Help needed - designing a charity poker tournament

[iillllii]

Hello all, I've been given the responsibility to design a charity poker tournament for my company, and would appreciate insight into what would be the best structure. My experience is mostly limited to 1 table Freeze- outs so this is a bit of a challenge.

Here are details:

-must kicks off after work, so about 6PM at the earliest

-takes place on a thurs. evening

-should end at a decent hour for working folk to get some sleep for the next day (end time of 10pm or so?)

-involves rebuys and add-ons (raises more money)

-initial buy in will be $20 or thereabouts. (players are typically mid to late 20's, $45K - $60K salaries, not serious poker players or gamblers)

-all money goes to charity although top winners will be awarded prizes (free round of golf, rafting trip, etc)

-Would expect to have about 30-40 players, but really, attendance is hard to predict...could be as low as about 20.. so we'll probably need to have multiple structures available depending on attendance?


This seems like a difficult tourney to organize, as re-buys and add ons usually make for a long tourney, but we only have about 4 hours at most.

Any advice on exactly how to structure the starting # of chips, blind schedule, re-buy period, add-on chip and dollar amount, etc?

Here is what I was kicking around:

Buy in $20, re-buys $20, add-on $10. 1000 chips.

blinds increase every 15 minutes

6:00 posted start time, expect to actually kick off at 6:30

blind structure:

round 1 15/30
round 2 15/30
round 3 20/40
round 4 40/80
round 5 50/100

<we are now 1:15 hour in. pause, cutoff rebuys, Add-ons of 500(?) offered for $10 (?)>

round 6 75/150
round 7 100/200
rount 8 150/300
round 9 200/400
round 10 300/600
round 11 400/800
round 12 500/1000
round 13 750/1500
round 14 1000/2000
round 15 1250/2500
round 16 1500/3000
round 17 3000/6000
round 18 5000/10,000

my thinking here is as follows:

round 1-3: The blinds start out high but flat to encourage both early action (get people out and re-buying) and to reward skillful play.

round 4-5: start the increase to get more action going, but don't cause any nose bleeds. We have a full 15 minutes of 50/100, which is 10% of the starting stack, and should get a lot of all-ins here with the rebuy period ending soon.

The add-on is significant in relation to starting stack (50%), which raises more money, but doesn't allow for too big of stacks (5 big blinds).

rounds 6-12: Blinds get big, but not too fast...should get a lot of knock outs but decent stacks shouldn't have to be desperate yet. the money raising portion of the tourney is over so now the focus is on getting the thing to end at a decent hour while still letting some solid poker happen. by the time round 12 ends, we are 3 hours in.

round 12-18: Time to end this thing. By the end of round 16, we are 4 hours in, and people are thinking about work the next day.


My biggest issues:
-is my set up for rounds 1-5 reasonable?

-Should I hold the blinds constant for longer than 15 minutes right after the add-on to make the add-on be valuable

-should I steepen the increases in rounds 6-12? This is the meat of the tourney so I didn't want to make it an all-in fest quite yet, but then again, it is hard to predict how big the big-stacks will be and it might just slow the whole thing down?

-Is the end (rounds 12+) too aggressive? My concern is that people will be hesitant to play at all if it means staying up until midnight on a worknight (we expect to play on a Thurs. evening), but then again, this thing carries some decent bragging rights and some desireable prizes, so I don't want to make it a complete circus.

More issues I'm pretty lost with:

-How many chips and dollars should the add-on be for?

-Is there any way to fairly allow non-busted players to buy a re-buy? If their stack is less than X big blinds headed into the break, they can do a full re-buy at $20? Allowing short stacks to re-buy would add more money so it seems worth doing, but then again, maybe this is why add-ons exist so allowing the re-buy would just be overkill?

Any advice would be appreciated, and may even benefit charity.