Texas Holdem Blinds

Texas Holdem Blinds for a home tournament

I get a lot of queries about Texas Holdem blinds and how to set them up. I can understand why because most people find out that it is not as easy as it looks.

The BBQ is fired up and the esky (chilli bin, cooler) is full of beer and ice. Your mates are all here and the cards are all shuffled. Out comes the chip set and a blank expression comes over everyones face- "how many chips do we get and what are the blinds going to be?"

Running a tournament is not as simple as just giving each player a pile of red green and blue chips and getting started- but I have tried to make it as simple for you here as it can be.

CHIP STACKS

There are many combinations and denominations possible but my tip is that you hold a $5000 chip tournament with a nice sized stack of chips in front of each player.

Everyone likes having a big stack of chips to start with, you can use them to intimidate players with, play with them between hands and arrange into stacks and piles just the way you want them.

I recommend the simplest way to start this is to give each player 8 chips of three different colors and determine one color to be $25 chips, the second color to be $100 chips and the third color to be $500 chips.

This adds up to $5000 in chips.

TEXAS HOLDEM BLIND STRUCTURE

The Big Blind starts at $50 and the small blind should always be half of the big blind. Every half an hour you should increase the big blind to the following amounts- $100, $150, $200, $300, $400, $500, $600, $800, $1000, $1500, $2000, $3000, $4000, $5000.

Try to take a 15 min break every hour or two so you can stretch your legs, top up the snacks and tell your tales about the great hands you played in the last level.

The tournament should last about as long as it takes for the big blind to reach the original buy in of $5000 (give or take an hour), so you can add or remove blind levels to suit your needs.

COLOURING UP

This is the term used to describe the process of changing the smaller denomination chips for the larger denomination chips.

This happens when there are too many chips on the table due to players being knocked out, or if the Texas holdem blinds set up you have no longer requires a certain color..

Make sure that for each player you have 2 of the $100 chips and 2 of the $500 chips remaining in the case for when you need to "color up" or change the $25 or $100 chips to larger denominations later in the game.

If you want to play longer you can always add 5 chips of a fourth color, make them $1000 chips and adjust your texas holdem blinds structure to allow another level or two.

This would be a “deep stack” $10,000 chip tournament.

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