid three places, $720, $360, $120.

The second tournament, we decided that we could go up to 32 players, and we gave all 24 participants in the first tournament the first opportunity to get in by prepaying their entry fee, and opened it up to the next 8 people that gave me the cash. We paid out five places in this one, $720, $400, $240, $160, $80.

The third tournament, this Friday, we are going to 40 players, and all 40 have already paid me the money. The payout will again be 5 people at $900, $500, $300, $200, $100. At this tournament however, the $10 juice per player will add up to enough that there should be some money left over after expenses, so my and my two friends should receive at least a small amount of $$ for our troubles.

I structure the tournaments with 5,000 in starting chips, and the blinds go up every 20 minutes. The blinds are
10/20
15/30
25/50
50/100
75/150
100/200
150/300
200/400
300/600
500/1,000
1,000/2,000
2,000/4,000
3,000/6,000
5,000/10,000 and double every 20 minutes from that point on

If you would like additional information, feel free to PM me and I will get it to you.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot, one of my friends that helps me is a city cop, and about ten of his cop friends usually play in the tournament. This is helpful:
(a) The game will NEVER get busted
(b) Nobody would ever have the balls to try and steal the cash
(c) my buddy and all of his cop friends do not have the slightest clue about how to play poker.

Anyway, good luck at the next tourney.

Rick Diesel

[neotope]

[ QUOTE ]
(c) my buddy and all of his cop friends do not have the slightest clue about how to play poker.


[/ QUOTE ]

That is obviously the most helpful thing /images/graemlins/smile.gif

[neotope]

I forgot I actually had a question.

What denominations of chips do you guys use? And, how do you handle coloring up? Right now we run single table sit and go style tournaments so we don't really have any issues with coloring up but eventually my friends and I would like to host bigger tournaments. I know that too many color chips would be bad but I have to have some different colors for the higher values.

[Rick Diesel]

Right now, I have five different colored chips.
White - 5
Red - 25
Green - 100
Blue - 500
Black - 1,000

Everyone starts with 5,000 in chips. Once we get down to about 4-5 players, the blinds are usually pretty large (3,000-6,000 maybe) so I reintroduce a color, usually red, as a 5,000 chip. This works out fine since at this point, I have already colored up the white, red, and green chips. I am currently looking into getting another color of chip, maybe purple or yellow, but until then this works okay.

Rick Diesel

[neotope]

For some reason I never thought of reintroducing a color as a different value. Now it seems to make so much sense /images/graemlins/smile.gif The chips we play with are not marked so I guess it does not matter if we change them later in the tournament.

By the way, I'm from the Pittsburgh area and always looking for tournaments. What part of the town do you guys play in?

[Rick Diesel]

Banksville/Greentree

[cferejohn]

[ QUOTE ]
Automatically pulling the BB off the table can have other implications at the table. The best method is to draw for the move (or have the dealer deal everyone 1 card) and have the high card move. It doesn't get fairer than that.


[/ QUOTE ]

I disagree. You can have some random way of choosing which table will be pulled from, but always pulling the BB *is* random because you have no way to determine where the BB will be when you happen to need a player to move. High-carding someone can easily lead to someone going through the blinds twice in a row, which is definitely not fair.

When I ran my tournament (started with 5 tables), I would always pull the BB-to-be and move them to as close to the BB as possible on the new table.

Fwiw, I believe that the standard tournament rules now recommend this.

[ QUOTE ]
If I was buying supplies to setup a tourney, I would add X per player to cover the cost. I don't think anyone has a problem with it so long as it's up front.


[/ QUOTE ]

It is, however, probably illegal. It is unlikely anyone will care, but there you go. When I ran a tournament, I asked everyone to bring food/beer/soda to share and I ended up with a lot of extra beer and soda to share. Good enough for me. Your milage may vary.

[setter]

Sounds like things went pretty much as well as could be expected. We have a monthly game here in Texas that got up to 74 (and another 18 no showed but had signed up (weather)) last month. Taking a rake is illegal in Texas, as in many other states, so we decided to form a "club" with yearly dues. Those dues payed for tables, chips, KEM cards etc. By becoming a member you are "in" for any event we put on and can bring a "guest" twice a year. If your guest wishes to become a member then, they can pay dues as well. We hold discussion groups, allow for members to rent tables for private games very cheaply and also the chips as well (in order to get value from being in the "club"). Thinking about having a newsletter with various topics of discussion and a website so you can register on line. A couple of things we have done is let the first two levels of blinds (start w/ 2500 or 3000 chips and blinds at 25/50 last a bit longer than later on, so that people feel they are getting to play poker (some have no idea) for their buy in. We low card for the move but allow them to miss the blinds if they are less than 2 away from posting (we do this so people dont complain as much if they constantly get low carded and moved. Works for us but not likely for a real tournament setting. I and my friend do pretty much everything and we have our set roles during the tourny. If one of us gets eliminated, they take control over everything.

This month we play on Saturday with a rebuy. The problem is my friend and I have a disagreement on how to do rebuy. My idea is rebuy at any time you are at or lower than the inital buy in amount, his is when you are at 50% down from inital buyin amount of chips. Heated discussion and we let those who are in decide by email vote (so far the 50% is winning handily). We introduced a bounty for each person who gets eliminated after the addon period is over ($5) so it gives some people who will not make the paid money finish some money back. Let me know what you guys think as well, on how we can improve our game.