Home Tourney

[ansky451]

Me and several people are organizing a home tournement, probably for around 40-50 people, 30 at the least. How do you reccomend we setup the blind structure, and payout structure? I was thinking start out with 100 units in chips, with blinds 1/2, increase (2/4, 3/6, 4/8) etc. every 20 minutes, is this too soon? The payout structure i was thinking was this, for every 10 people, we add one to the money. So if theres 40, how would u divide the money for the top 4?

[jacki]

http://www.homepokertourney.com will answer most any question you've got.

[Scooterdoo]

The site that was recommended to you is really good and I just used it for a tournament I put together with about 40 guys. A few things to consider:

1) we were going to do a normal NL tournament, but decided to do a shootout structure at the last minute because we felt it would be too difficult to constantly move people around and collapse tables. It's one thing if you have a tournament director doing it, but if you want to play and enjoy yourself it just makes it too complicated. So we had 4 tables of 10 each. I used a similar structure to Pokerstars so that it would take around 1-1.5 hours to get down to 2 players on each table (you might want to lengthen the level a bit from online tournaments because you play less hands per hour than online). We then took the last two guys from each table and since we still had room for 2 more, we dealt 5 card open hands to the 4 3rd place players and the two people with the best hands also made it to the final table. We then started over again at the final table. We thought this would be more fun and friendly than having people bring there chips.

2) unlike an online tournament it gets messy after a few rounds since you now have low denomination chips on the table. I would strongly recommend that you color up the chips once or twice during level breaks. For example, we had colored chips worth 10, 25, 50 and 100. Once we got to the 100/200 round we made everyone exchange their chips for 100's. At the final table we decided to simplify things a bit and we got rid of the $10 chips and just combined the first two levels (they were 10/25 and 25/50, but we just had one longer 25/50 level).

It was a blast and everyone had a great time. BTW, one advantage of the shootout is that most people will be out around the same time and they can then start playing in a limit side game while the final table is playing. The side game became much more lucrative than the final table in our tournament -- the buyin for the tournament was $50 so we had a prize structure of $1,000, $700, $300 for the 1st 3 places. At the side game the limits got up to $10/20 and even 20/40.

Good luck.