Hi,

This is my first post on here. I joined because I have a question I can't find an answer to.

My friends and I want to start playing poker together but were unsure how to distribute the chips we have, or what blind structure to have. (A common question on here, I know, but none that apply to this situation as far as I can see).

We don't play with any real money stakes and we want to keep it as simple as possible, so we don't want any buy-ins or rebuys or antes etc.

I have a set of 500 numbered chips as follows:
175 x T100
150 x T500
125 x T1000
50 x T5000

How should I distribute these chips and what should the starting blinds be?

Thanks for any help you can provide.
~ Dave

How long do you plan the game to last?

Well one possibility that would support up to 9 players is starting stacks of 40,000:
15 x t100
15 x t500
11 x t1,000
4 x t5,000

30 minute levels:

L1 100/200
L2 200/400
L3 400/800
L4 700/1400

Break, exchange t100 and t500 chips for t1,000 and t5,000 chips, rounding as required

L5 1k/2k
L6 2K/4K
L7 3k/6k
L8 5k/10k

Break, from here on in, SB goes up by 5/k per level

L9 10K/20k
L10 15K/30k
L11 20k/40k
L12 25k/50k
L13 30k/60k
L14 35k/70k
...

Generally, this should provide about a 5 hour game.

Thank you DoTheMath for helping me out

If I only wanted a 2.5ish hour game could I change the level time to 15 minutes? Or is it more complicated than that?

Yes, that would be a simple way to do it. 2.5 hours is a pretty fast tournament.

A problem with such an approach, however, is that at an 8 player, self-dealt table, you will very often not go a whole orbit before the blinds go up, which can be unfair to those players that don't pay the lower blind level.

Another possible approach would be to replace levels 3 and 4 with a single 500/1000 level, and levels 7 and 8 with a single 400/800 level,and reduce level times to 20 minutes.

You might find a tool like PokerSoup helpful

Be aware that your chip set may not be ideally structured. Sets with denominations of {t25, t100, t500 and t2000 or t2500} or {t100, t500, t2500, T100,000} or even {t1, t5, t25, t100} might be more useful. Denominations that are 2x the next lower denomination are less useful than denominations that are 4x or 5x the lower denomination. My suggested structure takes into account the chips you have.

A rule of thumb I've heard is to have the blinds get to the stage where there's 20bb in play when you need to finish, which worked well for us when we ran a one off larger tourney in my local (finished within 5 minutes of when we intended), so if you want a 2.5 hour game, start with 15k and go 100/200, 200/400, 300/600, 400/800, 600/1200, chip up, 1k/2k, 1500/3k, 2k/4k, 2500/5k then 3k/6k on a 15 minute clock. If it runs a bit quick in the mid stages, bin the 2.5/5k and add 800/1600 instead next time you run it