So you want to get into those higher buy-in tournaments but don’t want to pay that much or the satellite tournaments not jiving with your schedule? We got a recipe for you to make the perfect Sit and Go (SNG) satellite tournament at your place when you want.
Ingredients
9-10 Poker players (dead money always welcome)
1 Deck of playing cards
1 Set of poker chips (anything to keep track of your stack)
1 Poker Table (dining table is ok)
1 Timer
1 Blind Structure
1 Dealer (optional)
First you see how much it would be to enter that tournament that you want to play at. Some tournaments quote their prices with two figures x + y, in which case, it means that x is the buy-in (which goes to the prize pool) and y is the entry fee (which goes to the house). Try no to enter tournaments that only quote you one price, cause you don’t know what the break down is and it might not be worth it to play. In the case of the WPT Philippines events, its Php 10,000 buy-in + Php 2,000 entry fee, and since you want to play for the whole amount you divide the total (Php 12,000) into the number of players you have playing in your SNG satellite.
In this example Php 12,000 divided by ten players means each players puts up Php 1,200 winner take all. Now you take the deck of cards and the poker chips to the poker table and play. Make your starting stack and blind structure to where all the players are comfortable playing, usually in our tournaments we make the buy-in be the starting stacks, so that players play better. I have included a sample blind structure that you can use with the chip stack of 1,000-2,000 in chips. Use the timer to let you know when to increase the blinds and since it’s a small tournament, make each blind increase at 20-minute intervals.
As you whittle down the players, and one player remains, that player gets the whole pot and is the representative of your group into the big tournament.
Options – You can add a little more money into the pot so that second and maybe third place gets prize money as well. You can do this by adding the buy-in and entry fee that you need to make with the prize money you want to give, say Php 2,000 for second and Php 1,500 for third. That would make the required amount be Php 15,500 or Php 1,550 per player which is still not bad.
