Office poker tournament

At the office they are having a "winter olympics". The office administrator was looking for ideas for events.

I suggested we have a poker tournament as an olympic event. The administrator was enthusiastic and thought that was a pretty good idea. So I'm organizing the poker tournament.

I sent out the e-mail below describing the tournament. There are around 30 people in the office. I was hoping for around 5-10 would sign up for the tournament. Right now I know of around 7 people already who said they would play so that's pretty good. I can go up to 20 if there are more than 10 interested. In that case I'll run a two table tournament and combine into the final table when enough people get eliminated.

The tournament is on February 17. I'll give a report how it went.


- the poker game is no limit Texas hold'em
-- all skill and experience levels welcome to play
-- location is the mezzanine boardroom. Nice view with a good wide narrow table

- tournament structure
-- each player gets a starting stack of 30 chips
-- I know that's not a whole lot, but we want to keep things moving
-- might go with 40 depending how many players there are
-- standard rules around chip stacks: once you lose all of your stack you are out of the tournament, there is no re-buy or add ons, chips are non transferable between players
-- the minimum bet is always the big blind

- stakes
-- the tournament winner will get the "SPRT bracelet"
-- this is our version of the WSOP bracelet
-- sorry, no stacks of $100 bills


The office administrator is a keener. I suggested I'd go over to Zellers and get a cheap trinket bracelet for around $5-$10 with petty cash. Instead she asked me for a picture of the WSOP bracelet. I sent her the link. She said she'd get an engraved plate to put on a bracelet to make a nice prize.


- blinds
-- the blinds will go up on a 10 minute timer
-- blinds will go according to this schedule
1/2, 2/4, 3/6, 4/8
then 6/12, 8/16, 10/20,
then 15/30, 20/40, ...
-- no ante

- blinds at heads up
-- when there are only two players left, the blinds schedule above will be replaced by this schedule
-- the timer interval will be reduced to 8 minutes
-- the blinds will go up in multiples of 5 starting with the next multiple of 5
-- for example if the blinds are 6/12 when it gets to heads up, then when the running 10 minute timer expires, the next blinds will be 10/20, 15/30, 20/40, ... and the timer will be set to 8 minutes

- no side pots
-- when someone goes "all in", the other players can either call or fold, but cannot raise
-- the reason for this is side pots can slow play down considerably
-- keeping track of side pots can get complicated, especially when there is more than one side pot. The rules around side pots may not be well understood by everyone, which could lead to misunderstandings
-- a special case would be if someone goes all in, then someone else with fewer chips calls. In that case the smaller stack is all in and any bets above the smaller stack already in the pot are returned uncalled
-- for example, suppose player A has 20 chips, B has 50 and C has 15. Suppose A goes all in with 20. B calls with 20. If C calls with 15, then C is all in and 5 chips are returned to A and B uncalled