Tourney Slightly unorthodox structure for first tournie - can it work? (1 Viewer)

[Nymor]

I had my first cash game last week which went really well and this Friday I'm hosting a tournie (8 handed) for a different set of people that I want to try and fit as many of my "would be great"s as possible.

1. I have chips with the following denoms - 5, 25, 100, 500, 1k, 5k & 25k - and want all 8 players to be able to handle all of them.
2. I don't want anyone knocked out too early.
3. £20 buy-in.
4. No more than 5 hours of play if possible. (We'll be starting around 8pm and would like to be wrapping up by ~2am, have a 30min dinner break and a 5min stretch your legs once an hour(ish)

My current line of thinking is this...

I can't see a structure that would use the 5s as actual chips (with 25ks as well) so I'm thinking they would act as my "bullets". Everyone gets 4 bullets at the start - £5 per bullet - and one is used straightaway to buy a starting stack (of 25k). The remaining bullets can be used as rebuys in the first 2 hours and once the first 2 hours are complete any remaining bullets are redeemed for chips - 25k for each bullet.

I'm hoping that would allow everyone to get at least 2 hours of play with an average stack now of 100k.

That puts 800k of chips on the table so the tournie should end when the blinds get to ~40k if the 5% rule works.

Working with 20min levels and trying to avoid any big jumps in blinds I've got to this point...

Is that workable or terrible?

 

[TexRex]

Workable for a game where playing time is 5-6 hours. My goal was for the average player to get to play at least 2 hours. This structure should easily keep 90% of the players in for 2 hours.

 

[Nymor]

As well everyone getting at least 2 hours play I also wanted the prize pool to be fixed and of a decent size.

We played on Friday and it worked out pretty well.

I did change it slightly so I had 5 bullets (of 20k) instead of 4 (of 25k) and you could fire a second bullet at the 1 hour break and could rebuy in the 2nd hour if you went below 20k rather than needing to be at 0. This meant eveyone had reasonable stacks to play with until the dinner break.

Everyone took the top up at the 1 hour mark and everyone still had 3 bullets to cash in at the 2 hour mark.

I think we lost our first player after 3 hours and it finished during the 20/40k level. I came 2nd

The structure worked for it's purpose so may use it again with a tweak or two.

 

[Nymor]

I did the above again and while it worked as intended we still had 7 players in when total bb count was ~30 - shortest stacks kept winning - and then carnage as players then dropped like flies.

I'm trying to get a regular mixed schedule going so aiming for something like Fri/Sun one week and then Sat the next - Fri being NLHE tournie, Sun a PLO deep stack tournie and the Sat circus cash.

No game this Fri but a PLO deep stack tournie on Sunday. Same players that play the circus cash game but all are keen to have a fixed cost Sunday afternoon chill game, to finish up by 10/11pm, and just some normal 4 card PLO with no funny business. Going with the same bullets/reload setup as above but stretching it out to ~7 hours.

Going with this at the moment ...

With the average stack not going below 100bb until the 3 hour mark there should be plenty of play for everyone.

 

[Nymor]

Dear diary

Deep stack PLO tournie went really well and everyone loved the structure and it's a game that is definitely getting added to the regular schedule - every 2/3 weeks.

Seemed nearly everyone was delayed so we started 30+mins late once we had six players. The last two arrived some 30 mins after that but we didn't deal to their stacks/blind them out as we were introducing shuffling behind for the first time and including them just seemed a level of complication we didn't need. The stacks were so deep that it didn't make any material difference.

Shuffling behind was awesome - really speeded up the game and kept everything moving along. If you're thinking about doing it go for it you won't regret it.

As mentioned before this group either plays NLHE tournie (pub league) or Circus cash with nothing in between - and while the circus has a good chunk of it's games based on PLO there's always a twist, 5/6 card - dbl board - hi/lo etc, and extremely rarely just basic 4 card single board so all were agreed that it was so good just to play straightforward PLO.

Structure/blind levels were spot on and everyone had between 1 & 3 bullets at the 2 hour mark and all made it to 3 hours .... just. Lost our first player around then and then at a rate that saw remaining players have playable stacks most of the time. Finished, as hoped for, in the 20/40K (20BBs) level.

The two most experinced PLO players came 1st & 3rd with me squeezed in between . Pretty happy with that but did have the chip lead heads-up at one point so maybe should have done better.

The idea of a Sunday game is to start early so we can wrap up by 11pm but as it's a Bank Holiday Monday today we did do a few hours of cash afterwards ... but just this once

 

[Nine_high]

Glad to read this! I just got my cards mold tourney set and I want to do a deep stack PLO tournament. I was debating how deep to start it. I went with T100 base and was thinking somewhere between 50k-100k to start (250-500 bb) with plain vanilla rebuys for the first few levels.

My goal is to keep people in and for cheap so they can learn to play PLO without torching a bunch of money on the cash game.