How To Move Players In A Poker Tournament
If you are hosting a poker tournament with more than one table, you will need to pay attention to keep that tables full and balanced. Since some players will naturally play more aggressively than others, some tables will have players eliminated faster. When one table gets too low, you need to either break that table, or move players to fill it.
Small Tournaments
If you are hosting a small tournament, 2 or 3 tables, the easiest way to keep the tables even is to just watch when one table gets 2 or more players lower than another table. When that occurs, simply move a player from the larger table to the smaller table. However when you move players you need to do that fairly. After all, the moved player is likely at a disadvantage. He has to learn how to play against a full table of new players, they only have one to deal with. There are a couple ways you can ensure you move the players fairly.
1) Random moving – deal out a deck of cards, giving one card to each player at the big table. The player with the highest card moves to the smaller table. When you do this you move the player to the same seat at the new table. So if he is sitting in seat # 5 at the old table, he will sit at seat # 5 at the new table. If that seat is occupied, move the player to the next open seat clockwise.
2) Button moves – To ensure that a player doesn’t get hit with the blinds unfairly, you can move the player on the button at the larger table to the first open seat to the right of the button at the short table.
3) Big Blind Moves – The final method of moving players is to move the player who would be the big blind during the next hand. He moves to the open seat at the short table which is the least number of turns from being the big blind.
Large Tournaments
In large tournaments, instead of moving players to keep tables even, keep a count of how many people bust out. When that number reaches the number at each table, bust a table and reseat the players at the remaining tables. Deciding which table to bust is easy. When you originally placed the players in the seats, you had tables lettered A, B, C, D, E etc. Bust the tables in reverse order. Bust table E first, then D, then C, then B, until A is your final table. If you went by suits bust them in this order Spade, Hearts, Diamonds, with Clubs being the final table (that’s reverse alphabetical) If you had no rhyme or reason to how you sat your players, start by busting the table closest to the food, so the busted players will have somewhere to hang out. Obviously, if some of your tables are larger, or nicer, than the other tables, you can arrange your lettering system so that you bust the smaller, crappier, tables first and finish your final table on the nicest one you have.
When you are moving players from the table which is being busted to the remaining tables use a variation of the deck of cards or piece of paper method. If you have 3 tables remaining, each with 3 open seats, Club Ace would go to the lowest number seat at table 1, Club 2 goes to seat 2, etc.
Seating the Final Table
If you have a large tournament, you might want to consider reseating the players when the get to the final table. Have each player draw a card A-10 and move to the corresponding seat. This ensures that players who started at the final table don’t spend the whole tournament playing next to the same player, which could be a great disadvantage depending who you are sitting next to.
Near The Money
If you have a very large tournament, 100+ players, you will likely want to pay out to the whole final table, or even to people who bust out before the final table. If you are in this situation you will want to go into Hand For Hand play when you are within 2 or 3 players of the money bubble. Hand for Hand play means that each table plays a single hand of poker, then waits for all remaining tables to finish that hand of poker before starting the next hand. This ensures that players who play at tables where the game is quick aren’t disadvantaged by playing more hands and being more likely to bust out right before they make the money. It also ensures that you don’t have players who play extremely slowly for each hand in order to make sure they hit as few blinds as possible, and can limp into the money.
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