Gmansbu, I’ll give you my take on your original post.
I don’t know what a “traditional tourney” setup really is. There are so many ways to run a tournament and a lot of tournament structures. The WSOP Main Event used to have T10,000 in chips and start at 25/50, so a total of 200 BB. Then I think they went to T30,000 in chips, and it’s changed more. When I first started hosting tournaments, we duplicated the WSOP starting stacks and 200BB. I was shooting for a 4-hr tournament (playing time). I believe the starting stacks were 12x25; 7x100; 2x500; 3x1,000; and 1x5,000. The stack was 25 chips. Then they changed to 8x25; 8x100; 2x500; 3x1,000; and 1x5,000 – 22 chips. I tried both formats. Perhaps that is what people mean by traditional tournament.
I think it makes for a better player experience if you don’t have half the starting chip value in one chip, but I had to learn that through experience.
Getting a setup for 20 players makes sense, but I’d consider the possibility that your game will grow. There are 3 ways your game can grow that will affect a chipset purchase.
- More players and needing more chips to accommodate those players.
- More buy-ins per player. Things like rebuys, add-ons, and bonus chips will require more chips.
- Larger starting stacks. Down through the years, I’ve done 200BB, 300BB, 400BB, and 500BB for “regular” tournaments. What I found is players seem to prefer the larger starting stacks. To keep the game at 4 hours, I just made the blinds structure more aggressive. See below on this.
- There can be a combination of all of these things that will affect the chipset size.
Players can be funny. I played someone else’s game for a while. They started with 15K instead of 10K. I decided to go to 15K, and my players loved it! That inspired me to try something else, so I experimented with 25K – 500BB. Players liked the bigger chip stack even better. Then I went to 40K starting chips, but started at 50/100, so 400BB. Players really liked that structure. I found it humorous that some would say they loved how many starting chips we had, but we’d effectively reduced it from 500BB to 400BB. But throughout this process, I kept to a 4-hour playing time. Some players didn’t realize we reduced the starting BB. They look only at the total starting chips. By itself, that means nothing. Chip stacks are always in the context of the blinds, and it tournaments, that changes every time the blinds go up.
I would have T5,000 in the chipset! Your structure will dictate the need, but realistically, if you are thinking of rebuys, or the tournament goes longer than expected, you will want higher value chips. My suggestion is to buy at least some chips that are 1 value higher than your intended format.
The more chip values, the more flexible your set is. I have 2 tournament sets right now. One is 1675 chips and the other is 1700 chips. Due to being required to buy the 1675 set in blocks of 25, it has more bank (total chip value) than the 1700 set. Both sets were designed for 30 players, but also designed to accommodate up to 40 players by reducing the number of chips in the starting stacks. You can be creative and not giving everyone identical stacks as long as the total value is the same. I had a plan to do that if I got more than 27 players. My home would be limited to 3 tables of 10, though I no longer use 3 tables. Therefore, I never had to try varying chip stacks. Having a plan for it though would allow me to actually accommodate up to 45 players.
Your game is likely to change. If you play other games, you will see new things to you that you want to try. Your players will come up with suggestions you might want to try.
Developing a good tournament structure is a science. Once you understand the factors and how they work, you can develop a structure with almost any starting stacks and starting blinds to go 3-4 hours. What I’ve tried to do is have a good experience for the players. That is not necessarily a goal of commercial tournaments.
There are five factors that determine the length of your tournament. Alter one and you alter the tournament time. The factors, in no particular order, are:
The ratio of starting chips to the big blind (SC/BB) – Here’s something I heard some years ago. A tournament is deep stacked if over 150 BB, very short stacked at 100 BB. A player is considered to be competitive at 50 BB, short stacked at 30 BB, seriously short stacked at 20 BB, and desperately short stacked at 10 BB. By itself, this is a good guide, but this is somewhat in a vacuum. You have to look at the average blind increases too.
Average blind increases – The average of how rapidly blinds go up. Most people use increases of 1.25-1.67 (25% to 67% increases) and think 2.0 or higher is too high. Three basic philosophies are [a] consistent increases, start slow and increase, and [c] start fast and decrease. Every good tournament follows one of these 3 basics or a variation of them. If blind creases are all over the place, it can be predictable regarding time, but it’s like driving on a really bumpy road.
Length of rounds and time per hand -- 1 hour or more per round is considered slow; 20-30 minutes is about average, 15 or less very fast, and under 10, lightning fast. Most calculations of times I’ve seen use an average hand time of about 2 minutes, so anything less than 2 minutes per player at maximum players per table is probably too fast as it doesn’t give every player a chance at every position every round. Generally tournaments are calculated using the 2 minutes per hand assumption, even if people don’t realize that is the assumption.
Note: Not every group plays at 2 minutes a hand. If the pace is slower, you have to adjust for this. If it takes 3 minutes a hand, your blinds must be 50% longer to end at a particular blind level. Reality is that tournaments need a certain number of hands more than a certain number of blind rounds.
Think about a 60-minute football game. If the average play takes 30 seconds, the game will last about 120 plays. If the average play takes 20 seconds, the game will last about 180 plays. Those two paces are very different. There will be more of everything in the second game – more plays, more yards, more points, etc. Poker tournaments are the same way. If you know the average hand length in your group, you can calculate more accurately.
Number of players – It takes longer for more players to be eliminated. However, this is not a straight-line ratio. If you have half as many players as anticipated, that doesn’t mean the tournament will only last half as long.
Fewer players tend to play longer per player in my experience. I’ve been calculating average time per player for several years, and this is very consistent. The more players you have, the sooner knockouts start happening. While my measurements have been done with no more than 3 tables, what I’ve found is that it takes less than 30 minutes average playing time to eliminate twice as many players.
Total chip count and BB (big blinds) in tournament -- Two different formulas can determine how long a tournament will last. One is when Antes (A), Small Blind (S), and Big Blind (B) added together equals 5% of the total amount of chips in play (T), the tournament will end. This is expressed in several ways, but one is A+S+B = T*.05. A second formula is when B equals 5%, expressed as B=T*.05. My experience is these are good outside parameters and the actual time is likely to fall in between these times the vast majority (80-90%) of the time.
Allowing rebuys, add-ons, bonuses, etc., affects the total chip count and therefore the length of the tournament. What really counts though, is the number of big blinds these things add at the time they occur. For example:
If you have a tournament with starting stacks of 200BB, and about halfway through, players could do an add-on of the same amount, then you have to look at how many additional BB that is right then. If that add-on is 20 more BB, to accurately account for that, you calculate the starting stacks with 220 BB instead of 200.
Doubling the starting stacks does not double the length of the tournament. A rebuy will add a little bit to the tournament time, but its timing is important. A rebuy at the 1 hour mark will lengthen the tournament more than if it’s at the 3 hour mark.
Note: I’ve been tracking this for several years. If I plan on a 4-hour tournament (20 minute playing rounds), I’ve found that over 80% of the time that tournament will last within one round of the planned ending time.
These five factors work together. None can be ignored. Changing any one of them will affect the length of a tournament. The five main factors in tournament design lead to how good the tournament structure is.
There are several PCFers who can develop good structures, and there are programs that can do it for you. I’ve developed many structures I’m happy to share, but I’ve never figured out how to post them on the forum. I use an Excel spreadsheet to help you create your own that will last the length of time you want it to last.
