SlowPokeTony
Two Pair
This was before the boom when tv tournaments got really popular. I had seen the 1 hour wsop espn specials each year, usually they’d air 5 or 6 of them in a row and i’d watch them all day. My only poker experience before that was dealers choice for pennies with my grandmother. But once I saw Hold em on tv that was it. Hold em was tournaments! I was 12 or 13 playing 5 player tournaments with my friends and brother, $5 buy in winner take all. I really had almost nothing to go by structure-wise and came up with it all on my own. It wasn’t great but it was fun because we didn’t know any better.
We had a ton of mismatched chips of many different colors and designs. So everything was worth 1. 100 chip starting stack. It only took one game to realize that when the blinds got high enough it was a pain in the ass to count all the chips for every bet every hand. So here’s what I eventually came up with:
Blinds increase every time the big blind makes a full orbit. Then every 2 orbits when it’s down to 3 or 2 players. Start at 1/2, 2/4, 3/6, 4/8….then before 5/10 we’d “revalue” the chips by making them all worth 5. Everyone would essentially color up their stack rounded up to the nearest 5. So if you had 75 chips it would turn into 15 chips, 103 chips would be 21 chips, etc. Looking back now I realize how steep of a jump that ends up being when you go 4/8, 5/10, then 10/20. But I remember telling everyone it’s no different than when we do 1/2 to 2/4 at the start of the game. Wrong. A whole tournament must have only been around 30 hands or so, seems crazy but we loved it.
Anyway I eventually got a proper set of dice style chips and the structure evolved to what we still use today (usually T5 base 10/10/7/3). Anyone else start out with some funky structures?
We had a ton of mismatched chips of many different colors and designs. So everything was worth 1. 100 chip starting stack. It only took one game to realize that when the blinds got high enough it was a pain in the ass to count all the chips for every bet every hand. So here’s what I eventually came up with:
Blinds increase every time the big blind makes a full orbit. Then every 2 orbits when it’s down to 3 or 2 players. Start at 1/2, 2/4, 3/6, 4/8….then before 5/10 we’d “revalue” the chips by making them all worth 5. Everyone would essentially color up their stack rounded up to the nearest 5. So if you had 75 chips it would turn into 15 chips, 103 chips would be 21 chips, etc. Looking back now I realize how steep of a jump that ends up being when you go 4/8, 5/10, then 10/20. But I remember telling everyone it’s no different than when we do 1/2 to 2/4 at the start of the game. Wrong. A whole tournament must have only been around 30 hands or so, seems crazy but we loved it.
Anyway I eventually got a proper set of dice style chips and the structure evolved to what we still use today (usually T5 base 10/10/7/3). Anyone else start out with some funky structures?
