Hi,

I'm looking at hosting a friendly home tourney next week and have been playing around with blind valet and came up with this (couple of minor tweaks by me)

What do you guys think?

Expected players - 9
Expected rebuys - 0
Expected add-ons - 3

Re-buy Tounament

Starting Stack: 15000
Rebuy Chips: 15000
Addon Chips: 7500
Players: 9
Duration: 4.5 hours

Created by the Blind Valet structure creator at http://blindvalet.com

The main factor is the type of player you will have, and also the prize structure. You could be done in ninety minutes.

Starting at level 11 some of the jumps are huge. On BlindValet, that usually means one of the variables is too extreme for a smooth structure: stacks too big, overall length too short, or level length too long. I would adjust one of those and see if you can smooth things out more. Maybe a 10K stack or 15 minute blinds would help.

Yeah, level 11 is a killer isn't it...
After that it's not 'too' bad but those levels are as they are to close the game out I suppose.

15 minute blinds might be too quick with the players we have but I'll certainly look at a 10k stack.

I should add that I hope to have a lot of play early on and hardly any busting before the break...

There are different thoughts on this. Some people think the later levels are a crap shoot anyway, so don't worry about big jumps. I think the gradually diminishing stack to blinds at the end of a tournament are very interesting to play, so I don't want to kill it by having huge jumps that induce an all-in fest any more than necessary.

I also prefer 20 minute levels, so I'd opt to either reduce the stacks or play longer.

I’m sure I sound like a broken record to most of the people on here with this, but I’ve always had much more success with low starting stacks, which allow you to have longer blind levels and smaller steps. I would start off with 3,000 or 3,500. This allows you to have the following steps: 25/50, 50/100, 75/150, 100/200, 150/300, 200/400, 300/600, 500/1000, 800/1600, 1200/2400, 2000/4000. You have approximately 30,000 chips on the table and the game should end at 800/1,600 or 1200/2400. Most people stick around for 1.5 hours (levels 1-3). You start to lose half of the people in levels 4-6 which maintains the 20-25BB level. The blinds force the end of the game at around level 9. We have never done any re-buys or add-ons, so they are not included in this, although I would limit them to full re-buys only in the first 3 levels in case someone gets an early bad beat and doesn’t want to leave.

The main reason I advocate this approach is that the tournament becomes real for people when they are in that 20-25BB level. It makes every decision interesting. With a big starting stack (300BBs), re-buys, and add-ons, the first 7-9 levels of the tournament (3 hours) are very uneventful, then you lose most of your players quickly in the last 1.5 hours when everyone starts to shove and race. You are only in the “sweet spot” (20-25BBs) for about 40-60 minutes of a 4.5 hour tournament. The rest of the time you are either too high or too low in blinds to make it interesting.

I'm with you, Grima. We usually start with 4K, which is 80 BBs. This coincidentally corresponds well with our starting stacks in our cash game. That is, $40 buy-in with .25/.50 blinds.

It really takes the pressure off the blind structure in a short tournament. The downside is that most players' stacks are not deep for as long.

But keep in mind that if you start with 8K instead, in 20 minutes you'll be back to an average stack of 80BBs, so the deeper stacks are short lived. I think the shorter stacks are a better balance when you only have a few hours to finish.

I tend to prefer a smoother structure with shorter blinds versus longer blinds and steeper jumps.

But turbo nights are fun too. Short stacks, short blinds, steep jumps, and 4 tournaments in a poker night! Banzai!

We play with a somewhat similar structure.
Minor differences are that we start with a 10k stack. We never ante, as most of us are amateurs and its self dealt, so it keeps it simpler.
And our levels around 11 change:
10 20 800 1600 200 3:20
11 20 1200 2400 300 3:40 We use 1k/2k (Less fumbling with chips)
12 20 2000 4000 500 4:00 We use 1500/3k (cause we have 500/1k chip denominations so it makes it easier to put 2 or 3 chips into the pot in front of you).

Then we go to 2k/4k, 3k/6k 4k/8k which pretty much ends it almost every month. We normally start 12-15 people, with 3-5 rebuys, so at a typical 15-18 entries, there is 180k in the room, so big stack would have at most 15-20bb.