Best Tournament Structures
22 June 2008Best Tournament Structures
If you are hosting a poker game, it is important to decide how you want to set up your game. This is something that you should decide before any of the players show up. In fact, it is a good idea to tell people the structure information when you invite them to the game, so there aren’t any surprises.
What do you mean by poker game structure?
In addition to poker being a diverse activity with many different games, hold-em, omaha, stud, draw, there are many different ways you can play the same game. For instance, if you wanted to set up a Texas hold-em home game, you could host a cash game or a tournament. Both of those could be limit hold-em or no limit Texas hold-em. The tournament could be a freeze out event, a rebuy, a shoot out, or a heads up poker tournament. Below is a rundown of what each of those event types are.
Freeze Out
A freeze out is the most common poker tournament that are played in casinos. What that consists of is every player purchasing chips before the tournament starts. As each player loses all of his chips, they are immediately eliminated from the tournament. This has led to the expression “A chip and a chair”, meaning you are still alive in the tournament if you have a single poker chip and a place to sit. Although this is the most common format in professional poker tournaments, it doesn’t mean that it is best for your poker home game. Since your poker game is most likely meant to have a good time, and the money is secondary, it can be a bad thing if someone busts out really early in the night. If you are playing a freeze out and someone loses in the first round it will ruin their fun for the evening. It can be somewhat harsh. Therefore a freezeout is best if you have other activities for your guests after they are eliminated.
Rebuy / Add ons
Having a rebuy / add on event is a great alternative to doing a freeze out. This is especially true if you have less than 10 guests who are playing at a single table. A rebuy event means that whenever someone busts out they are able to buy back into the event for whatever the original buy in was. Thus if your tournament started by giving each player 1000 chips for $20, a player who busts out could put up another $20 and get 1000 chips. To make it fair to a player with a small chip stack, but who hasn’t been completely eliminated, you can include add ons and say that any player with less than the original starting stack can pay the buy in and get another stack. Thus a player with 500 chips could pay $20 and get another 1000 chips, ending up with 1500 chips. You dont’ want to let anyone add on if they already have more than the starting stack, other wise someone could put down a lot of money and be the prohibitive chip favorite immediately. It is a good idea to limit the rebuy / add on period. For instance, you might say that people can rebuy for the first hour, after that you play the chips in your stack. This will prevent the game from going all night long.
Additionally, you need to keep in mind that if you plan on doing a rebuy / add on tournament you will need more poker chips than is recommended in the “how may poker chips do you need” guide. On the bright side, every time someone rebuys you don’t need to break out a completely new stack for them. You can just give them a couple high denomination chips and tell them to make change.
Shoot outs
If you have a lot of people at your tournament, at least 25, you might want to try a shoot out event. In this format every table is its own mini tournament. Instead of combining tables when they get low on people, each table plays down until there is a single winner, all of whom are combined to a final table to play for the tournament winner. The nice thing about this format is that you as the host don’t need to worry about re-seating players as the tables become lopsided. You can set up each table and do nothing else except keep track of the blinds.
If you had 25 players, you might set up the tournament like this – 5 tables of 5 players. Each table plays down to a winner. The 5 winners come together to the final table to play down and see who gets paid.
If you had 50 players you could do 5 tables of 10 players, or 10 tables of 5 players. This is a very good format. Since there are so many tables going at once, it is likely that people will bust out at approximately they same time. After tables begin to clear away, the losers can use those to play their own poker games while the main tournament is still going on.
Heads up
A heads up poker tournament is also a fun event. Instead of playing a large game with 8-10 players, set up a bracket system. Each player goes one on one against another player, the loser is eliminated from the tournament. If you are going to do this kind of structure, it is important to set up the blinds so that each individual game is relatively short, 30 minutes - 1 hour is a good idea. In the early rounds plan on having a lot of decks of cards and a lot of playing area so that many games can be going on simultaneously
Multiple Tournaments
Instead of hosting a single long poker tournament, you can set up your blind structure to play two quicker tournaments. Playing two tournaments can be nice because instead of having a single winner at the end of the night and a lot of losers, you can have several winners. It also gives people a chance to try different playing styles. They can play cautious during the first tournament, see how it goes, and change to a fast and loose style in the second tournament.
Bounties
Do you have one player who is a lot better / luckier than the rest? Does he tend to win all of the tournaments? You can make it more difficult for him by placing a bounty on his head. If you have a $20 tournament, say that who ever knocks out the lucky player will get a $20 pay out. You will quickly find that that player will not be winning as many tournaments, people will be gunning for him, putting him all in, and trying to call his bluffs. Alternatively you can set it up so that any body can post a bounty on any body else. Or you can can set it up so that any body who knocks out another player gets a bounty. In a $20 tournament you might give $5 to any one who knocks out another player. Generally a bounty on a single player would be paid by the individual who posted the bounty, the $5 bounty for any player knocked out would be taken from the prize pool.
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