[seymour]

One of my friends is a teacher (actually, a whole bunch of them are teachers or nurses, weird stuff) and they play poker tournaments where he works every week with the other staff.

Except, it's more like a lottery.

They start with 100 in chips, spread out among denoms of: 1, 2, 5, 10, 20. That's just wacky.

And then the blinds go up every 15 minutes (10 player games, I think) something like this: 1/2, 2/5, 5/10, 20/40, 40/80. He told me that the longest game went around 1h 20m.

He says it gets people to move quickly, but that's just insane. There doesn't seem like there would be a hell of a lot of actual poker involved Sort of explains some of his play when he's playing in our T10000 games with a more civilized structure and denom breakdown (he's not really a bad player but he does make some weird plays at times).

Also, there's a local billiards place that holds tournaments pretty much every night. But I don't think I'll ever play there. Well, maybe once or twice, but definitely not regularly. They use regular dice chips, and Bicycles that they reuse, and reuse, and reuse, and reuse... it's amazing that they can even be dealt at this point. All warped and dirty and marked. Their blinds go up quick after so many minutes AND when a played busts out. I probably did mention this game around here somewhere previously, but the blinds just go up way too fast relative to the stacks. Another crapshoot. Amazingly, the crappy chips are the least of my problems with that game

Anyone else have some crazy tournament structures they've played in?

[MTUCache]

My monthly game is pretty rediculous at the moment, as most of the guys have never hosted a tournament before, or even played in a structured game.

Because he feels like the newer/drunker players will be too easily confused, the host has ruled that ALL chips are worth 1. No denoms. So, because of the limited number of chips, and the variable crowd (between 15-25), we initially started off each tournament with 40 chips each. Blinds start at 1/2, and go up 1/2 each every 20 minutes (2/4, 3/6, 4/8, etc).

Starting out with 20xBB does not make me happy... but having only 10xBB after 20 minutes, when I have only seen two flops, because everyone plays so freaking slow, makes me even less happy. Playing conservatively simply isn't even an option. You're forced to see the flop with just about any two face cards, any suited cards, or any ace, and if you hit the flop, you're going to get at least 1/2 of your chips in the pot. One or two bad beats, or mis-reads later, and you're out of the tournament.... which is pretty frustrating when you're playing with the typical group of calling-stations and luckboxes.

The cash games we play afterwards aren't much better. They insist on playing $.5/$1 blinds (usually two tables of six, trimmed down to one full ring after a couple hours). Now, usual thinking would suggest that the minimum buy-in for a $.5/$1 game would be $40, and the maximum would be $100... but NO!!! If you buy-in for more than $20, they look at you all funny, like you're trying to push them around or something. They'd much rather just play community flops and try to quadruple-up whenever they manage to chase down a flush.

Slowly, over several months, I've worn them down... a little bit anyway. It took some convincing (from me and another guy), to get them to increase the starting stacks to 60 chips. I'm not going to be happy until they're at least over 100, but to start doing that we'll have to use at least two different values of chips, which everyone is still very hesitant to do.

I think I may also have them talked into decreasing the stakes of the cash game to $.25/$.50, but again it's dependant on how many people are playing and how many chips they can scrape together.

I'm going to be SO happy when I get into my new neighborhood later this year and start up my own game, with my own chips, and with my own house rules. It's about time somebody's tournament lasted longer than 2.5 hours around these parts. (I'm already planning on starting a deepstack, 5-6 hour tournament, hopefully once per month, in addition to the standard T1000 4 hour tournament.)