Hey 2+2 Community!

I'm involved with the Poker Club at my university and am having trouble thinking of ideas. I figured I could use this thread for brainstorming. Any and all help is appreciated. If I am in the wrong place, feel free to redirect me to a more appropriate forum or whatever.

Basically, the club has been around for a couple years now. It usually only holds 2 or 3 events per semester and at each event the final table qualifies for a "main event." Each event is free to play in and prizes are funded by the school with whatever budget they give the club. Prizes tend to include: poker chip sets, poker books, playing cards, gift cards, etc.

For the most part, NLHE has been the game of choice, but we're hoping to change it up and run more events with different games and formats. Any ideas for formats would be great. I also had the idea of running a league with a point system. Has anyone done something similar? I'm completely clueless when it comes to how to format something like that, but it sounds fun.

Because it is a school sponsored club, we can't really hold tournaments with real money buy-ins. However, we are hoping to hold small buy-in events with decent prizes and donate the buy-in to different charities. (Still no clue what charities would be best. Any suggestions?)

I guess my main questions are:

1. What game/format/structure of tournaments should be run?
2. Can a league with a point system be successful? (Detailed structure?)
3. What kind of prize structure should be used?
4. How should we go about advertising the club?
5. Any thoughts on holding events for various charities? What charities should we focus on?

Any and all help is appreciated. Witty remarks are welcome, too. I could always use a good laugh.


Yours truly,
thegreatambino

1) Most of the people coming into the club are going to know NLHE, because that's the current golden child game due to being television friendly. I would start there with standard freeze-out tournaments and maybe open up to other things down the road as people get more comfortable with poker in general.

2) Absolutely. A lot of your bar leagues operate on a points system, with the points earning you seats into money tournaments and the like. You can hunt for any of them to get an idea of how they work, though I'm partial to http://interstatepokerclub.com, simply because it's the league in which I play and the one for whom I'm a TD.

3) This would depend on what you have to offer. Standard "casino" tournament payout is the top 10% of the field. Most privately run tournaments, you can get away with only awarding prizes to the top 3-5, depending on what you have to offer.

4) Given that this is a university club, by all means plaster flyers around campus and use whatever electric means of advertisement you have available. The key question that needs to be answered for this is are you limiting this to students or are people in the community able to join as well? The answer to that may also depend on the charter for the organization with the University.

5) What charity you want to support is entirely up to you. My personal preference is generally to stay with something close to home, but that's a decision the group as a whole would likely want to discuss.

I played in a great league locally with a pretty straightforward point system. You had to sign up at the beginning of the league, so there was a set number of players (45 in our case) for the entire run. Then, in each tournament, first place would be 45 points, second 44, etc. down to the last place entrant. If only 30 players entered that week, 30th place was 15 points. Then at the end of the league, the two lowest scores for each player were discarded (we ran 12 weeks, so ten highest scores) and voila there was a winner.

This wouldn't work so well if you wanted an open league, although I'm sure there could be some sort of modification (ie scoring only based on how many entrants, rather than total pool).

I'd think that introducing PLO or PLO8 to the game might be a reasonable way to stir things up a bit, maybe every third or fourth event to see how people like it. It's one of those games people can understand because it's similar to NLH and might get them interested in learning other games. PLO8 could then lead to Stud Hi/Lo if people still wanted to try new things.

In most of the non-casino games I've played, the payouts are pretty generous, often 15-20% of the field, sometimes even more. While I don't like this personally (I prefer 10% top-heavy structures) it does appeal to the inexperienced players.

Good luck!

Bearing in mind that you're starving students:

1. Once you have an established group of NLHE players, you can start to throw a few things into the mix and see what sticks. You can, perhaps, make minor modifications to the format (like PL-preflop and on-flop), deep stacks, turbo short-stacks -- then move to other games like Omaha. ...but having a core group of players and getting their input is important. Holding a HORSE tournament is great -- until nobody shows up or it sours players who simply don't understand the concept of limit poker or why anyone would want to play such an "awful" game.
2. Detailed? I haven't had to show my work in decades. Our league runs a quarterly structure. 30 games over 15 weeks with points for the top-5 and cash for the top-3. $10 a game and we end up taking $2 of that for roughly $1,000 finals with $8 back to the players on a nightly basis. We give 1st 100+(10*Players), second gets 8*Players, third gets 6*Players...down to 5th. The top 16 players play in the finals. We reset points every 15 weeks. The point leader and the tournament winner also get trophies with the names of all previous winners -- a la Lord Stanley's Cup.
3. For 1-2 table tournament, pay ~2 spots per table. For larger events, the top 10% or so, or the final table if possible.
4. On campus? What's it cost to get in the school paper? How much are fliers outside of dorms? I don't like carnival games (50 points if you invite a friend who plays for 2 games!), but if they work for you, I can't complain.
5. If you want to support a charity, support one you care about, not one I care about. Breast Cancer is always fun. People like tits.

You cant accept PMs yet, your location says New England, if you are in RI i can help you with this. I have done it before

1. Good point. I should be asking these questions to club members. I was definitely planning to start with NLH Freezeouts. I'll switch it up depending on what people think and how comfortable they are with other games as well as their eagerness to learn other variations. Maybe a heads up tournament would be fun too.

