Time Your Home Game with PokerDIY Tourney Manager

If you’ve ever run a home poker tournament, then you know what a pain it can be to keep the blinds straight with a timer.  Sometimes the egg timer in the kitchen simply just won’t do.  One time, I went to a home game and the host used the timer on his oven.  Talk about amateur hour!  Fortunately, there is a free tournament manager program out there that lets you take care of the blind schedule and timer… and it’s completely free.

Enter PokerDIY Tourney Manager, a free blinds timer.  It’s extremely easy to use, completely free, and can be used either online or downloaded onto your Windows computer.  It will run your live poker tournaments and manage games from beginning to end.  The program is packed with blind timers, blind management, chip calculators, and has other tools to help make the game go smoothly and professionally.

You can download and install the program onto your laptop or computer and run it without an internet connection.  If you do not wish to install the software on your system, just run it from the online site via a web browser and it will work the same.  The only catch is that your computer will have to have Microsoft Silverlight installed (it’s like Adobe Flash) and you’ll be ready to roll.

A recent update shows that you can now move and resize the windows on the timer to lay it out as you please.  When you load the program, you can adjust the amount of money it costs to rebuy and the chips you receive for it.  You can also allow players to add on during certain levels.  You can even program in an Add-On Break, which is a period of time during the game where you can let players rebuy or add on as they like.  You can change the duration of the breaks and blind levels to suit your needs.

When you start up a tournament, you can configure and calculate the number of chips you need, taking into account your chipset’s contents.  The timer screen displays the average chip stack and adjusts automatically as players are knocked out.  Add any color chip you desire, assign it a value, and you’re ready to go.  You can even save configurations for your next home game.

One of the cool “extras” is the ability to put in a custom background without extra boxes showing on either side of the table timer.  The look is totally customizable and you can add or remove boxes (which house information about the tournament) as you wish.  For example, you can just have a custom background, the current blinds displayed, and the blind timer showing.  Or, you can have the custom background, blinds, timer, name of the tournament, number of players remaining, prize pool, average chips, and total chips displayed.  It’s all up to you.

Blind levels are also customizable and include the ability to set their duration, number of breaks, rebuy levels, add-on breaks, and more.  You can then save your structure for the next time you play and even share your configurations with others.

This is one of the most customizable and in-depth tournament clock programs out there and the best part of it all is that it’s completely free.  If you run a home game or go to one that should be better organized, then be a hero and start using PokerDIY Tourney Manager.