So me and 5 other guys I play a little weekly home game with are putting together a little venture. We're doing a point system race in a monthly tourney with the cash going towards buying the winner a seat in a small circuit event in Feb. However, since I haven't put together a tourney in years I'm kinda floundering with putting together a decent structure. Ideally we'd like more play in the early stages with the tourney being over in 4-5 hours. I'm thinking something like 3-5k starting stacks with longer levels for the first few.

Salient details:
6 handed
4-5 hrs long
would like decent stack to level length/starting blinds ratio for more play early.


Anybody got a good format I could use?

check this thing out. it's pretty sweet to use for home tournies and it's free.

home tourny organizer

Well, that looks good for actually running the tourney, but I'm looking more for suggestions on starting stacks, level duration, and blind structures that accomodate a specific overall tourney duration without feeling like a fold/shove fest from level 4 or so.

How many different chip values do you want to have?

When i run little tourneys at my place, it goes something like this:

30 min levels, 10000 starting chips

25/50
50/100
(75/150)
100/200
(150/300)
200/400
300/600
500/1000

And that should probably be enough. Keep in mind that this is a relatively slow structure, so you can tweak it by either adding/removing the 75/150 and 150/300 levels or by adjusting the round times. After two hours, blinds will be at 200/400, and assuming everyone has equal stacks, thats 25 BB's a piece, plenty of room to maneuver without feeling like you have to shove.

I don't claim to be a structure expert, but this does nicely for me. Good luck!

I do something very similar, however with 2 to 3 times as many players though.

$20 buy in =3000 chips
$20 rebuys 1st 3 levels (3k chips)
$20 add on at end of level 3 (3k chips)

BLINDS:
25-50 30mins
50-100 30mins
100-200 30mins

200-400 25mins
300-600 25mins
400-600 25mins
500-1000 25mins
600-1200 20mins
800-1600 20mins
1k -2k 20mins
1500-3k 20mins
2k-4k 20mins
3k-6k 20mins
4k-8k 20mins
5k 10k 15mins all levels after this double, however it rarely reaches this far

Avg total chips in play is usually between 85k - 100k depending on how many show up (avg 12-14)

Usually over in 5 - 6 hours

Dont know if this helps but it works great for us. 1st each night is 4+bills.

Luckily there's only 6 of us, so it's more of short handed sng than a mtt, which is nice because we can do a rebuy tourney. So 'tis a short handed sng with rebuys. I came up with fairly decent structure with rebuys for the first two hours. I was only able to do this because eventhough it's a rebuy everyone still plays fairly conservatively (exact opposite of DN's approach basically) and the rebuys are more like bad beat remedy than get it in and gamboooool. I think on the first run we had something like 9 or 10 buy ins which was pretty much what I figured we'd have and the blinds hit just about perfectly, I may slightly tweak the antes though. Plenty of play early and even at the end stage it's not necessarily a shove fest.

Thanks for the suggestions.