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Texas Hold'em has become incredibly popular, and now millions of new players are enjoying the game. In fact, Poker Night is now alive and well as Texas Holdem tournaments have become a favorite reason for gathering friends and enjoying an evening together.
Even though we've all seen poker tournaments on television, actually hosting one on your own can easily raise some questions. It's not hard to overlook things when putting together your first tournament, and it may take a couple of tournaments until you've had to deal with all the possible situations. But, the first few times everyone will be happy just to play, and soon enough you'll be comfortable racing off chips, splitting pots, and breaking down tables.
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When you are putting together a tournament, start at the beginning. Everyone needs to sit, at a table. So, make sure you have chairs that will support your guests (support both their size and number), and tables large enough for everyone to enjoy a little personal space. And of course, make sure the appropriate refreshments and snacks are available.
You can decide how many chips each player gets ahead of time if you'd like, but I tend to decide once the guests have arrived. For smaller tables, we issue more chips since the blinds will eat away at the stacks more often.
The blinds we do have a set schedule for, and we use it if there are seven players or thirty-seven.
In online poker, the blinds are raised very quickly. That makes sense for online play, but in the real world we tend to raise the blinds a bit more gradually. Once every twenty minutes is fine. To slow the game down, perhaps raise them every half hour. Anything quicker than twenty minutes is a bit too speedy for the tastes of the players at my tables.
If you have any questions about poker chips, how many you will need, what denominations to make them, etc. Or if you would like an example of a working blinds schedule, visit our pages. We have that information for you.
When choosing chip denominations, one of two things will happen. Every chip at the table will be divisible by the lowest chip value, or it won't. If you have, for instance, these chip values [$5, $25, $100, $500] you can always get rid of smaller chips (that become a bit of a nuisance later in the tournament) by simply exchanging them for larger chips. You can collect 20 $5 chips and give the player a $100 chip. Problem solved.
If, on the other hand, you have chip values such as these [$10, $25, $100] you may not be able to cash in all of a player's chips evenly. At some point you will probably have to "race off" the smallest chip denomination. The process of a chip race is described on our Chip Race page.
I use chip races as a built in break for the players. At a designated blind level (once the smallest denomination chip will no longer be needed for posting a blind), we "color up", and everyone gets a chance to visit the snack table, the bar or the restroom.
Where you set the payouts has a lot to do with the players at the table. Does everyone want a piece of the pie if they play well? Or is it a "winner take all" crowd? We offer some suggestions on our payouts page for those of you with a mixed crowd.
Another aspect of the game, the accepted etiquette at the table, varies from crowd to crowd as well. For our take on poker etiquette as we practice it, visit our etiquette page.
There will surely be questions we haven't answered, but I hope we've answered enough to allow you to host a tournament with confidence. Poker tournaments are great fun, and we wish you the best of luck with yours.
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