Home tourney - Part 1

Hosting a home poker tourney

One of the most exciting ways of introducing friends to the game of poker is by hosting your own poker tourney. The relaxed atmosphere of a home tourney makes it easy for a newcomer to become accustomed to the game. It is a medium through which poker players of all skills can thoroughly enjoy the game.

When hosting a tourney for the first time, many people don't know where to begin and often leave out some of the fundamental things. All of this knowledge does come with time and experience; however it often helps when you have someone to show you the ropes. This is why we have compiled this guide to hosting home tourneys for you. We will show you everything you need to know to make your first tourney a highly successful one.

So where exactly do we start? Well firstly there are a few options to consider. You will have to decide what the format of the tourney will be. Cash game or tourney; Texas hold'em, Omaha or stud?; no-limit, pot limit or limit? Since there is huge variety in poker you should decide this beforehand and make sure that all of the players are familiar with this format. This article deals with home tourneys so we won't elaborate on the hosting of a cash game.

Once you've make your decisions it's time to think about the tourney particulars. This includes things such as the buy-in amount, whether re-buys are allowed and the duration of the tourney. It can be quite tricky to decide on the buy-in amount as you have to take numerous factors into account. For instance if your buy-in is too high then few players will participate, however if the buy-in is tiny it becomes meaningless and the game becomes less enjoyable.

Decide on how serious/intense you want the tourney to be. If this is simply a laid back Friday night game then choose an amount that all players will be able to lose and still enjoy themselves. However if all of the players are serious poker players then make sure that the prize money is worth it. If you are new to the world of poker tourney, then make sure that the buy-in is small enough that you won't be upset if you lose.

An innovative way of increasing the tourney purse without increasing the buy-in is to set a re-buy period. This is where, for a specified time, a player can buy some more chips if he gets knocked out of the tourney. In this way the tourney becomes more lucrative for the higher skilled players, especially if there are some "loose cannons" around. Keep in mind though that a re-buy period effectively lengthens the tourney's duration.

Which brings us to the next most important variable: for how long should the tourney last? Unless you're the owner of a casino and can host a tourney that lasts a few days, the tourney will have to end within a certain timeframe. This becomes almost as important as the buy-in amount since most players won't appreciate it if they have to play into the early hours of the next day to decide a winner.

The duration is effectively managed by deciding on a blind structure and on blind periods that will ensure a winner is decided within a predetermined time. Other important things to consider is the payout structure and the starting stack sizes. Further information on this and in particular the setting of blind structures will be given in a later section.

In the next part of this instructional series we will look at some of the essentials that are required to host a successful tourney.