[wijwij]

This past weekend I did a deepstack tournament with 8 players using a T1600 buy-in. I wanted something that would take about 4 hours and reward skillful play. It worked out well.

Starting stacks: A stairstep pattern of 10, 8, 6, 4, 2 chips.

10 x (T1) = T10
8 x (T5) = T40
6 x (T25) = T150
4 x (T100) = T400
2 x (T500) = T1000

30 chips = T1600

We allowed rebuys during the first two hours. (Two people busted and rebought.) Then an optional add-on for half price. (All eight players took the add-on.)

Blinds used a "1-2-3" pattern, with 20-minute blinds, coloring up every hour.

1-2, 2-4, 3-6, color up white
5-10, 10-20, 15-30, color up red
25-50, 50-100, 75-150, color up green
100-200, 200-400, 300-600, color up black
500-1000

The tournament ended at level 13 after four hours, 15 minutes.

Here is a web page showing the immense M values of this tourney. We were well in the "green" zone for the first 3.5 hours.

http://world.std.com/~wij/jpgs/deepstack-070224.html

The average M at each level was:

533, 266, 200, 120, 60, 44, 55 (after add-ons), 32, 25, 24, 16, 10, 6.

I felt the resulting tourney encouraged good play and would try this structure again. Plus, it gets lots of colors of chips into play. So if you have a set with 1, 5, 25, 100, 500 values, give it a try.

[BCR_9er]

I noticed you did a T1,600 insted of T1,500. Was this for the convenience of distributing chips?

[jbones]

With T1500, he'd have to give out 16 more 100's, or cut out 100's entirely, which I'm guessing would make betting quite a hassle.

[wijwij]

The strange starting amount of T1600 was purely the effect of the desire to have the "stairstep" stacks of 10, 8, 6, 4, 2 chips. Easy to count out and easy for people to verify visually.

Other "stairstep" stacks ended up with even stranger final totals, so I settled on that. (Note, however, that a T2400 can be done using a 15, 12, 9, 6, 3 pattern.)

It wasn't too hard to make the rebuys and add-ons equal to T1600. For the early rebuys I used (8 green + 9 black + 1 purple) and for the add-ons I just used (6 black + 2 purple) or (1 black and 3 purple).

Essentially the tourney plays like a T200 at the beginning, with people using their white (T1), red (T5), and green (T25) chips, and not really delving into their black and purples.

After the first color up, the tourney plays like a T600 with people using their red (T5), green (T25) and black (T100) chips.

After the second color up, which was also the end of rebuys, the tourney plays like a full T1600, with people using green (T25), black (T100), and purple (T500) chips.

If the tourney had many more rebuys, I would likely add a ND blue chip as T2500 into play. I could introduce those later to buy up purples and blacks from the successful players as needed for rebuys or add-ons.

[Obviously, in a T2500 tournament or T5000 tournament, such a chip can be easily used to give out rebuys. That was the only minor drawback of the T1600 starting stack -- that a rebuy couldn't be made with a single kind of high society chip.]

One other advantage of the 10, 8, 6, 4, 2 stairstep arrangement is that the color-ups of the white, red, and green chips were all clean. The 10 whites per person color up to exactly 2 reds; the total of 2 + 8 reds per person color up exactly to 2 greens; the total of 2 + 6 greens per person color up exactly to 2 blacks. So, the chip races gave out an exact integer amount of the next higher chip. In other words, none of those color-ups changed the total number of chips in play.

Only the color-up of the blacks at the end to purples was not clean in this way, because the number of black chips handed out (in original stacks, rebuys, add-ons, etc.) was not a multiple of 5.