BLUF: I'm a newb at putting tournaments together; I have questions about rebuy, addon, and bounty structures, along with how many chips of what type I should buy. Read on if you'd like...

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So after my successful acquisition of ~500 Pharoah's copmosites (http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/24...aroahs-1145317), I'm contemplating picking up a cheap set of ~500 chips for tournaments.

The Chips

I've settled on the desert heat set of chips:





Link Here

They're about $0.16/chip, have a sexy, modern-type design that I like, and for the price, are decent chips. I ordered a sample of 25 that I received last week. The chips are clearly plastic with metal slugs, but they look nice, stack decently, and are eons better than the 500 dice chips I have at home.

As for a bounty chip, I want to get these:



Link Here

Myself and my friends are huge nerds; we play lots of League of Legends among other nerdy games, and these chips would hit the spot. Plus, I may or may not have been a Rogue in the land of Azeroth before, and daggers are particularly appealing to me. =/

Chip Distribution

Here's the chip distribution I'm considering:

T25 x 100 (no more than 10 blind chips per person w/10 player tournament)
T100 x 200 (the bread and butter chip)
T500 x 150 (another heavily used chip methinks)
T1000 x 50 (not particularly needed because it's x2 of T500)
T5000 x 25-50 (not sure how many of these I need)

This leaves a grand-total of T 272,250 - T 397,500 in chips.

Tourney Structure

What I'm more concerned with is tourney structure. I plan on using pfap's structure that's in the FAQ.



Tournaments I run will be no longer than four hours, as I plan on running a tourney + cash game as people get knocked out. I will have no more than ten people playing, and I'd like to incorporate rebuys, addons, and a bounty chip.

My friends like having chips. Lots of chips. Thus, I plan on using the highest set of chips with the shortest set of blinds on pfap's chart: 10k chips + 15 minute blinds for 8-12 players @ 3-4 hours length.

Add-ons, Re-buys, and Bounties

I want to add in bountys, rebuys, and add-ons. The base buy in will be $10. How much should the bounty be? I'm thinking $3 for a bounty chip, so $13 buy-in total. If I allow rebuys if someone busts out, I'd make them buy another bounty button, correct? So $13 for a bust-out rebuy? $13 is also an awkward buy in amount, with lots of change being made-- maybe an $8 + $2 buyin (8 for prize pool, 2 for bounty)?

As for the addons, how many chips and for how much? A full starting stack for another $10? Or more chips for more or less money?

Finally, I realize all of these extra options will increase the length of the of the tournament; should I then use the 1-2 hour length row instead, to account for the added length of the rebuys + addons?

Many thanks for reading my novel-post.

is this a new abbreviation for tl;dr? (and by the way, is tl;dr a 2+2-only meme? I keep wanting to use it in the real world)

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I recommend purchases in units of 20 to fit neatly in racks, and get a few extras.

I had trouble finding a 500-chip breakdown that works with 10x t10k stacks, rebuys, and addons. That's a lot of value to put on the table.

The holdempokertourney.com poker chip calculator might help you.

This is the direction I tend to go lately: deep stacks with fast blinds increases. This makes it much harder to bust quickly, and tends to get lots of players to the middle part of the tournament. It serves a similar purpose to rebuys, so you may not want to do both (ie, do 3k or 5k stacks with rebuys, OR 10k stacks as a freezeout).

There are important things to consider though. First of all, that middle stage is carnage. When the blinds finally do catch up to the stack sizes, they steamroll everyone. Lots of people become shortstacked at once and the cards take over. All tournaments tend towards shovefests, but deep+fast amplifies that moment.

also, you'll have a **** ton of chips on the table, especially if you go t10k+rebuys+addons. You'll want to color up twice by the time you get to heads-up, which takes time.




Bounties are essentially a 2nd tournament. They can be small or large, mandatory or optional. $3 is fine. I like your $8+2 idea (with $5 rebuys? see below), but $5 (optional?) bounties would also work.

