Comments - My Home Tourney

[razor]

I thought I'd give a few thoughts and comments on the NLHE tourney I hosted last weekend.

I got a ton of info at Home Poker Tourney. Highly recommended if you don't know the first thing about poker tourneys and how to host them... and even if you do.


Table - I built my own... standard cheap, quick and dirty type table: folding table ($50cdn), sheet of plywood ($45cdn) and cloth & foam ($50cdn including shipping) which I purchased on eBay from Poker Cats. I got purple cloth for something a little different and in honor of my woeful Raptors. The surface is great to play on. No fancy ass padded rail, maybe I'll have a go at that in the future.

Chips - 9gm diamond, how can you go wrong with these... nice weight, feel good, sound good, look ok and cheap. If you live in Canada consider purchasing from these guys. They are located in Toronto so shipping is inexpensive and no outrageous UPS brokerage fees. No choice in colours (as far as I know). I did order some additional chips from 5StarDeal on eBay (and paid those crazy UPS brokerage fees) because I wanted some purple chips and some additional whites for limit games. Bonus with buying from 5StarDeal is you can add extra items from their store to your auction purchase, so I bought some additional chip racks and cut cards with no additional shipping charges.

I used The Tournament Director software. Yeah, using software to run a one table tourney may be a bit overkill. But this was the first of what I hope will be more tourneys and I figured it would help make a good impression... with a notebook running the software and an additional monitor to give everyone a good view of the status screen, it made the desired impression. I like the TD software a lot. Very flexible. If you are running multi-table tourneys it handles seat assignments and moving players. Check out Tournament Director here.

Overall the night went very smoothly. I dealt the entire tourney which got a bit tiring since you really get no time to relax, but I thought it would go smoother with one dealer (esp. with a 82" x 42" oval table) even if I'd never dealt a single hand of poker in my life before. [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img] And it did.

Fun times, especially since I prefer live games to online.