[wijwij]

I know this is an old thread, but I have recently been giving some thought to examining the percent change between blind levels, to avoid doubling.

The blind schedule I am thinking of using tries to keep the % increase in blinds as consistent as possible -- omitting any "double" jumps.

I use a "2-3-4-6" pattern for the number of chips in the small blind.
By repeating this pattern, the ratio of consecutive blinds is always either 3:2 or 4:3 or 5:3, that is, 50%, 33%, or 66% increases only.

Using this pattern with T1, T5, T25, T100, T500 chips yields the following pattern shown below.


Universal blind schedule.
(Percent of increase between blinds is shown in parentheses.)

2 4 ----- <-- start T200 here
3 6 (50%)
4 8 (33%)
6 12 (50%)
---- color up W ----
10 20 (66%) <-- start T1000 here
15 30 (50%)
20 40 (33%)
30 60 (50%)
---- color up R ----
50 100 (66%) <-- start T5000 here
75 150 (50%)
100 200 (33%) <-- start T10,000 here
150 300 (50%)
---- color up G ----
200 400 (33%)
300 600 (50%)
400 800 (33%)
600 1200 (50%)
---- color up K ----
1000 2000 (66%)
1500 3000 (50%)
2000 4000 (33%)
3000 6000 (50%)
---- color up P ----
5000 10000 etc.

The advantage of this schedule is it is easy to remember and can be used for many different tournaments. Just choose where to start based on your starting stack divided by 100. Tourneys with this structure reach a big blind equal to starting stack at level 10 or 11.

The above idea does need minor tweaking for certain chip counts. For example, to do a T2000 or T2500 that starts with T25 as the lowest chip and doesn't use T5 chips, you'd probably add a 25-25 and 25-50 level and then continue from the 50-100 point in the schedule above.

I have to give some thought to the question raised earlier in this thread, about the actual effect of increases in relation not only to starting stack size, but average stack size at various points in a tournament. If the average stack size changes in a non-linear way, then maybe a blind schedule could be devised to acknowledge this. Then again, when assessing a blind schedule, you might best be served by presuming you are looking at it from the perspective of the "average" player -- that is, a hypothetical player who always just happens to have an average stack at every point in the tourney. It would be interesting to look at a blind schedule from this point of view -- how does the actual increment of a blind level change (not the % change) compare to the average stack size?