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At a poker night I organise with friends, we're currently ratifying a set of rules.
For the blind structure, at the moment, we start with blinds of 5/10 and increase the blinds every 15 minutes.
If we want a game to last for say, 2 hours (obviously, loose or aggressive play can influence this) is there a blind increase structure or schedule that can make a game last roughly 2 hours?
The number of players varies for each game, anywhere between 4 and 8.
One way to help this is to think about it backwards, so you have 8 periods of blinds (15 minutes x 4 x 2 hours) and let's assume 8 players, 100 chips each. So, ideally, you want one player eliminated each period. What's a high-enough blind to encourage play? Try 10-1 or 20-1. With 10-1, the last period will have 2 players, each with 400 chips, so that's a big blind of 40. The second to last, has 3 players with ~260 chips each, that's a big blind of 26.
10 11 12 16 20 26 40 is therefore the mathematical progression (which we'd tweak to 5, 10, 12, 16, 20, 30, 40 for poker sanity and ease). This is quite aggressive, so feel free to tweak the ratio. Still, it should give you a method for determining good numbers.
Found a web site that you can enter in the following parameters and it'll create a blind structure for you:
Number of players:
Tournament length (hours):
Smallest chip denomination:
Starting chips:
Round length (minutes):
