The blind structure is the heartbeat of a tournament — it's what makes the game speed up and eventually end. Get it right and your home game finishes on time with a real final table. Get it wrong and you're either done in 40 minutes or still playing at 3 a.m. Here's how to build one that fits your night.
A blind structure is a schedule of increasing forced bets (small blind, big blind, and sometimes antes) that goes up at fixed time intervals called levels. As the blinds rise relative to everyone's chip stacks, players are forced to take action instead of folding forever — which is what makes the tournament progress toward a winner.
Two dials control the whole feel of your game:
Match level length to how long you want the whole tournament to run, not the other way around. A rough starting point:
| Target length | Level length | Feel |
|---|---|---|
| ~90 min | 10–12 min | Turbo — fast and punchy |
| ~2 hours | 15 min | Standard home game |
| ~3 hours | 20 min | Deep, skill-rewarding |
| 4+ hours | 20–30 min | Serious "main event" night |
A common home-game mistake is too many rebuys plus slow blinds — the game never tightens up. If you allow unlimited rebuys, lean toward slightly faster blinds once the rebuy period ends.
The classic guideline is that blinds should roughly 50–100% increase per level early on, smoothing out to smaller relative jumps late. So 25/50 → 50/100 → 75/150 → 100/200 and so on. The key is that every level has to land on chip values you can physically make — a small blind of 30 is useless if your smallest chip is 25.
Enter your game length, starting stack, and chip denominations. It builds a clean 20-level structure where every blind lands on makeable chips, with antes and color-ups already worked out. No spreadsheet required.
Antes are a small forced bet from every player (or, in the modern "big blind ante" format, one larger ante paid by the big blind each hand). They inflate the pots and speed up the late game by giving everyone something to fight for. For home games, a good rule: skip antes early, introduce them around level 4 once stacks are shallower. If you want a faster game, start the big-blind ante from level 1.
As blinds climb, your smallest chips become useless clutter. A color-up is when you pause, have everyone trade in their smallest denomination for larger chips, and remove that color from play. Plan color-ups into your structure so the table isn't drowning in 25-chips at level 10. A good generator flags exactly when to color up.
Poker Night ships all three as one-tap presets when you set up a tournament — pick Turbo, Standard, or Deepstack and the whole structure is built around your chips automatically.
Poker Night builds your blind structure from the chips you own, runs the live clock, auto-advances levels, and even puts the board on your TV. Free to run your games.
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