Some good friendly banter going on here ... like it!! I usually take things in a different direction, so I will. I'm going to try and keep it short and see what the masses respond.

1) You don't have 'large' starting stacks when you are down to 50bb 15 minutes into a tournament.

2) Not sure when your rebuy period ends, but I think it's 'fine' and somewhat normal to receive 25bb (Level 4). But depending on what your add-on is set at I think it's hardly worth it to come into Level 5 after break with only 12.5bb. That is a shove/fold stack, which is nice for action but not so 'valuable' for the Player (other than they get to stick around for an extra orbit or two).

3) With only 15 minutes levels Players may only see the BB once a Level with this action driven format where each hand may take some time ... and then if you get 'any' tanking ...

You did state that this was 'for fun' and the influx of additional chips will help the tournament last longer for sure. The re-buys add to the prize pool and multiple bust-outs probably add to the fun for most Players ... But the tournament 'purest' will want a little more 'playability' out of a starting stack. GL

You just give the last two players 10bb each in the last level and combine that with the amount of chips they have and work your way back. So if the last level is 1000/2000, reduce that by about 30% each level and do that until you have spent 4 hours. If that means the starting blinds are slightly higher then so be it. Also if you want to make really big skips, do it early on because it is much better for the structure to go from 25/50 to 50/100 than it is to go from 200/400 to 400/800. In the middle stages you don't want everyone to bust at the same time because you doubled the blinds and all of the sudden everybody is in shoving mode. If the average stack goes from 100bb to 50bb it isn't that much of a problem.

Also you can add accelerated levels in the end of the tournament. Blinds going up fast isn't as much of a problem 4-handed as it is with a full table because hands play faster and ranges are wider anyways.

Ok with that being said how does this look......

5k starting stacks
15 minute blinds

25/50
50/100
100/200
200/400
Break and remove 25's
400/800
500/1000
600/1200
700/1400
800/1600
900/1800
Remove 100's
1k/2k
2k/4k
4k/8k
5k/10k
10k/20k

300/600 ??? GL

Yeah I could put that in too

I mean this is super slow compared to the rest. If you simply start at 20k and divide by 1.5 every level you get something close to this:

I really like the look of that! I reckon I'll go with your suggestion then, cheers!!!

Ok so here's the final structure


25/50
50/100
100/200
150/300
Break and remove 25's end of rebuy and top up
200/400
300/600
400/800
600/1200
800/1600
1200/2400
Remove 100's
2k/4k
3k/6k
4k/8k
6k/12k
10k/20k

Thanks everyone for your input it's been much appreciated

So the structure ran very smoothly and the tourney finished just after the 4h mark with 14 players in, bonus I actually won it!!!

rigged.

Yeah that's rigged, we're going to have to report you to the poker police. Sir do you have your nash chart and tournament ticket for me please?

There were actually joking calls of it being rigged as I dealt on one table and the other dealer on the other table got to heads up lol