Not necessarily. The rule I've played under is you win a bounty chip only if your victim is eliminated, not simply felted. If he rebuys, he keeps his original bounty chip. No reason you couldn't do it the other way, though. With optional bounties, you could say the bounty chip is lost with every felting, and leave it to the player to decide whether to buy another when rebuying. (note that you must possess a bounty chip to be able to win one from another player)



There are a couple structures that work well. One is a limited-rebuy/addon, where you get one or two rebuy chips. If you still have the rebuy chip at the end of the rebuy period, you can use it as an add-on instead. This is more a 2nd-chance structure. Generally the rebuy/addon is the same cost and # of chips as the first buyin (minus the rake, if there was one).

The looser unlimited-rebuy structure is to give a new starting stack for the same or less $. Say for $10 initial buyin of t3k, you could rebuy for $5 for another t3k. The addon is typically a little larger, like t5k, but might be $10. This makes the rebuy period more like a cash game as a precursor to the real tournament, which has a $20 buyin. Plan for everyone to take the addon, plus ~1 rebuy per player, maybe more.


You'd be surprised how little the rebuys/addons change the length. Chips/20 still applies. If your structure triples the number of chips on the table, that's only about 3 or 4 more rounds at the end.

You can definitely have a nice 10 man tournament set with 500 chips.

Color	Value	Total Qty	Total Value	Qty per Buy-in
Green	25.00	120	3,000.00	12
Black	100.00	120	12,000.00	12
Yellow	500.00	100	50,000.00	9
Orange	1,000.00	100	100,000.00	4
Purple	5,000.00	60	300,000.00	0
	Total	500	465,000.00	37

That gives 10 people 4 buy-ins, with some left over for color ups. But don't use these quantities without thinking through how the rebuys and color ups will work. I could do it, but it will cost you.

This is a little short on 100s, but soon enough, they are not the working chips. They are your small chips. These stacks will work. I have used these stacks many times.

pfap's tourney structure is nice.

i love this though; blindvalet.com
you make several inputs, it gives you the tourney structure

BLUF is bottom line up front, a military term I use/hear all the time. I wasn't sure if people would know it or not =/

The chips come in packs of 25 so that's hard to do; but I do use racks so I understand your point.

I'll use this utility, looks very useful.

So either a 10k freezeout or a 5k with rebuys/addons to prevent massive numbers of chips then, correct?

$8 + $2 would definitely be easy to run.

I was never able to understand whether or not an optional bounty would work, but you word it out well; it makes sense that you must have a bounty chip to take bounty chips. I think I might make it optional, then; some of my friends will be all for it, while others won't necessarily be.

So for the limited rebuy, does the initial buy in cover the two rebuys? Or do you pay for the rebuy chips ahead of time? I'm a little unclear on that.

Well sexual favors and merge monies are about all I have right now I'm not too sure how to calculate how the rebuys and addons would work because I've never used them before.

As for the structure, you know you did not post the right pic, correct? Those are starting stacks. These are both on the FAQ, everyone.



This is a good chance to get everyone's input on the WSOP blinds (at least at the time of pfap's cheat sheet creation; are they still the same?) versus BlindValet.com. I used to go by the cheat sheet, but for more tourney's I am run, BlindValet is just too easy. But I have always wondered about the pros and cons of these.

Let's take the 10K X 10 players for 3-4 hours. I included antes, because the cheat sheet only has that option. This includes no re-buys or add-ons, to keep it simpler.

Level	Time	BV BB	BV Ante	WSOP BB	WSOP Ante
1	0:15	50		50
2	0:30	100		100
3	0:45	150	25	150
4	1:00	200	25	200
5	1:15	300	25	200	25
6	1:30	400	50	300	25
7	1:45	500	75	400	50
8	2:00	600	75	600	75
9	2:15	800	100	800	100
10	2:30	1,000	100	1,000	100
11	2:45	1,200	100	1,200	100
12	3:00	1,600	200	1,600	200
13	3:15	2,000	300	2,000	300
14	3:30	3,000	400	2,400	300
15	3:45	4,000	500	3,000	400
16	4:00	6,000	500	4,000	500
17	4:15	8,000	1,000	6,000	500
18	4:30	12,000	1,500	8,000	1,000

I have found BlindValet gets the tournament over on time, but the jumps tend to be brutal to force the deadline. On the other hand, it appears the WSOP is not in that big of a hurry. The blinds do not jump as much, and the antes are slightly smaller.

