Report Back on first home game NL Hold'em tourney

[GoneFishing]

Not that anyone really cares, but just ran my first NL Hold'em tourney at home with some buddies, some quick thoughts/feedback in case you are running one:

1)thanks Ali for the list of rules: Poker Rules With some slight modifications for our home rules, these were great! Little hard to get 12 drunk guys to read all the rules, but at least they were there if needed! - We did a good job enforcing 'string bets' and 'oversized chip' call/raise rules - which impressed the 'casual players'.

2)Fortunetly, we used some pretty good 11.5g composite chips with denominations printed on them - this gave a much more serious/fun mood to the game.

3) 12 guys started. Had to play on 2 stud tables and went to one 'final table' for last 8 - wasn't a problem, actually made game move faster, which was okay for this group.

4)Used 'Tournament Director' software on the PC with blinds doubling every 20 minutes. After a few minutes, everyone got the hang of dealing Hold'em and we were able to get in enough hands per round. Some on 2+2 had suggested only doubling the rounds when someone got knocked out - but we only wanted to have this tournament run 2 1/2-3 hours - so the clock worked out great. Funniest part of night was watching a couple of the guys trying to understand 'coloring-up' and 'racing-off'.

4) Started with $10k in chips each (just cause it sounded like it would be fun), but actually wasn't necessary - $2k-$5k would have been fine too-just give some thought to blind structure.

For a bunch of guys, that usually play 7/27, tic-tack-toe and 7 card stud- this was a great change of pace that I'd recommend!! But, be prepared, it was a lot more work than I expected!!