2. That is detailed enough for me, hahah. I've never run a points system league before so I wasn't sure what the best way of doing so was. I'm sure there are a lot of different options so I guess I'm trying to see what has worked for other people in the past. There's a good chance I give your system a go or at least a similar structure.

3. Prize structure is pretty much exactly what I thought it would/should be.

4. School newspaper would be good. I think we could probably throw an advertisement in it for free. Posting flyers won't cost much if anything either. And, I'm hoping to fix up a website to make communication and whatnot faster and more accessible for everyone.

5. Another good point. I'll see what the group is interested in as a whole and figure that one out.

Thanks for all the input.

@ Bull and Flush -

Thanks for the great advice. A lot of what I'm hearing seems to be along the same lines. Flyers, school paper, online for marketing. Consult the club for major decisions like choice of charity.

Flush, great point about most inexperienced places wanting prizes to pay out more places. I'll look into awarding something small for at least the top 20% maybe even everyone that enters or at least enters every event (or the majority depending on how many we run this semester).

Bull, thanks for the link. Looks very helpful. I'm gonna ask around to see what point systems seem to work best and what people like the most.

JASEP, I'm in MA. Too bad tho.


Also, sorry responses were out of order. I'll try my best to do things a little more orderly in the future.

Thanks again for all the help guys. I really appreciate it.

Domains and hosting are cheap. I'm a fan of 1and1, as it's cheap and allows freedom (as opposed to using a template only on Godaddy), but there are hundreds of other options.

http://www.southchandlerpokerclub.co...rrentStandings

http://singledollarblind.com/index.php/Standings

Both 1and1 hosted, both on my same plan, etc. I confess to paying $7/mo, but they host a dozen sites for me on my package. Affiliate bonus whoring link.

...if anyone needs a vanity email forward, let me know

One of the things our game structure does is reward variance By having "turbo" games, people get lucky. In the long-run, the good players win, but if you run a game in 3 hours, there's a luck factor.

good luck big guy. hopefully you can get something running

Thanks for the support. I'm definitely going to look into using the new "Home Game" feature Pokerstars has introduced. I think it looks pretty promising and will make holding more events much easier. (I still feel the need to hold live events, too. After all, the game is all about live communication and interaction right?)

Absolutely, this about getting people together face-to-face. Don't set it up where everyone's back in their dorm in front of their computers! For God's sake, man, aren't there enough opportunities for that?

I think it would be a good supplement for the weeknights when its harder to get together and devote 100% of your night to play in a tourney but would be achievable from your laptop where you could be multi tasking. But def live tourneys for the weekends with everyone as more of a social poker aspect

eneely, i definitely don't want to completely cut out the live atmosphere. like hotwings said, it would simply be used as a supplement to make more games per semester possible. everyone has busy schedules, with classes, work, athletics, and other clubs so i think that the club can benefit by using the online feature because it will make holding frequent games easier and will also speed up games when people have time constraints.

I can see the benefit, as long as there is a good balance, and you get positive feedback that people like both options. Keep in mind that some might like the idea of participating live, but not online, and that may impact their score in the point system. Just keep your radar up for people who are turned off by the online games.

I guess others might have opposite preferences, and prefer online play, but if this is using school funds in some way, I imagine the school would lean toward face-to-face social activities.

Truer words.

We've got movie sign!

Oops. Sorry, Clutch, I saw your avatar and panicked.

Eneely, very good points. I'll make sure to see what the members want. I'm sure some will prefer online, while some will prefer live. Balance is key. Something about the greater good, blah, blah, blah utilitarianism ********.

Clutch, amen, brotha!

Schmendr1ck, not quite sure if I understand your witty post. I think it went over my head.

Anyways, thanks for the support guys! I really appreciate it. Good luck at the tables!

Sorry, it was an off-topic reference to Clutch_C's avatar. I guess I should contribute something useful, too...

I agree with keeping the club games mostly, if not all, live. Poker, especially free poker, is a social event, and you lose that aspect of the game if you're playing online.

My other comment is to be sure you get guidance and approval from the university on any charity games where you collect a buy-in from players. Many localities have very specific requirements for charity events of this type, and you want to be sure your games remain legal. So be sure to get approval from the school first.

In all sincerity, if you need some post bust-out activities for your poker club, set up a TV and watch some Mystery Science Theater 3000. If you're not familiar with it, and you're in college... well shame on you! I feel like you just asked who these Monty Python and Pink Floyd guys are. Get thee to Netflix and stream instantly any episode of MST3K, and thank us later!

Hear hear!

The Netflix streaming only package is an incredible bargain at $8/month, and well within most student budgets. They have a ton of MST3K, lots of Python, and a bazillion other things. Use that school-provided bandwidth for something other than Bittorrent.

I've come to the horrible conclusion that college kids have no idea what any of those things are... ...except bit-torrent, of course.

Being the colossal geek I am, I made a lot of merges of new Rifftrax stuff - their audio, original videos - and sought out some of the other Nelson audio track versions of some movies, where he laid tracks over public domain stuff.

It's all on the drive

Nice! Rifftrax was the only way I could manage to get through Twilight. I think I would've clawed my eyes out of my skull if I'd had to watch it without commentary.

The 5th Element...

...which as we all know is Boron.

so is Nick's group taking over yours or is that not related to the club at all and is functioning separately