[TommyW]

Well, I played in a $50 buy in tournament as a fundraiser for a local high school. I guess my expectations were a little high for the running of the tournament, but I was very dissapointed in the way it was run. First off, they were using interlocking chips. Secondly, they had no dealers. Lastly, the blinds were brutal. So we started off with like 490 in chips, with like 7 different colored chips. The blinds were 1-2 to start then went to 2-5, 5-10, 10-20, 20-50, 50-100, 100-200, 200-500, 500-1000, and that is when I was knocked out. There was 300 people at this event and there was very few good players and a lot of very, very bad players (just did it for the local high school). IMO, this was the worst run tournament I have ever played in. It might be me, but charity or not,if you are going to have a 300 person tournament, you have to have dealers run the games. When you have someone that doesn't know how to deal, let alone play, it makes the night very long.

[Devilboy]

What do you mean 'Interlocking' chips? How many chips did you start with?

I agree that for tourneys you need dealers, although they should probably just say to each table that the person with the most experience should deal. Otherwise they have to pay for dealers - and 30 of those are quite expensive.

Those blinds are insane... How long were the levels? How long did the whole thing last?

[T-Bone]

He means Bicycle-style chips. The Red, White and Blue super crappy ones.

[TommyW]

Yeah, the chips were the super crappy bicycle style chips that interlocked with each other.

[TommyW]

We started with like 490 in chips, like 6-7 different colors. we had a $1, $2, $5, $10, $20, $50, $100, $200, $500, and so on.

[Spaceman Spiff]

I played in a game once that sounded very similar to your experience. Notice I said ONCE!

Same deal, $50 buy-in and it was a real goofy blinds schedule. We had super awesome dice chips as well starting with 5 colors. On top of that, of course no dealers, but to make it worse, only one deck of cards per table and since it was "too confusing" there were no burn cards.

Between the fact that anyone could smuggle in extra dice chips and the shuffle your own deal and no burn cards leaving it wide open to anyone who could even halfway work a deck, it was just way too open to shadiness for me. Too bad because there were some really bad players there.

I guess the take home message is, if at all possible, find out the blinds schedule and setup from the TD before trying out a new game.

[Captn_All_In]

You sure your not from PA?? Because I played in a game that was exactly the same as this!!! EXACTLY!!!

Originally Posted by Spaceman Spiff

I played in a game once that sounded very similar to your experience. Notice I said ONCE!

Same deal, $50 buy-in and it was a real goofy blinds schedule. We had super awesome dice chips as well starting with 5 colors. On top of that, of course no dealers, but to make it worse, only one deck of cards per table and since it was "too confusing" there were no burn cards.

Between the fact that anyone could smuggle in extra dice chips and the shuffle your own deal and no burn cards leaving it wide open to anyone who could even halfway work a deck, it was just way too open to shadiness for me. Too bad because there were some really bad players there.

I guess the take home message is, if at all possible, find out the blinds schedule and setup from the TD before trying out a new game.

[seymour]

Originally Posted by Spaceman Spiff

I played in a game once that sounded very similar to your experience. Notice I said ONCE!

Same deal, $50 buy-in and it was a real goofy blinds schedule. We had super awesome dice chips as well starting with 5 colors. On top of that, of course no dealers, but to make it worse, only one deck of cards per table and since it was "too confusing" there were no burn cards.

Between the fact that anyone could smuggle in extra dice chips and the shuffle your own deal and no burn cards leaving it wide open to anyone who could even halfway work a deck, it was just way too open to shadiness for me. Too bad because there were some really bad players there.

I guess the take home message is, if at all possible, find out the blinds schedule and setup from the TD before trying out a new game.

Similar games run here pretty much daily that are like that, from what I hear. Dice chips, starting with 16 chips totalling just over 16000 (weird number), paper cards that have been around a while, blinds going up every X minutes (not sure, 10 or 15 minutes I guess) AND when a player gets knocked out, and the blinds going up by crazy amounts each time.

A lot of bad players there, but I don't think I could play in a tournament like that. Just too many bad things about it. And one of the guys at work don't understand my problems with it, especially the dice chips (but they're "nice chips"!) and paper card security issues.

[Devilboy]

Last week on Monday night I played in an Australian Poker League game at a local pub. Horrible organisation. The 5 of us decided never to go again.

- The game was supposed to start at 7:30 but only actaully started around 9:00. The reason? They didn't bother to set up the tables and starting stacks and they had no decent way to assign seats to players - so they read out the names one by one taking about 30 mins to seat everyone. Then they had some useless speach about what the APL was and blah blah blah blah.

- They only started us on $1000 in chips, with the blinds at $25 / $50. Each player only got 16 chips (8 x $25 and 8 x $100)

- The chips were horrible and could not even stack 5 high.

- They had 200 players, but NOT A SINGLE $500 chip! In the end they had so many $100 chips on the tables that play slowed to a crawl.

- Blinds went up arbitrarily at random intervals. Around 10:30 the organisers decided they wanted to go home and started doubling the blinds every 3 mins - sometimes even skipping 3 levels.

- At one point the average chip stack was 10,000 - all in black. I suggested they re-assign the green to $1,000 and colour-up some bulk, but they said 'no we can't do that'. Um... yes... you can!

- They refused to race-off the odd green chips. This resulted in lots of all-ins with odd chips that could not be called since the other player in the hand didn't have any greens.

Worst game ever.

[Brewster]

That sounds like the way our weekly tournaments were run until I discovered both Chiptalk and homepokertourny. No matter whos house we play in now, I am the default tournament director. The boys are even starting to understand things like racing off the final few chips when colouring up (that was a disaster the first time I tried it).