Hosting a Home Poker Tournament
You can successfully run your own home poker tournament and to begin with you require a poker table, playing cards of good quality, poker chips, blinds timer and an arrangement to go about things.
The fun of poker game enhances with a poker table and is one of the biggest investments as well. Nonetheless the game can still be successful without the poker table if your budget doesn’t allow you to fit in a poker table. You can look for alternatives like a portable table topper or can even consider building your own poker table too which is quite easy.
You must remember that quality playing cards are necessary for a good poker game. The low and cheap quality playing cards become unclean and sticky. Good quality playing cards last much longer and play better. Each table requires two decks of cards which allow one player to shuffle while other is dealing. This prevents action to become slow. One cut card for each table is also essential which prevents the bottom card of the deck to get exposed.
When selecting poker chips there is wide variety and it is not necessary to purchase the most expensive chips for a good game. You will come across poker chips with or without denominations. Although convenience is more with poker chips with denominations on them, however it is not compulsory. The poker chips without denominations can be assigned any value and hence are flexible in this regard. Depending on the number of players, chips should be purchased.
For blinds timers a simple egg-timer can be used or alternatively a Poker Genie or dealer buttons with built in timers is also a good option.
The last point to consider is a plan for the poker game. The plan should involve:
- Decision around buy in amount
- Decision about rebuys should be there is the game or not
- Decision about Payouts
- Decision about blind structure
Those invited for the game of poker should be informed about buy in and rebuys. Before starting the game out, payouts need to be decided and announced. Similarly blind structure should be posted in advance to avoid disagreements regarding the speed of blind escalation.
How long the game should last should also be decided when setting up the blind structure. Doubling blinds every round is a general error when setting up blinds. For early rounds this looks fine however with the blinds getting bigger this could generate too big of a jump. Depending on how long you would want the game to last, time for each round should be decided. Usually a quick round lasts for about 10-minutes and long rounds are for 30 minutes.
Lastly you can always set some ground rules for the game and also have a moderator to make rulings. So good luck for your home poker tournament and setting a good plan to make the tournament as enjoyable as it could get for your family and friends.
