How to Host Home Poker Tournaments

If you are planning to run home poker tournaments, here are a couple of things to keep in mind to make them enjoyable and successful.

How to Handle Chips

In home poker tournaments, it is wise to keep away chips that would not be used to avoid getting them into the tournament inappropriately. Since your chips have higher value during games than their actual amount, you want to avoid cases where a participant could get hold of unpaid chips then cash them out at the end.

Likewise,it is better to avoid using generic chips. This is so you could avoid getting tricked by any participant who would buy, for example, chips worth $0.10 each, use them into the game, then cash out for much higher value each.

How to Seat Players

At home poker tournaments where there are no designated poker tables, you may need to limit players to about 4 -6 per table. If there are more players, you need to distribute evenly between tables.

How to Draw Seats

There are two common methods to do this - draw cards or lottery. If this would be done by lottery, you need to write down seat numbers on pieces of paper and let participants pick them. You have the option to distribute chip stacks at this point, too.

In draw cards, use cards Ace (considered as 1) to 10. The cards stand for seat numbers. If there are two or more tables, the suits can represent the table number as well. Have each player pick out a card.

How to Draw for the Button

The easiest and most widely used way to do this is to deal a card to every participant. Whoever gets the highest gets the button. Should there be a tie, a formal poker game resolves this by the order of suits. If players are not familiar with the suits'proper order, a second option is to deal another card to the players who got the highest cards.

How to Deal with Late Players

As a rule, any player who paid in advance to get into the game has the right to have his blinds posted and have his stack of chips at a table. He can join at any point provided he has remaining chips.

For other late comers, the host has the discretion. So you may either let a late comer buy into the game and get a stack equal to theamount blinded-down or let him post all his missed blinds since the start of the tourney.

When and How to Move Players

As a rule, when the number of players between tables differ by more than 1, a player must transfer from the larger table to the other table to have an even distribution among participants. The person on the Big Blind is the one who should transfer.