Any other thoughts on the differences here? Pros and cons?

Keep the sexual favors. Wait a second...before I say that, you are a dude, right? OK, keep the sexual favors. Here's a little more info. This is using a SS I put together a while back. After you provide the 10 starting stacks I posted before, you have this:

Color	Value	Qty remaining	Qty per Re-Buy	Re-Buy Value	# of Re-Buys
Green	25	-	-	-	-
Black	100	-	-	-	-
Yellow	500	10	-	-	-
Orange	1,000	60	5	5,000	12
Purple	5,000	60	1	5,000	60
	Total			10,000

After you exhaust your 1k chips for the 12 re-buys, you just use 2 purples. Very simple. You'll have 48 purples at that point, for rebuys and color ups.

You can use the 10 100s and the rest for color ups. But even if you color up the 25s through the 500s, you only need 60K chips for that. The total set is 465K chips, so you should have plenty.

You can check this yourself. Get out your dice chips and create stacks, re-buy stacks, and then color them up and see what you used.

This is about all I saw in your post since I'm not a tourney person at all. Huge fan of the game and have been playing for a long time. There is a LOL page in the video games section that is rather busy. I'm always looking for people to play with. User name in there is Payback shoot me a friend request.

remember, these are set up to accommodate 3-day and longer events. They also subscribe to the model of more gradual increases later, to extend/emphasize the middle phase of the tournament.

BV is a decent "custom" solution for arbitrary parameters, but I really think WSOP makes more sense as a default:

-- highly evolved. They've been testing and tweaking these parameters for decades, and it works.

-- familiarity. people can move between your game and the wsop and other games using the same structure without any surprises.

-- defensible. "This is what the WSOP does, quitchyerbitching."

They're also very flexible by design. Whether you're doing 15 minute blinds with t1k stacks, or 3 hours with t10k, the same structure sequence applies.

You have to watch BV because it will do things like increases of 1.3x/1.3x/1.3x/2.0x/1.3x... It's pretty good, but I've seen it.

that's my suggestion, yes


that's the beauty of it. It raises the stakes only for the people who want to play for more.

I guess it could work either way. The rebuy chip is worth and costs $x, or everyone gets one as a "coupon" allowing the purchase of another stack. I've seen it run the 2nd way, but that requires more cash handling mid-game. If you go the first route, you might have to buy one of these back if someone elects to not add on, or leaves early for some reason.

I'll friend you fo sho; our group of friends played for about a year straight up until september of last year; that's when I decided grinding limited hold thems on merge was my main thing to do, and my other friends sort of faded out from LoL also. But if you ever need a half-assed effort from Caitlyn, Sona, or Teemers I'm your guy

Yeah, I've seen it, too. Usually about 2/3 to 3/4 the way in. And also at the end, like I wrote.

But this one looks pretty smooth at a glance.

I just want to add that 8x25, 8x100, and no more than 2x500 is ideal for any tournament starting at 25/50. Everything else in 1k chips.

For buyins, if you're doing $13, go to the bank and get a LOT of $5s and $1s for change. It's a lot easier if you can make buyins in multiples of $20s, or at the very least multiples of $5. A $15 buyin is a lot easier to manage than a $13 buyin.

If you use bounty chips, make sure they're easily distinguishable from evey other chip.

Those look like nice chips. Good luck and have fun!

I've been using this for my 10k...

10 x $100
2 x $500
8 x $1000

Fits nicely in racks. I use WSOP blinds, but remove all levels using 25's. The 100 ante hits kind of hard, so I have a 2k add-on at the beginning of the tourney to soften the blow.