A Texas Hold Em poker tournament manager is the manager in charge of running the Texas Hold Em poker tournaments in the casinos.

With all the home games going on nowadays, there are a variety of poker tournament manager products and software out there that make running your home poker tournament easy and fun.  These products also give you the professional feeling of having a real tournament manager in charge of your home game.

How Do Tournament Managers Work?

A good poker tournament manager allows you to enter the number of players, the blind levels that you would like, and the time for each blind level.  The manager then begins the tournament and indicates when it is time to change blind levels.

Different tournament managers have different features and extras that make them unique and go beyond the basics mentioned above.

Extra features that come with tournament managers include the option to save your tournament structure into the system for the next time around, and the functionality to calculate the estimated tournament length given your options.  Another cool feature of advanced tournament managers is that they let you key in the denominations of poker chips that come in your poker set and the number of players so that the tournament manager will work with the type of chips that you have to best accommodate your game.

Our Recommendations for Tournament Managers

Our top choice for purchasing a Texas Hold Em poker tournament manager is:

The Poker Genie

The Poker Genie is the ultimate home tournament manager timer out there.  It has all of the standard features that you need in a tournament manager, plus loads of extras.  In addition, it is very easy to setup and use.

The Poker Genie allows you to enter up to 5 colours for chip denomination choices and also allows antes.  In addition, the tournament length estimator on The Poker Genie is pretty accurate.  The display screen is a good size and can be seen from a distance.  The beeper to indicate blind levels is also loud making it audible over the noise and chatter of a home poker game.

The Poker Genie is also portable.  It is relatively small and lightweight so that you can take it to poker tournaments away from your home or tournaments where a computer is not nearby.  This gives it a huge advantage over computer based tournament managers.

The Poker Genie sells for $69.95 and can be found at www.worldpokersupplies.com.

The Poker Genie is our overall top choice for a poker tournament manager and we don’t think it can be beat for a combination of functionality, price, appearance, and portability.

ESPN Poker Tournament Timer

The ESPN Poker Tournament Timer has many of the same features of The Poker Genie and is remarkably similar in size and appearance.  However, in direct comparison, it works better as a timer and falls a little short of The Poker Genie as an overall tournament manager.

As a straight up poker tournament timer, the ESPN Poker Tournament Timer is great and will keep track of time as well as show increases in blind levels.

The ESPN Poker Tournament Timer also serves many of the key functions of a tournament manager.  This includes automatically setting up blind levels and estimating the length of the poker tournament.

The ESPN Poker Tournament Timer can be bought at www.poker-dude.com for $59.99.

Computer Based Tournament Manager

If you are looking for a poker tournament manager software to run on your computer or laptop, then we recommend you download The Tournament Director from www.thetournamentdirector.net.

The Tournament Director is a free poker tournament manager software that performs all the great functions needed in a great tournament manager.  The biggest drawback is the fact that you will need to have a computer or laptop nearby to run the tournament manager from and this obviously limits its mobility.

Overall, we recommend The Poker Genie as our top choice for a poker tournament manager.  It only costs $10 more than the ESPN Poker Tournament Timer and has better functionality for bigger tournaments.

If you don’t want to spend money on a tournament manager then The Tournament Director is the best option out there for you.

Organizing and running a home poker tournament can be hard work given the varying number of players that may be involved, getting the length of the tournament right, and all the other things that go with it.  Using a tournament manager is the easiest way to take the stress out of your Texas Hold Em home poker tournament and get down to what you really want to do – have fun playing poker!