How many Buy-Ins allowed for a home tourny?

[cuttlefishcake]

I plan to organise a small tourny at home, playing a $1/$2 limit game, with a 2 hours time limit.

at the end of the 2 hours, the person with the most chips wins a prize.

However, the players are requesting for buy-ins (or is it called buy-backs?) in the event that they lose all their chips before the 2 hours time limit is up.

how many such buy ins/buy backs should i allow?
(let's asume i have infinity amount of chips)

thanks your the help

[Muck]

This sounds like a strange tournament/cash game hybrid. Tourneys don’t usually have a fixed time limit, the increase of the blinds is what effectively makes sure they end. In your situation you’re going to get some interesting strategies, e.g. players with large chip stacks will start to stall play when the finish time approaches.

Why not just play a fixed limit cash game? It solves all the rebuy issues, players can re-buy as much as they like and at the end of 2 hours (or any point in time) everyone has a fair cash “prizeâ€

[cuttlefishcake]

hi muck,

thanks for the reply.
i like the idea of just letting every player have unlimited number of re-buys

i'll definetly have to set the limit poker

if a player rebuys, i will have to note it down how many times he/she rebuys, am i right ??


1 more thing regarding re-buys,
Am i right to say that re-buys are only allowed in between hands, and NEVER during a game ?

[Muck]

if a player rebuys, i will have to note it down how many times he/she rebuys, am i right ??

Not if they pay then and their for the chips. Don’t bother with paper or credit just tell everyone to bring all the cash they’re willing to lose.

1 more thing regarding re-buys,
Am i right to say that re-buys are only allowed in between hands, and NEVER during a game ?

Yes you can’t re-buy while you’re involved in a hand. NB: This is if you allow people to rebuy while they have chips. Many tourneys setups allow players to re-buy if they’re below a certain level, e,g, starting stack 1000 chips, if that drops below 100 they are allowed to re-buy again.
But I’d advise you to keep it simple and only allow rebuys if the player has lost all their chips.

How to you intend to slip up the prize pool?

[jimmer]

It sounds like you are all new to the game???

Depending on the money involved and the time available, there are a number of different options you can take.

The first thing you need to decide is; do you all have around the same amount of money to blow? If one of you is bringing $1000 to the party and the other arrives with $20, it’s gonna collapse before it even starts.

I host a home game every other week. It costs £5 ($10) to enter and lasts around 90-120 minutes. All of us are keen players. We all play on line and most of us play at the casino at least a few times a month. I usually get around 8 players at my home game, but sometimes it’s as many as 10 or as little as 3. We can usually squeeze in two games, before some players need to go home. With the remaining players we usually play a third game. Either way, it’s a real good social night, we all have a good chat, order pizza and no one loses much.

The structure I use is this;
We play No limit hold’em. We all buy in for £5. Everyone gets given 1000 chips. We then decide the payout structure. If there are say....8 of us, we may pay out £25 for 1st, £10 for second and £5 for third. If there’s 5 of us we may pay out £20/£5, If there’s 4 or less the winner takes all. The blinds start off as 5 (sb)& 10(bb) and increase every 15 minutes. Once you lose your 1000 chips you’re out. Players then sit in my living room watching porn and hoping my wife doesn’t come home early.

As I said previously, the point is, everyone starts on off on the same level and even if you get knocked out after 30 minutes, you don’t have to wait too long until the next game.

However you don’t have to do this, there are other options.
If you want a re-buy tournament you can use the same structure as above, except with a few slight variances. Firstly, the logical re-buy rules would be to allow players to re-buy for the first 1hr when they lose all their chips. They would pay another £5 and get given another 1000 chips. However there are some problems associated with this. Firstly, there will probably be more money in the pot, yet you won’t know how much until the end of the re-buy limit ends. Therefore, when deciding at the start the price payout, you need to agree it on a percentage. This then gets complicated if, for example, you agree the winner collects 50% and the prize pool is £35. At our home games, nobody had change. Secondly, it means the game lasts a lot longer as there is more money in play. Thirdly, if someone loses all their chips and wants to re-buy, they need to do it after that hand has finished. I played in a home game before where someone bust out after 2 minutes and then said, nah, I’m not re-buying. Then, 5 minutes before the re-buy ended they decided to re-buy. By this time a few players only had small stacks and were not too happy.

The third option is to have a cash game. This means the blind structure stays the same all night and players can come and go as they please. You might want an upper limit for the stack sizes (say £200), but this also means if someone arrives with £1000, as soon as their stack drops to £190, they can keep topping it up if they want. The downsides are; if someone arrives with £20 and everyone else arrives with £200+, the guy with £20, won’t be having much fun as the others will probably be raising a little too rich for him. The other down side is; you need a lot of change therefore players need to warned about it in advance. (If you are playing £1/£2 and everyone arrives with £20 bills, you’ve f**ked). Also, if you play with chips, at the end of the night you need to have lots of change and when the game ends, some players may have £187 and someone else has £53 yet they both want the right change before leaving.

[cuttlefishcake]

hi jimmer, muck

thanks for all ur helps

i do play the game as a player, but i'm totally new as to hosting my own small home tourney.

hence, it's real great to see ur replies. they certainly help.

for this tourney that i plan on holding, there won't be any real cash involved. I am going to give all my friends (there's 10 players including me) $1000 worth of starting chips (there will be a combination of different denominations $1, $5, $10, $50, $100, $500 .
i like the idea of playing no limits, i will consider this setup. if i set up no limit texas, i'll set my starting sb $1, bb $2 and i increase it every 15 min.

cos i'm doing this partially for some elder relative of mine and his friends, and they want to have just a friendly game, no real cash involved, just that the winner gets a nice bottle of expensive wine sponsered by him, that's it yeah

[supafrey]

hi jimmer, muck

thanks for all ur helps

i do play the game as a player, but i'm totally new as to hosting my own small home tourney.

hence, it's real great to see ur replies. they certainly help.

for this tourney that i plan on holding, there won't be any real cash involved. I am going to give all my friends (there's 10 players including me) $1000 worth of starting chips (there will be a combination of different denominations $1, $5, $10, $50, $100, $500 .
i like the idea of playing no limits, i will consider this setup. if i set up no limit texas, i'll set my starting sb $1, bb $2 and i increase it every 15 min.

cos i'm doing this partially for some elder relative of mine and his friends, and they want to have just a friendly game, no real cash involved, just that the winner gets a nice bottle of expensive wine sponsered by him, that's it yeah

For a single table tournament that sounds perfect. Nice prize, too.

[Kemics]

if there is no buy-in and infinite rebuys, your gonna run out chips pretty quickly

[jimmer]

they want to have a friendly game, no real cash involved, just that the winner gets a nice bottle of expensive wine sponsered by him,

Oh, in that case, you can spice the night up by adding a few extra bonuses as well.

For example, yes give a bottle of expensive wine to the winner, but also how about;

Giving a prize to the player who gets the highest hand through the course of the night
or
The player that wins with the smallest hand over the course of the night(like J high etc)
or
If a player get dealts the hosts favorite hand (what ever it is) automatically gets a prize etc.

All these things detract from the game of poker, yet if the players aren't in a postion where the money's important, then it just adds to the fun of the night and means the guys who aren't the best players still have an active interest in the outcome.

[Muck]

Giving a prize to the player who gets the highest hand through the course of the night
or
The player that wins with the smallest hand over the course of the night(like J high etc)
or
If a player get dealts the hosts favorite hand (what ever it is) automatically gets a prize etc.

This a clever idea. My close friends range in ability quite a lot so I think this would keep a lot of the less experienced player interested.