[slogger]

First, if you've never played in a rebuy tournament before, I wouldn't suggest trying to run one. It requires your constant attention and can prevent you from playing your own hands appropriately (assuming you plan on playing and running the thing), even if you're familiar with how it should work.

Second, the homepoker tourney site linked in another response is very helpful.

The way I look at it, you should figure out how large you want the pot to be. If $600 sounds about right, then just go with the straight $30 buy-in and leave rebuys for some future date, after you've had a chance to deal with them as a player only.

I run a weekly home tournament for about the same number of people (we've only pushed it to 3 tables twice, and believe me, 2 can be hectic enough while playing myself). It's a $40 buy-in and we vary the structure quite a bit depending on how long we want the thing to last, how many players we have at the start, and whether we think there will enough people afterward for a good side game.

If you're not too concerned about the length of the tournament, then I always feel that longer is better, especially if you consider yourself to be a better player than your opponents. Because of a general facination with the WSOP, we like to start with 10,000 in chips. As far as chips breakdown, we vary it a bit from the actual WSOP, using:

8 green ($200)
8 black ($800)
4 purple ($2,000)
2 blue ($2,000)
1 orange ($5,000)

We start our blinds at $25/50 (using either 15 or 20-minute levels, depending on how long we want it to go). You can increase the blinds however you feel appropriate, but a good rule of thumb is to never increase them by more than 100% from one round to the next. Once you've determined how long you want your tournament to last, it's quite simple to make sure it ends by that time. As many have suggested (including the website mentioned above), the the big blind should be equal to one starting stack at whatever point you want the tournament to come to an end. Likely, it will be over before that. Obviously, depending on the chips you've got available and the time you want to spend, you can set the starting stack just about wherever you want, but make sure that players have at least an hour to play with relatively low blinds, or else the thing just becomes an all-in fest and isn't as much fun.

In terms of payouts, our rule has been to pay 2 places in tourneys of less than 10 players, 3 places in tourneys with 10-15 players and 4 places in tourneys with 16-23 players. We generally prefer to make the payments a little top heavy, and so we pay 45% to 1st, 30% to 2nd, 15% to 3rd and 10% to 4th.