I play in a monthly Texas Hold’em tournament. We’ve been playing for a while… certainly for longer than the current craze.
Anyway, I got the following email from the organizer last night:
Our current structure is to play limit at first (we begin at 6:30 PM), starting at 10/20 (with 5/10 blinds) and we increase the blinds every 45 minutes or so. We double, from 10/20 to 20/40, then 40/80. 80/160 and top out at 100/200 with no limit play.
That last step happens around 10:00 and there are usually fewer than 6 of the original 15-20 players left (the top 4 finish in the money).
The only money in the pot at the beginning of a hand is the blind bets; there are no antes.
If the goal is to finish on schedule, does the proposed rule change make sense? What are our options? Anyone know?
Sounds like fun. I wish I could get some live action going around here.
It seems to me that if you’re usually hitting the NL portion of the game around 10:00, then cutting that out and just taking the limits up is just going to prolong your game. If you’re still going up every 45 minutes, you’re only going to get one more limit increase before 11:00, and you won’t have people making all-in moves.
It seems to me that your options for speeding up the tournament are:
–Start with smaller stacks.
–Start at a higher limit.
–Increase the limits more often, or more steeply.
It would depend on which part of the tournament drags. If it’s the NL part, then raising the blinds every 20 minutes makes sense. You could say that after a certain time (say, 9:30) or after a certain number of people go out (say, down to the last 5), limits and/or blinds go up every fifteen minutes, no limit stage or not.
