Advice for running a charity tournament

[Luke]

Mods, if this is the wrong spot, feel free to move it to B&M or wherever.

I've been asked by a family friend to run a charity poker tournament. We have a hall, supplies, food, drink, etc. I was just reaching out to you guys for a little help in the logistics of running the tournament itself.

We have 70-80 people playing and we're aiming to be done in about 5 hours. It's NL Hold'em and being a charity, there's no professional dealers and a lot of the players will be extremely novice so the first hour will probably be pretty slow.

Any of advice you guys could offer would be great but I would particularly like some guidance in creating a good blind structure that is will be simple and get us done near the 5 hour mark.

Keep in mind, we'll probably have a couple 5 minute breaks sprinkled in there as well as a half hour dinner break.

Thanks in advance.

[Luke]

NM

[BigAlK]

Home poker tourny talks a bit about blind schedules and estimating tournament length. There was thread in the last couple months (IIRC in this forum) that had some discussion on this. I believe another poster had a spreadsheet to guess at tournament length based on field and blind structure, but I can't find the thread. Maybe if you search you can uncover it. You might need to adjust a bit for non-professional dealers and inexperienced players.

[Luke]

Thanks, this is a good start.