Hi All!
I have observed the duration of my tournaments and total chip amount for the past weeks and found out that they usually end by the time the SB and BB together reach 5% of the total chips (eg: 600k total chips - tournament ends at blinds 10k-20k). So far so good. What I would like to know now is approx. how many players will be left in the middle of the tournament? (I don't really need to know how many players are left, but it would be good to know how many dealers I need :-) Any thoughts?
Georg
Georg, this is very useful information, let's break it down. 1) if you reach the end of the tournament at these numbers, that basically means you just have 2 or 3 players left. If the SB & BB combined are 5% of the total chips in play then at your example of 600K total chips in play at 10-20k blinds, you have a total of 30 BB's at the table. So if you have 2 players, the average stack is 15x the Bb and if you have 3 players the avg stack is 10X the BB.... the key is that anytime you get down to that level where the average stack is 10 to 15X the bb "the end is near".!!
2) Now, as for "in the middle of the tournament, I would not go that far back, I'd look for where I want the FINAL TABLE to start... with, lets say, 15 or so BB's per player at the final table. (20 or more if you want the pressure to be a little easier so they can go an interval or 2 without all-in pressure, it just depends on how much time remains on your clock)..... so if you have 9 players that's 140 BB's at the final table (assuming of course you're playing with an ante to knock the shortstack rocks out). SO, now you know where your BB has to be to end the tourney, and you know where it has to be to get you a final table, and you know where you STARTED the tourney. Just exatrapolate from there, what sort of increments you need to use to get you from SB/BB at startl, to the SB/BB required for a final table at whatever time that has to happen, and to the final conclusion at whatever time that has to happen.
This is a long-winded way of saying that IMO there are 3 critical points you want to calculate for: the start, the beginning of the final table, and the final heads-up ending. You just have to scale your increments between these three points so they increase steadily in a more or less constant percentage rate of increase. The middle of the tournament will just fall into this scaling.