[Manu]

Hi everyone,
Been on this board for a while just reading and admiring your chips. Now I need an opinion of you experts about my tourney structure/custom chips needed.

My name is Manu, I'm 21 years old and live in Upper Bavaria, Germany. I play poker for about 5 years, which is a very frustrating hobby because poker, especially cash games are strictly forbidden in Germany. Nevertheless I received a letter from the local town hall allowing me to run public poker tourneys even though with a lot of restrictions. The most important is that I'm not allowed to pay out the buy-ins to the winners, I have to provide no-money prices.

With the first poker tourneys broadcasted in German television, the public interest is constantly rising but most of the people still think of maverick-like 5-card draw when they think of poker. So I will take the given chance running tourneys to show the people what poker is like. Of course this will be a little harder to do with absolute newbies on the tables all the time.

Keeping that in mind I worked out a tourney structure. Hope you guys could help me to find eventually problems or general improvements.

I'm planning to run a NL Texas Hold'em Tourney for about 30 players. Though one table is enough investment at first, I would play three tables one by one, each one playing down to three players and seat these nine the final table. With blind levels set to last every qualifying table 2 hours und the final table 3 hours this would fit quite well for a whole evening.

I'm thinking about a 10€ T1000 with unlimited 5€ Rebuys until a certain blind level. First, second and third players will receive no-money prices and after paying the location I can spend the rest on further tables and custom chips.

At the moment I only own a trashy 500 dice composite set which will do the first couple of test runs. But I definitely need real chips.

I've been calculating a long time and that’s my result.

700 chips total:
200 red 5
200 green 25
200 black 100
80 purple 500
20 orange 1000 (backup)

With this set I could give every player on a 10 player table 20/16/5 (R/G/B) and have still enough chips to give out the rebuys in blacks and to color up without problems. Every player on the final table would have about 5000 in average (10players + ca. 5 rebuys(?), 3 players advancing) which I could cover with 20/15/6 (G/B/P). Even if I color up green I would be far from needing orange chips.

With two tables real multitable I could still give every player the minimum of 10/10/7 (R/G/B) although color ups would become a little issue.

And finally. Here is my (at the moment) best loved mockup. The inlay is just a sketch. A design freak friend of mine will do the artwork once we agreed on a name.

http://www.drsnet.de/~manu/Nutschips1.jpg
http://www.drsnet.de/~manu/Nutschips2.jpg

Looking forward to your answers and thank you for reading all the text

[tomb1]

Willkommen Manu. Ihr Englisch ist sehr gut, besser als mein Deutscher.

If you have only one table but have 30 players, most of the people in the room will have nothing to do while only a few are playing. That could be very boring to them. I would not like to stand around for 4-5 hours waiting for the final table. I would suggest you use temporary tables or something else so you can get all 30 players playing at the same time.

But that would mean you need more chips for 30 people simultaneously.

And if you are going to have multiple rebuys with new players, you could expect many rebuys so you probably need more chips for this also. You might consider no rebuys -- they can be fun but they definitely make the tournament much longer.

With a T€1000 starting stack, if you provide 20/16/5 chips that makes you buy more chips than you need. If you changed to having fewer of the €5 chips and more of the €25s, you would use the smaller chips just for blinds and small bets, and the €25s would be used for most of the betting. You might consider this starting stack:
5 x €5
15 x €25
6 x €100
Total 26 chips per player. You would only need <300 chips for each 10 players (50/160/60/20), but many more for rebuys.

When you get to the final table, you should let each player take all his chips with him. That means you need enough chips for at least T€30.000 (and maybe a lot more for rebuys) on the table at the same time, This is where you would need your €500 and €1000 chips. And you should start with a higher blind structure at the final table.

Just some of my thoughts, my zwei pfennigs worth.

[bolgenmod]

Manu --

Welcome to the board! I don't run tournaments, so I can't give you advice about your tournament. And I would say that Tomb1's advice is always to be trusted (any man who uses the Packers' helmet (especially one with a pink hat) as an avatar MUST be correct!).

But I would suggest that you would get better advice if you post your question in a more appropriate forum, since your main question is not really about custom chips. I'd repost this in the Tournament Structure forum which is a sub-forum under Home Game Advice. I'm sure you'll get many more replies if you post it there!

I hope you aren't offended that I give this advice: many new posters don't really put their posts in an appropriate place.

[Manu]

You're right. Could someone please move the thread to the tourney structure forum

Thank you for your fast replies.

Of course 30 (or more) player real multitable is the perfect solution for a poker tourney. But for me it's not an option to start with. I would need a large number of chips, at least three tables and the same number of dealers plus someone experienced enough to manage the tourney. So I'm looking for an option to start simple and gain experience (and money) to get there in a few months.

Furthermore the locations which showed interest in such events so far are mainly bowling and billiard centers. I think they like the idea because poker would bring many people in their centers and make them stay there a long time especially when they have to wait for the final table.

It's very important that my main intention is to show the people the fascination of the game rather then exploit them. There is a German poker association which does the exploiting part very well. There the people pay a lot of money for not even a good time.

That's why I would like to provide rebuys. I don't want a first time player who was drawing dead all-in to stand up and say "I'm not lucky enough, I never gonna play poker again". And with a cheap buy-in of 10€ (about $12) many people would give it a try and don't have to stand up just when they start to like it. Besides the rebuys increase the money that I can invest in the improvement of the tourneys. And with short blind levels the rebuys wouldn’t matter that much.

The amount of chips is a similar topic. The people should experience poker and should have fun stacking and counting there chips and win big pots. As someone else on this board wrote: “big stacks are fun”

I played a very bad organized tourney in Munich a few months ago where everyone got a stack of 10x10, 10x20 and 7x100. The effect was that the dealer was busier making change than dealing. And if you play a very fast tourney this can be really annoying.

I hope you can see my point. I’m starting out of nothing. I can’t just rent 3 tables and pay 3 people who deal home games twice a week. There’s absolute no base for poker here…