Out of interest, what does eveyone use for timing the blind schedules?

I have a great little application on my Smartphone - Tournament Timer by Concrete Software. It was something ridiculous like $5 and you can edit and choose different tournaments. So I have a standard 6 and 5 player tournament all ready to go, and the best thing is the sound effects when the blinds are changing!

Make sure you charge your cell phone battery though ;)

We normally do not have a problem with anyone being slow when I play local games.  I have been to one tournament though that they used a computer with a timer setup on it as use for the timer.  A sound went off when someone was running out of time.

No, I meant the Blind timers - for example, every 20 minutes the blinds double or something. This application shows your the currenty small and big blind and what they are about to go to.

We have always just played the number of times the button goes around the table then we up the blinds.  Example: I have to be dealer 3 times & then blinds will double.  When you get down to just a few people left the blinds begin to increase quickly and the game will be end without having to take hours to finish.

I like this plan.  It keeps the game flowing smoothly and it keeps everyone on their toes as well.  After a few beers, though, it can be rough to keep up with the number of times the button has been around.  You might want to set out some beans or something to help you count.

I usually play with around 10-12 people and the blinds always depend on how late we start and how drunk we are. We always up our blinds after a certain amount of minutes, otherwise we would never keep track. We don't have anything fancy we just set the timer on the stove! With 10 or less people we usually set the blinds for 40 minutes and double them. When more people play we usually drop that to 20min otherwise our 10pm game would end around 5am (and it has).

http://www.thetournamentdirector.net/ The dogs Kahunas costs $30

The free version is here, but not many features http://forums.uglytuna.net/showthread.php?t=75

 

My rules are basically very similar to Caro's and Cookes and can be found at www.ukpokerinfo.co.uk on the horizontal menu at the top under the Tournament Director header. Hope this helps all you budding TD's :) 

Since our weekly game is always on a week night, we just have a cut off limit at 10 pm ....the only timers anyone in our group uses has been on the odd weekend that we play. But usually we just all want to be home by a certain time ...I guess that's getting older lol.