Poker tournaments — rules

How Poker tournaments plays in OmertaEra, the free Prohibition-era mafia MMO. The same rules are shown where the game is played, and every outcome is provably fair.

No-Limit Texas Hold’em, every event. Three sessions a day — morning, evening and the middle of the night — and each one runs a $2,500 event with the $25,000 main event an hour behind it. One buy-in, one stack of tournament chips, and you play until you have them all or none. The chips are not money and never become money: the cash comes back at the end, from the prize pool, to the top places. The house takes nothing.

When: 02:00 / 03:00, 08:00 / 09:00, 20:00 / 21:00 UTC every day
Buy-in: $2,500 or $25,000 in cash, for 5,000 tournament chips either way
Registration: Opens 2 hours before the first hand and closes when the cards go in the air. There is no late entry.
Tables: Up to 9 a table and up to 27 runners
Levels: Every 5 minutes, starting at 25/50
The clock: 30 seconds to act, exactly as at the cash tables. Run it out and the table checks for you, or folds if there is a bet to answer.

How it runs

Buy in while registration is open and the money leaves your pocket then; change your mind before the start and it comes straight back.
The field is filled out so an event always runs, and those seats are only taken once registration has closed — a player who signs up never loses a place to one.
The field is dealt across tables of up to 9. As players bust, tables are evened up and the smallest are broken, until everybody left fits at the final table.
No rebuys. When your chips are gone you are out, and where you finished is where you finished: the shortest stack at the start of the hand takes the lower place when two go out together.
The blinds go up every 5 minutes, on the hand after the level changes — never in the middle of one.

The money

Every buy-in goes into the prize pool and nothing is taken out of it. A field of 18 makes a pool of $450,000.
The pool is paid to the top places when the event settles: 3 places for six runners or more, 4 from nine, 5 from eighteen and 7 at a full field. The winner takes 38% of it.
Everything is paid in cash, through the ledger, and your tournament entries are counted on their own line of your casino record — never mixed in with the cash tables.
If an event cannot make a game of it at all, it is called off and every buy-in is refunded.

The hands themselves are the ordinary game: Texas Hold’em, dealt from the dealer’s seed pair and replayable on the fairness page like any other hand.

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