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How to set up a home poker tournament and season

How to run a recurring poker league at home: seasons, scheduling, points, blind structures, and paying out at the end.

9 minute read

  1. 1Decide how long a season runsEight to twelve nights is the sweet spot — long enough for standings to mean something, short enough that people can see the end.
  2. 2Create the tournament and its first seasonName it, pick a buy-in, and lay down the whole calendar up front so people can put the dates in a diary.
  3. 3Share the join codeYour crew joins with a code. No app to install, and guests can play without an account.
  4. 4Choose how the pot splitsDecide what each night pays out and what banks toward the season prize. 30/70 is a common starting point.
  5. 5Play the nightsThe table screen runs the blinds, the knockouts and the payouts. Standings update themselves.
  6. 6Finish the season and pay outDeclare the winner and split the banked pot by the payout tiers you agreed at the start.

A season is what turns a run of poker nights into something people plan around. The same crew, a fixed calendar, points that accumulate, and a prize at the end that everybody has been contributing to all along.

How long

Eight to twelve nights, playing weekly or fortnightly. Long enough that standings reflect skill and attendance rather than one lucky evening; short enough that somebody joining in week two can still see the finish line.

Lay the whole calendar down at the start. A season where next week's date is announced each week is a season that quietly stops after five.

The money

There are two pots, and keeping them separate is the thing to get right.

The nightly pot is what gets paid out that evening. The season pot is what banks toward the end. A common split is thirty per cent paid out nightly and seventy per cent banked — so there is something to win every week, and something much larger to play for over the whole run.

Agree the split and the end-of-season payout tiers *before the first night*. Changing either halfway through changes what everybody has already been playing for, which is the fastest way to lose a league.

Points

Points decide the season, and the formula matters less than everyone understanding it. Two properties are worth insisting on:

Everybody who turns up scores something. A system where only the winner scores tells the six people who busted early that their evening did not count. They stop coming, and a league needs bodies more than it needs precision.

Attendance should be worth roughly as much as placing. Otherwise the person who plays every week and finishes mid-table loses to somebody who came three times and got lucky once — which is not the behaviour a league should reward.

Dropping each player's worst night or two is also worth considering. It means missing one week for a wedding is not fatal.

Blind structures

The blind ladder decides how long a night takes. Roughly:

- Deep and slow — 45-minute levels, small increments. Four to five hours, rewards play over luck. - Standard — 20-minute levels. Three hours or so, which is what most weeknights actually have room for. - Turbo — 10-minute levels. Under two hours, mostly variance.

Add antes from around level four if nights are running long. Antes put dead money in every pot and force the action far more effectively than raising blinds faster.

Starting stack matters less than the ratio of stack to blinds. Ten thousand chips against 25/50 blinds is a deep game; the same stack against 100/200 is already short.

Running the nights

Put the table on a TV. The screen holds the blinds, the clock, the seat map and a QR code your crew scans to take a seat — including guests, who can play without an account and leave no permanent record.

Knockouts, payouts and the ledger all record themselves as the night goes, so standings are correct without anybody maintaining a spreadsheet.

Finishing

At the end, declare the winner and split the banked season pot by the tiers you agreed at the start. The app computes it from the ledger — which is the sum of every buy-in and payout across every night, so it cannot disagree with what actually happened.

Then start the next season from the same tournament, keeping the rules and the roster. The crew stays, the standings reset, and the thing runs again.

[Start a season](/play/holdem).

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