Help Your Home Game Not To Suck

READ MORE: Home Game, Poker

There’s a home game around town here with a group of guys who play a tournament once a week. Great guys, terrible tournament. It’s not for a lack of talent at the table - in fact, most of these guys are pretty solid players. It’s that they start the game at 9PM on a weeknight, and want to be wrapping it up within a half an hour of midnight. With fifteen to twenty players on a regular basis, they adopt what can be generously called an “aggressive” blind structure to accelerate the game. Turns the tournament from a poker game into a lottery within the first hour. So what’s an agreeable blind structure? Otis from Up For Poker muses on the topic:

So, given that we know the casinos have little interest in tournaments outside of the cash game lure and the minute amount of juice they make, we can easily figure out what kind of structure is best for the casino. Fast. Speedy Gonzalez fast.

What is fast? Any live tournament with blind levels less than 30 minutes is too fast. Simple as that.

Many of the low buy-in tourneys in cardrooms these days have 20 minute levels. Some get as ugly as doing 15 minute levels. Twenty minutes is rough. Fifteen minutes is an insult to your intelligence.

If this sounds like your home game, maybe you should re-think your structure, and either budget more time for your tournament or mix in a cash game so people can actually play “poker” instead of “push your chips in with any Ace after 90 minutes.”

Tournament Structures Good and Bad [Up For Poker]