Before you can create a tournament, your club needs two things: a timer setup and a blind structure. Both live under the club’s templates in the Console.
Build them once and setting up a tournament takes seconds for the rest of the season.
Timer setup — the money and the chips
The name is misleading: the clock isn’t here. This is everything about stakes and stacks.
- Buy-in and starting stack — what it costs to play, and how many chips you get.
- Players per table — drives the seating chart once you need more than one table.
- Rebuys — price, how many chips they give, the maximum per player, and the level they close at.
- Add-on — price and stack, if you use one.
- Bonus chips — extra chips, for the people who turn up on time, say.
- Prize split — see below.
Playing without stakes? Set the buy-in to zero and play on points. Everything else works the same.
Prize split
Two ways:
- Percentages — written comma-separated, for example
50, 30, 20. A fixed split must add up to 100, or the form won’t save. That’s deliberate: a split that doesn’t balance is otherwise discovered while you’re settling up at the end of the night. - Dynamic — the split scales with how many actually turn up, so you don’t have to change it when seven arrive instead of twelve.
Blind structure — the levels
This is where the clock lives: each level’s small blind, big blind and ante, how many minutes it runs, and whether it’s a break.
The default is a 12-level progression you can edit freely — add levels, change the lengths, put a break where you usually stop for air.
It’s worth making two: a fast one for weeknights and a longer one for when you have time.
Room display — optional
If the tournament is going on a TV in the room, a display setup decides what appears: clock, blinds, prize pool, players left, average stack, seating chart. The clock is always included. You don’t need this to get started.
How they get used
When you create a tournament you pick a timer setup and a blind structure. At that point they are frozen into it.
So later edits to the template only affect future tournaments — a night already set up keeps its own copy. You can tidy your templates mid-season without changing anything already planned.
To adjust something on a tournament that already exists, edit it on the tournament itself. That applies to that night only and leaves the club library alone.
The shortest way in
One timer setup and one blind structure is enough. You can refine later — templates exist to save time, not to be perfect first.
Next: Run your first tournament.
More on templates, including display setups and how freezing behaves in practice: Templates and setups.