I am not an experienced player, but I play at friends' small home tournaments once or twice a year and have hosted a 2-table tourney of my own with decent success. Now I want to have a 4 table evening tourney with about 36 players. Hoping to come up with a decent chip set and blind structure so we can start at 7 and finish at 1 or 2 in the morning.
I was going to get a 1000-chip set in 5 denominations (1, 5, 25, 100, 500) and start each player with 500, allowing one re-buy before the end of the second break. However, this only comes to 16 chips for each player's stack, which seems kind of paltry, and I can see that there would be a lot of need for making change during the game. Would you guys go for 1500? 2000? Four denominations or five? Higher denominations?
Here is a spreadsheet I wrote with a tentative structure. Let me know what you think.
If you are going to use T1 chips for tournament play, here is what I recommend:
http://www.pokerchipforum.com/threads/chips-needed-and-blind-schedule-using-1s.15271/#post-268795
A 36-player tournament will require these additional blind levels and corresponding chip set:
L19 800 1600
remove T100 chips
L20 1000 2000 ***
L21 1500 3000
L22 2000 4000
A 36-player event with 15-minute blind levels should last no longer than L20, or about 5 hours plus breaks.
starting stacks:
10 x T1
8 x T5
10 x T25
7 x T100
----------------
35 chips = T1000 (250BB)
chip set:
360 x T1
288 x T5
360 x T25
271 x T100 (includes 19x to color-up T1 and T5 chips)
73 x T500 (used to color-up T25 and T100 chips)
----------------
1352 chips
However, I recommend that you drop the T1 chips and use a T5 base structure. The same blind structure can be used (drop the first five levels) if you alter the starting stacks to T5000 and add the following blind levels:
L14 800 1600
remove T100 chips
L15 1000 2000
L16 1500 3000
remove T500 chips
L17 2000 4000
L18 3000 6000
L19 4000 8000
L20 6000 12000 ***
L21 8000 16000
L22 10000 20000
A 36-player T5-base event with 15-minute blind levels should last no longer than L20, or about 5 hours plus breaks.
starting stacks:
10 x T5
10 x T25
7 x T100
4 x T500
2 x T1000
----------------
33 chips = T5000 (250BB)
chip set:
360 x T5
360 x T25
252 x T100
144 x T500
83 x T1000 (includes 11x to color-up T5 and T25 chips)
21 x T5000 (used to color-up T100 and T500 chips)
----------------
1220 chips
Tournament length is a product of the number of entrants, the size of the starting stacks (in terms of # of starting big blinds), the progression of the blind structure (percentage increase), and the length of the blind levels. Generally speaking, a deep-stack four-table tournament with 200 starting big blinds and a decent blind structure will run six to eight hours, depending upon the length of the blind levels.
You can typically run a successful tournament using four or five denominations, depending upon the number of entrants. Those specific sets of denominations can vary quite a bit, so long as some basic guidelines are followed. One such guideline is that for maximum value, all denominations should be 4x or 5x apart. Another is that to ease and speed up play, at least 8 chips of the two lowest denominations should be included in the starting stacks (10 is better, 12 is considered optimum by many people). One advantage of using a T1 or T5 base set of denominations is that the starting stacks will contain 10x of the two lowest denominations. T25 base sets will require either 8 (bare minimum) or 12 (definitely better, but more expensive). The T1 and T5 sets (and multiples, like T1000-base and T5000-base) provide more bang for the buck.
