"Make Your Home Poker Tournament A Success"A home poker tournament is a great way to get friends and family together. Add bragging rights and some cash into the mix and everyone’s competitive juices are sure to flow. Before you can announce “shuffle up and deal!” there are a few key items you’ll want and decisions to make. What’s a tournament without supplies? Its an impossibility! You’ll need a few supplies. A table is a good start. This can be anything from a dinning room table with a poker table top to a full size poker table. It really depends on how often you plan on hosting tournaments and your budget. If your home pker tournament is an uncommon occasion a poker table top does the job. If it happens with MORE FREQUENCY and budget willing a real deal poker table is something to look into. Which ever you decide make sure you have enough table to people ratio. Next you’ll want a couple sets of cards. Plastic poker cards are highly recommended. They’re very durable which means you’ll have to buy new ones less often and your home poker tournament wont get cut short due to a destroyed card. You’ll also need poker chips to keep track of who‘s winning. This is another budget dependent supply. Poker chips no matter what they’re made of will last for many years. However you do get what you pay for. Cheap chips are made of cheap plastic. The higher the price the higher the quality (usually). Clay poker chips are the best quality your money can get. Clay chips can be bought for as little as $0.39 a chip. Prices go up from there. You’ll want about 20 chips in various denominations per player. So for a 10 player home poker tournament you’ll want at least 200 chips. Give or take. This goes without saying but chairs for everyone is a must. Now that your supplies are gathered lets get to the actual tournament. The first thing you should decide is HOW LONG you want your tournament to take. There are a couple ways to guarantee a short tournament (two hours or less). First you can make the amount of time between raising the blinds short. 10 minute levels or shorter makes for a quick tournament. Another way to make a short tournament is to make the blinds bigger in relation to each players starting chip stack. Or do the opposite start each player with less chips. If you start each player with $100 in chips start the blinds at $1-$2 or $2-$4 this makes the tournament go very fast and creates a TON of action. If you combine all three you may be able to play two or three tournaments in a COUPLE HOURS! To make a long tournament do the opposite of everything said above. Make the levels longer. 20 minutes or more can make the tournament last around three or four hours. Start each player with more chips or make the blinds smaller. Just be prepared for the long haul. Also take into account how many people will play your tournament. More people equals longer tournament, less people equals shorter tournament. The buy-in to your home poker tournament should be an amount that everyone can afford to comfortably lose. Remember it’s a friendly competition not a get rich scheme. Trust me the money you win off friends and family wont justify the strain it can create on your relationship with them. The payout of your tournament depends on how many people enter. Usually 10% of players in a tournament get paid. However if you have 10 players only one would get paid and that’s typically not much fun. In a smaller setting its best to pay one out of three players. So if you get 10 players pay 1st, 2nd and 3rd. This way more players have a chance of winning a little something. Also have a tiered payout where 1st gets the most money and each following place pays slightly less. Its best to do this as a percentage of the prize pool. Something like 1st = 50% 2nd = 30% and 3rd = 20% is good payout structure. Now its time to invite everyone over! Let them know the where, when, what the game is, how much it costs to get in and what the payouts are. Good luck! |
