• Run your home games like a pro
• How a poker tournament works
• Downloading Home Game Organizer
• Creating a tournament
• Editing a tournament
• Running a tournament
• Tournament settings
• Button descriptions

The Home Game Organizer is a free program for anyone who wants to arrange a smooth running poker tournament. You won't have to borrow your mum's egg clock anymore, or rely on your colleague's waterproof chronometer - which will disappear when its owner is eliminated in the second level. Home Game Organizer runs on any PC. Just download it and enjoy!

A poker tournament is like a usual game of poker - with a few important exceptions:

• Players are not allowed to buy more chips during the tournament. (However, see Re-buys and add-ons below.)
• A player who runs out of chips is eliminated from the tournament.
• Blinds and antes increase on a regular basis (see The blind structure below).

Buy in and start playing
At the start of the tournament all players pay a certain amount, the buy-in. Each player receives a pre-defined number of chips, the starting stack. The buy-ins make up the prize pool that will be shared by the winning players at the end of the tournament.

Then the tournament starts. You play poker as usual. A player who loses his or her last chip is eliminated from the tournament and must leave the game.

Who wins?
When all players except one have been eliminated, the tournament is over. The remaining player is the winner, and the other players are ranked according to their order of elimination. The first player to be eliminated takes last place in the tournament, the last player to be eliminated takes second place.

The prize pool is shared by the top ranked players according to the payout structure ? see below.

The blind structure
To make sure that the tournament ends within a reasonable time, the blinds and antes are increased on a regular basis. A player who does not succeed in collecting more and more chips will eventually run out of chips simply by having to pay the increasing blinds.

In Home Game Organizer you are free to set up a blind structure that suits your game. There are a number of preset structures that you can use as they are, or modify according to your needs.

The payout structure
The payout structure defines how many players will win money in the tournament, and how much each of the winning players wins. For example, a common structure for a ten players tournament is to pay the first three players 50, 30, and 20 percent of the prize pool respectively. Home Game Organizer contains two preset payout structures, Standard and Flat. With 100 players, for example, Standard shares the prize money among the first ten players while Flat pays 15 places. In Home Game Organizer, you can set up a payout structure that you and your friends like.

Re-buy and add-on
As mentioned above, usually during a tournament, players are not allowed to buy more chips. However, some tournaments start with a period where players may actually buy more chips (re-buy). This kind of tournament is called re-buy tournament and the period when re-buys are allowed is called re-buy period.

Making a re-buy means adding more money to the prize pool and therefore receiving more chips. In Home Game Organizer you can specify exactly how much a re-buy costs and how many chips a re-buying player gets.

Often re-buys are connected to some kind of condition, for example, that the re-buying player must have less chips left than the start stack, or even be out of chips.

When the re-buy period is over, players often have the right to make a last re-buy, called an add-on. As with other re-buys, Home Game Organizer lets you specify how much the add-on costs and how many chips players receive. Add-ons work just like re-buys, except that they usually are not connected to any special conditions.

To download the Home Game Organizer:

• Click Hereto download the organizer.
• Specify a place to save the Home Game Organizer.
• Click Save.
• Run the "homegame_installer.exe"

• Start Home Game Organizer from the Start Menu.
• Click on Create to create a tournament from scratch
  or
  Select a tournament in the list and click on Copy to create a new, similar tournament.
• Change the settings to suit your requirements. All settings are described under Tournament settings.
• Click Save. The tournament is added in the list.

To edit an existing tournament, select it in the list and click Edit. Change the settings to suit your requirements. All settings are described under Tournament settings. If you want to change a tournament while keeping the old one, copy the existing tournament by selecting it in the list and clicking Copy. Then edit the copy by clicking Edit and changing the settings.

• Start Home Game Organizer from the Start Menu.
• Select a tournament in the list.
• Click on Start Tournament.
  The clock gets ready to run.
• To start the tournament, click on Start/Pause buttons (see button description below). The tournament starts. Remove eliminated players, register re-buys, and so on with the buttons as described under Button descriptions.
• If you need to edit a running tournament click on Edit to access the tournament settings.
• When the tournament is over, click on End to end the tournament and display the tournament results.

Note: To get back to the starting screen with the list of tournaments, the Create and Copy buttons etc, click End and use the button seen to the right to close the tournament results.
Note: If the tournament is not over when the last level ends, the clock will continue ticking on the last blinds level until you click End.

Sound signals The end of a level is indicated by a series of sound signals:

• Signal one minute before level ends
• Countdown during the last seconds
• Signal when the level ends

The sounds can be turned on and off by toggling the sound button (next to the help button in the top right corner).

A tournament is defined by the following settings:

Title	The name of the tournament
Buy-in/ Re-buy/ Add-on	The cost of buy-in, re-buys, and add-ons, as well as how many chips players receive for each one of them
Add cash	Specifies if any money is added to the prize pool, other than the buy-ins, re-buys, and add-ons
Currency	The currency used in the tournament
Players	Specifies the number of players that will participate in the tournament. You can change this number later on, even after the tournament has started.
Payout structure	Specifies how much each winning player will receive, as a percentage of the prize pool. You can define your own structure or choose one of the preset ones. When you click on a preset, the payout structure is calculated depending on the number of players you specified. The presets for ten players are not the same as the presets for 50 players, and so on. The Total percentage must equal 100.
Blinds structure	Specifies each level in the tournament: blinds, ante, level duration in minutes, the length of the break after the level (can be zero), and the duration of the re-buy period (if any). You can specify your own structure or choose one of the preset ones.

1	Entries	Number of players that entered the tournament.
2	Players	Number of players left in the tournament. Click on '-' each time a player is eliminated.
3	Re-buys	Number of re-buys done. Click on '+' each time a player makes a re-buy.
4	Add-ons	Number of add-ons done. Click on '+' for each player that takes an add-on.
5	Start/Pause	Click to start or pause the clock. You can also use the <Space> bar.
6	Level	Steps the current level of blinds up or down. When you change level, the time is reset. You can use the Time slider to adjust the remaining time for the current level.
7	Time	Adjusts the remaining time for the current level.
8	Edit	Opens the Edit dialog so you can change the settings for the tournament.
9	End	Ends the tournament and displays the tournament results.