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Home Poker Tournament >
Getting Started Structure and Payouts Playing and Dealing
Getting StartedThe first important factor to running a successful home poker tourney is to have enough poker players and enough room to host the tourney. Larger tournaments are fun and allow the largest rate of return for the players buy-in or investment in the event. If you don't have the room, large tournaments are almost impossible to run properly. Larger tournaments are also harder to fill with players if you don't have enough friends to make your player pool. You don't want to have too many players in your home tournament that you don't know at some kind of personal level. (At least I don't!! I guess, that ultimately your decision.) The next thing to consider when getting your tournament setup is the buy-in. Every poker player has a comfort level for what limits they like to play. Some players are comfortable losing $100 at one time and others accept losses around $1,000. Make sure that you come up with a buy-in that all of your players will enjoy playing. If it is too low for the high roller players they will have a hard time taking the tournament seriously. If it is too high you will have a hard time getting players to commit to playing in the tournament, especially on a regular basis. *One important note is to set a date and let everyone know about the tournament. One of the hardest things to do is getting the poker players schedule to come together, but if you start moving the date for some players this cause more trouble then anything. So, set a date and stick to it. Once your friends see how much fun they had at your tournament, they will MAKE TIME TO PLAY! Back To Top |
Structure and PayoutsThe structure and payouts of your home poker tournament are very important. Below is a basic structure that can be used to run a home poker tournament. You can make adjustments to this structure to make the tournament run longer or shorter, just depending on what you're trying to accomplish with your poker tourney. Also, below is a great link to tournament director software that can run your tournament through your personal computer or laptop. Good tournament director software is the key to having a successful home poker tournament, unless you have a human who is well versed in handling poker tournaments. This particular software will do everything from the structure to the payouts to running a whole series of poker tournaments. The tournament director software will also randomly seat the players and move players during the tournament if you have more then one table. This is the great software that I use in my personal home poker tourneys and the poker satellite series that I run for the WSOP. Tournament Director Software If you're not running big enough tournaments or not running enough tournaments to make this software a logical purchase, here are some different options. Sadler and Carter Poker sell a programmable dealer button that you can program with the blinds and limit durations. This is a great product for single table home poker tournaments but not as useful in a multi-table tournament. The other option is to just have your tournament structure printed out and use a kitchen timer or clock as your timing instrument. This option does not give your tournament much of a poker room feel but it does work.
I great thing about this starting chip stack breakdown is that you can have the chip stacks pre-set and in poker chip trays before the tournament starts. This will make things much easier handing out the poker chips to each player before the poker tournament begins.
This structure should run for about two hours for 10 players with 20 minute blind levels. Setting up a poker tournament structure is far from an easy task. You will have to make adjustments to the structure after you have played with it a couple times. After that, you will know if it is running too long or too short. You can adjust the running time of your tournament by adding time to your blind levels or by adding more chips. Remember that adding more players will also change the running time of the tournament. The software can help with getting your tournament structure running the best. Payouts can be calculated by the poker tournament software or you can use the basic poker tournament payout chart below. This payout chart below shows some basic payout structures depending on number of players. Generally it is the best to round the payouts to the nearest $1 or $5 when determining your payouts.
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Playing and DealingMost home poker tournament players at each table deal the cards. The deal rotates around the table. It is best to have two decks of cards on the each table. This allows the player behind or in front of the dealer to shuffle and be ready to deal the next hand when the current hand is over. This helps get more hands per blind level. As players are eliminated from the tournament you can get a volunteer to finish dealing the tournament. This only works if the player eliminated did not suffer a bad beat and is still able to think clearly!!! It is a good idea to have a set of home poker tourney rules available for players. This will stop any arguments that may happen during play. Listed below are some links to different websites that have poker tournament rules for you to print. After you have a few home poker tournaments you can make adjustments to any rules that you feel necessary to make your game run better. Just make sure players know about any rule changes or let new poker players coming to the game aware about and rules that your game offer, so to stop any confusion during game play. Tournament Director Association - www.pokertda.com Home Poker Tourney - Poker Rules Poker Listings - Poker Listings Rules (These are just some of the website with rules available) Back To Top |
These are the basic steps to running your own home poker tournament. Sadler and Carter Poker has all the poker supplies that you will need to get your home poker tournament started. These guidelines should help everyone from the first time tournament host to the poker player that has been running tournaments since before poker was cool!!! We will be adding more rules and important poker resources over the next couple of weeks. If you ever have any questions about running a tournament or about poker rules please don't hesitate to shoot us an email. We will be happy to help with anything you may need. GOOD LUCK ON YOUR NEXT HOME POKER TOURNAMENT!!!!!