Home Tourney Structure

[PShabi]

Hey guys,

Every Thursday I have a home tourney at my place. It is usually played 5 to 7 handed. Just a $20 buy-in. Usually winner takes but 2nd sometimes gets a refund depending on # of players.

Anyway, was wondering if anybody would care to give me an idea of how you would structure the game. Obviously, I've got a structure in place already, but I'd like to compare.

We don't get started until 10 or 10:30 and I've got to get up early so we dont' want an all nighter. However, we don't want to see people busting super early either because we are all friends and you know it sucks to go out first. If we're done in 4 hours, that's good for us.
So,

1) What would you do starting stack wise?

2) Give me the different blind levels you would use and how much time before they move up?

Offer any othe feedback or ideas you may have.

Thanks,

Phil

[Talking Poker]

Start with 4000 chips (50s, 100s, 500s).
Blinds start at 50/100 and move up every 15 minutes (10 if you want it to move faster).

Lveles:
50/100
100/200
150/300
200/400
300/600
400/800
500/1000
800/1600 (or 750/1500 or skip this one entirely)
1000/2000
1500/3000
2000/4000

Your tourney will be over by now. With 15 minute levels, this will come out to about 2.5 hours at the most...

This is roughly what we do in one of the home games I play in regularly... and it works out well. You can also start with 5000 chips if you want a little more room to move, which I like.

[PShabi]

Thanks TP.

Here's how we've been doing it. Anything you like/hate about our current structure.

BTW, none of the players here are internet players. They play no poker other than at my place. They all INSIST on assigning monetary value to the chips so that they're placing bets with some $value to them It's a security blanket I guess.

Anyway:

We all start with $20.00 in chips. (.25, .50, 1.00)

The blinds start at .25/.50 and escalate every 45 minutes.

.25/.50
.50/1.00
1.00/2.00
2.00/4.00
3.00/6.00
4.00/8.00 (never got past this)

We used to just play single blind of .25 and would move it up every 45 minutes to .50, .75, 1.00, 2.00 etc. This made it last a little long and made it so stealing the blinds was worthless (which hurts my style). We recently went to the format I outlined above, but if you make a play at a pot and get called on your bluff ONE TIME, you are pretty well crippled. Just like to fine tune this thing a bit.

[Talking Poker]

Your format is ok. I just prefer to move the blinds up more gradually and less aggressively - ie, more frequent but smaller increases.

To convery my recommendation (4000 chips), jsut divide my numbers by 2 and you'll be apples to apples with your 2000 starting cents, giving you:

.25/.50
.50/$1
.75/$1.50
...
$5/$10 (1000/2000)
and so on