Poker Chip quantity required for a home game

[smachalk]

I would like to get a set of custom chips and everything I have read as far as how many chips you need seems like there would be too few chips.
I would like feedback from people who actually run home poker games on what their sets are like (ie. how many chips, what denominations etc). I figure I would like to start with enough chips for 10 players.
TIA
Scott

[AwesomeAli]

I run a regular home game and started out with the following chips when I had 10-15 players:

Denomination No of Chips Chip Total

25 135 3,375

100 223 22,300

500 166 83,000

1,000 113 113,000

We now have another 10 or so players and have invested in some larger denominations:

5,000 88 440,000

10,000 47 470,000


Ali

[Nottom]

I have to ask ... why do you have such crazy numbers of chips?

[Hedge Henderson]

What you play and how much you play for is pretty much required information for advice on your game but, since you asked about our games...

Our home game started out with coins, nickel-ante, quarter limit, regardless of game. After about a year, we decided to have a tournament and, to have a tournament, we needed chips. We started out with a very carefully planned 500 chips: 200 white ($0.05), 150 red ($0.10), 150 blue ($0.25) and 50 black ($1.00).

After a couple of large two-table nights, we realized we didn't have enough chips. We added 50 more red and 50 more blue chips, and that worked for about two months. We started playing more with blinds and less with antes and we also played more no-limit and pot-limit games. Soon, we started running short of chips again and, about three months ago, we doubled the value of the blue chips to $0.50. That worked for another two months.

By then, we had moved to almost exclusively no-limit and pot-limit games with $0.05-$0.10 blinds. With the white chips rarely used for anything outside of the small blind, most of them went unused, and we were often short of chips yet again. We recently purchased 100 "fancier" chips to be used as $2.50 and $5.00 denominations for big nights and tournaments.

I'm currently trying to get our players back into limit games (we need the practice) by upping the blinds to $0.10/$0.20 in order to keep the "big money" excitement for our many impoverished grad student players. If that happens, making the white chips $0.10 and the reds $0.20 may allow me to dust off those many unused white chips again.


Long story short, you have to know what you're going to be playing and how many are going to play in order to make a good decision on chips. 500 chips would be probably be sufficient for a stable game of 7-10 players, but it's a good idea to anticipate (as best you can) possible changes to your game in the future. In retrospect, we bought chips just as our game was beginning to take off, and wasted some money because of it. Plan carefully and make sure you've got some built-in flexibility.

[daryn]

you run a home game with $10,000 chips?? or 10,000 british pounds , or whatever? wow.

[slamdunkpro]

We went the custom logo / chip route. Here's what we have:

300 - 50 cent chips (white)
1200 - $1 chips (blue)
700 - $5 chips (red)
400 - $25 chips (greens)
300 - $100 chips (blacks)
100 - $500 chips (purple)
100 - $1000 chips (yellow)
100 - $5000 chips (pink)

Here's what we play: $2/4 limit $3/6 Limit $10/20 Limit
1/2 blind pot limit and 1/2 blind no limit.

We also play some tournaments


Here's what we've learned: As you experience level grows so do your betting levels. We took the 50 cent chips out of their boxes once.

These chip counts have been good enough to run 4 tables low limit ring or 3 tables pot or NL

[Jezebel]

Dude, I hope you have some serious security going on with that kind of dough at a home game.

[Easy E]

Most people are used to seeing $1 as white.

Also, slamdunk, how much are orange chips usually worth- $10,000?

[Easy E]

you either inflate your buy-ins ($100 gets you $10,000 worth of chips) or you do mostly tournaments... or both

[AwesomeAli]

Nottom

We ordered certain amounts from the supplier and they over ran on all of the denominations and sent them to us as well (FOC), hence the odd amounts of chips /images/graemlins/wink.gif

[AwesomeAli]

Daryn

Once a year I hold a WSOP style tournament where we start with 35 runners (or more) and 10,000 starting chips and run it on a 1 hour clock.

We invested in these larger denominations for the rounding up of the smaller chips and to keep large quantities of chips off the final table.

We find we use them in our regular game quite alot as well as we have alot of runners and by the time its 3 handed, there are way too many smaller chips on the table.

Ali

[AwesomeAli]

Easy and jezebel

We play 3 x freezeout tournaments during our home game with these chips. We start with anything up to 6k and the last game is a double chance (free top-up/re-buy). No cash for values is exchanged - its just chips.

Each tournament is £20 £30 £50 with a prizepool paying the top 3 or 4 (depending on number of runners).

So no security is required /images/graemlins/grin.gif

We do have cash games but have a seperate set of chips with much smaller denominations on them. The largest denomination being £10 and the smallest being 10p.

[slamdunkpro]

I've seen it both ways. The only reason I went with blue instead of white was that with a composit chip white is almost a dirty grey.

It varies - I've seen orange for 1,000 - 5,000, and 10,000.

[Easy E]

and bring 12 mugger friends with me!

[AwesomeAli]

LMFAO /images/graemlins/grin.gif

[Slacker13]

I just purchased chips for a home game, I based it on a 5-10 game which a normal buy in for that type of game is $300. So I took 300 divided by 5 (5$ chips) = 60 red chips per person for buy in. That means you would need 600 red chips (minimum) to cover 10 buy ins. (you could however give them 50-100 in green $25). Then you need 1$ chips for the antes, which normally you would get $10 worth when you first bought in giving each player 58 reds and 10 whites.
Now you at 580 reds and 100 whites just to get a good 5-10 game going. You can add some greens ($25) and blacks ($100) to make up for some of the reds. You should keep some extra of white and red, most players who get low will just buy from other players at the table, some people do not like that and some do not care. Hope this helps.

[smachalk]

Ok, thanks for everyone's input. It has been very helpful. I know that most of my trouble comes from the fact that I'm not sure how this is going to go as far as limits are concerned. I think our first game is going to start out at $.25-$.50 with a $200 buy-in so I can start with that. I am going to continue to use my set of Marlboro poker chips and I'll try to add some nice custom chips as I go. Please keep posting your opinions and I'll watch this thread.

[slamdunkpro]

[ QUOTE ]
I think our first game is going to start out at $.25-$.50 with a $200 buy-in so I can start with that.

[/ QUOTE ]

Wow- we play 2/4 with a $100 buy-in. I think your buy-in is a little steep

[smachalk]

Well, we're having a winner-take-all tournament. The idea is to start with everyone buying $200 worth of chips and playing untill one person has all the money (or until the few remaining players are too exhausted to go on).
The limits will probably increase as the night goes on. (well, I guess thay will have to or we'll be there for a month)
Personally, this is not the way I would play it but if I want a game with these friends, this is it. There is no way they are going to play hold-em. We'd be more likely to be playing something with a bunch of wild cards. /images/graemlins/tongue.gif
So, this is our comprimise. Anybody with input, please chime in. I am curious if anyone has tried this.