Poker

Online poker can be found everywhere today. Many online uk casinos now offer online poker for gamblers who are lazy to visit land-based casinos.

Setting Blinds (Minimum Bets) in a Poker Tournament

When starting with a 1000 starting stack we found small and big blinds of 25 and 50 work best. You can double this blind to 50 - 100 halfway through the first rebuy stage. The freezeout section can then start 100-200 blinds and at this time it's usually convenient for someone to change up the smaller denomination chips as it will help speed up the gameplay, otherwise some poker players might take a frustratingly long time counting the betting chips required to call a bet.

At the start of the freeze out section you should be able to tell how many chips are in play. You can then plan your blind increases so that by your intended finish time 10% of the chips in play is the value of the big blind. So for example say you have 200,000 chips in play. The big blind need to be in the region of 20,000 and you should be close to the final two players at this point. With a gradual increase in blinds players will naturally get knocked out as they are forced to go 'all in' - bet all their remaining chips. When players are eliminated you can condense the number of tables by moving players on the emptiest table to other tables, assuming you have more tables.

The easiest way to work out your blinds is to work backwards until you get to a number below the starting big blind. Starting with 20,000 half it to 10,000 and again to 5000 to 2500 to 1250 to 625 to 312 but since you working with chips with a minimum value of 100 you need to round up or down. Working forward assuming you start with 200 big blind at the start of freeze out then you could go 400 – 600 – 1000 - 2000 - 4000 - 8000 - 15000 or 400 - 800 - 1500 - 3000 - 5000 - 10000 - 20000. In the latter case there are 8 different blinds needed and if you have 2 hours to finish then 120 minutes divided by 8 is 15 minutes per blind increase. You can vary a little to suit chip values as shown above. I also try to get to using 500 chips as soon as possible so 100s can be removed maybe at a break.

At the end of tournament you’ll have a winner and usually they win a prize. From your fundraising receipts you should first remove your actual expenses and then perhaps split the surplus 50 – 50 for your charity and winners prize money. You can then allocate the prize money to as many places as you like but usually not more than the number of players you seated at the final table and perhaps not less than 3. Of course if this is all too much then you can get an experienced tournament director to be your completely neutral referee and teach you how to do your first poker tournament.