How To Seat Poker Players
26 June 2008How To Seat Players At A Home Poker Tournament
When you begin to seat poker players you must first decide how many players you want per table. From a perspective of what number gives the best poker play, having between 8-10 players is ideal. You shouldn’t have less than 5 players at a table. While you can play with up to 11 players at a single table, playing with more is a bad idea. 12 or more players should be split into two tables.
Seating the players
If you have up to 40 players at your tournament you can seat all the players with a single deck of cards. For each table in your tournament, include one suit in the deck. For each player at the table include one card of that suit. Thus if you have 40 players, you’ll want the A-10 of each suit in your deck. If you have 30 players, for 3 tables of 10, include A-10 of three suits. if you have an odd number, like 25 players, you’ll want to break the tables up evenly into 8-8-9, so you will put A-8 of Hearts, A-8 of Diamonds, and A-9 of Clubs in the deck.
Once you have arranged your deck have each player draw a single card from the deck. Each player goes to the table corresponding to their suit and sit in order of their number. The player who drew the ace sits at the head of the table, and the other players sit proceeding clockwise.
Seating a Large Tournament
If you have more than 4 tables at your poker tournament, you can’t sit them with a deck of cards. If you are expecting a large number of players, simply print a letter and a number on a piece of paper corresponding to a number and a seat. So you will have A 1 - A 10, B 1 - B 10, etc. If you aren’t sure how many players will come to your tournament, set aside the seating cards for each table, i.e. the A cards in a stack, the B cards in a stack, the C cards in a stack, so that when you have a count of the number of players, you can quickly determine how many tables you’ll need and mix up the cards for your players to draw.
Why it’s important to seat randomly
It is important to make an effort to seat your players randomly because, since it’s a home poker game, many of them will know each other. Some of them might like each other, hate each other, others might be dating each other. If you seat the players randomly you’ll be able to cut down on soft play between friends and couples. Couples who are seated next to each other will play differently. They won’t steal each other’s blinds, they won’t aggressively attack each other, which isn’t fair to the other players at the table. By randomly seating all of the players you can help ensure this doesn’t happen. You might still get soft play between friends and couples, but when they aren’t beside each other’s blinds it isn’t as big of a handicap to the other players.
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