What is meant by 'raise blinds every 8 hands' in the game of poker?

Question

I am new to poker. I am playing pokerTH on my ubuntu machine. I am able to play the game however there are blind settings as shown in the attached screenshot. In the blind settings there are properties which I am unable to understand nor was I able to find any resource to describe the meaning of those settings.
Please help me understand the meaning of "Raise Blinds Every 8 Hands or Raise Blinds Every 5 minutes."

Answer 1

In a tournament setting, blinds are increased periodically to incentivize more action. Each one of these increases moves the tournament up one level (commonly). If you have ever watched televised poker, you will see players at the final table having gone through many, many levels. At the beginning of the tournament, blinds may have been 50/100, whereas by the end, you may see blinds of, say, 100k/200k.