Any tips, advice or constructive criticism will help.
Some random suggestions:
* Ask each of the regulars to suggest new players, and take responsibility for bringing them to their first game at your place;
* If you can find some firehouse/VFW/American Legion-type games in your area, playing in these this can be a good way to make new poker friendships, and identify players who would make good additions to your game;
* Buy $2 scratch offs which players get at their seat. For just $10-$20, this spreads a surprising amount of goodwill and eagerness to show up. (I don’t do this in my game, but have seen it used in other games to good effect.) Much more, anyway, than if you gave people two bucks to show!
* To encourage more regular attendance, build incentives into your game that make people not want to miss sessions, for example...
-- For a tournament, take out a small amount per buy-in which gets held for an end-of-year special event with a higher payout. To qualify for the special event, players have to participate in a minimum of 50% of games, and pay “makeup” for the special event for those missed. So for example, if you held 20 tournaments in a year, withholding $10 per player each time for the end-of-year prize pool, someone who played in 15 games would pay an extra $50 (5 missed games x $10) on top of the entry fee, so all players have equal equity in the pool.
-- Or, create a point system (say, +8 for first place, +4 for 2nd, +2 for 3rd, +1 just for attending) which runs throughout the year, with some prize or other incentive at the end. I used to play in a home game with such a system, which led to a bigger money tournament at the end of the year where your starting chips was proportional to how many points you’d amassed over the year. We always had two full tables of 9, and sometimes spilled over to 10 per table. People didn’t even want to lose their measly attendance point.
-- Cash games: Presumably some of the ideas above could be adapted to cash games, or others have participated in games which have them.