Advice on holding small tournament on a regular basis

[bigbadbaugh]

Hi people

Been plying poker (Texas holdem NL) quite alot for the last few months.


I have been mainly playing online but before going to the casino would like to get alot of practice at a real table.


Me and my friend are setting up a hold em night with 8-10 expected plyers. Buy-in will probably be about $15.


Need some advice on tournament structure, and blinds.


How many chips should each player get, and do these chips have to tie in with the buy in amount. Can it not just be a default number of chips for each plyer and ply till theirs a winner ?

Would 50 chips each be to many with blinds starting at 1 and 2 chips ?


Finally, if 10 players show up, would it be best to pay to the top 2 or 3 or even 4 players ?


Since this will be a regular night, I dont want people to be hacked off by finishing 2nd all the time.


Any lead in the right direction would help.



Cheers

[karasz]

i do this alot...

we all buy in some low amount, then just get a box of chips...

50 white 25 red 25 blue...


we make them count 1/5/10


and make blinds 1-5 then increase every 3 orbits...

then 5-10, 15-30, 20-40, 25-50, ... etc

with us we never have more than 5 and we have 2 get money back, 1 take rest

[bigbadbaugh]

thx for replys so far.


Can some more users post their setups for me to look at.


Cheers

[BigSlickAK]

Well, I have some questions. Are you looking for something with a social directive or for pure practice. Because, I held a friendly tournament and i found that it's fun for the people who last longer. but some players got elimated early and although that's the name of the game they didn't really like being left out. What I find works best is just buying chips from the "house" and then cashing them in when your done playing. At my poker nights we bought in for 20 bucks a piece and gave usually four different values of chip: .10, .25, .50, 1.00. Those games could go sometimes from seven at night to seven the next morning with people re-buying in. I found this to be better practice too, that is unless you are going to the casino to enter in a tournament. Honestly I have no casino tournament EXP to speak of.

Also, something that i found helpful at my poker nights was a rotating ante. instead of all pitching in a nickle and then saying who forgot to ante we just had a rotating ante of a quarter to fifty cents. you may not like that style but i thought it to be pretty helpful.

Good Luck!