POKER TOURNAMENT MANAGEMENT & PROMOTION BOARDS > Event structuring

Formula to calculate the estimated duration of a tournament

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Georg:
Hello guys!

There is a formula to calculate the estimated duration of a tournament. Something like if the blinds reach a certain percentage of the total amount of chips in play the tournament will likely be over.

Can someone please help me out!

Thanks, Georg

MikeB:

--- Quote from: Georg on November 27, 2009, 02:53:12 PM ---Hello guys!

There is a formula to calculate the estimated duration of a tournament. Something like if the blinds reach a certain percentage of the total amount of chips in play the tournament will likely be over.

Can someone please help me out!

Thanks, Georg

--- End quote ---

Georg, of course that depends on how tight or loose your average player is. But, I'd suggest as a rule of thumb, in no-limit blind games, once the average stack drops below 20X the BB there's quite alot of pressure for action. Once it hits 10X the big blind, the end is fairly near.

So, let's say you start out at 25-50 with 100 players and 10,000 starting stack, no re-buys so there's 1 million in tourney chips in play. You can expect to be very near the end when you have, say 4 players, with an average stack of 250,000, and your blinds are between 1/20 and 1/10 the average stack. So, when you get into the big blind range of 6K-12k to 12K-24K you're going to really be putting pressurie on your final four players. NOW, let's say you want this to happen around midnight. Then you just have to work backwards to your starting time, and craft a blind raising structure to get you there. I would also heartily enourage adding an ante somewhere along the way (about 1/3 to 1/2 into the tourney works well), and the ante will help to "move" the very short-stack rocks who will hang onto a stack equal to 5 or 6 BB's for a couple turns around the table unless you pressure them with an ante...

chet:
Mike: 

Since you brought up "Antes", do you have a recommendation/suggestion for the size of the Ante in relation to the Small Blind? 

MikeB:

--- Quote from: chet on November 29, 2009, 07:51:43 PM ---Mike:  

Since you brought up "Antes", do you have a recommendation/suggestion for the size of the Ante in relation to the Small Blind?  


--- End quote ---

As a starting baseline I like to use 1/10 of the BB... So if you're at 500/1000 on the blinds, the ante would be 100. This can be adjusted up or down depending again on how tight your players are, and especially how tight your timeframe is.

I find in general that good tournament players tend to be pretty selective and will doggedly hang onto a chipstack in the face of a small ante, so if you're on a tight time schedule and have to finish by a certain time, you may find yourself needing to pressurize the ante a bit... say to 1/8 or even 1/6 of the BB, in order to encourage action. It's a very effective tool, better even than just raising the blinds without an ante IMO which doesn't do much to budge the rocks and really irritates players who are active and have competitive stacks.

On the other hand these ratios can be too tight if you're not on such a strict schedule.

LeScribe:
I agree with MikeB, of course.

The formula I found long time ago said that the last BB should be when you arrive between 4 and 7% of the total amount of chips.
I personnaly use 5%, which is a good compromise, whatever there are antes or not.

So : 

(Nb of Player  X  Starting Stack) x 5%  =  BB of the last level


With experience, I can say it's always good (sometimes 1 level shorter or 1 level longer depending of the player's tightness), but I often predicted the end of a tournament at 15 min max !  :)
 

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