[Hedge Henderson]

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I would count out stacks of chips beforehand ($50 blocks) and arrange them in your case so that you can easily pull a block out and add a few chips.

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Exactly. We played with change for over a year in our micro-limit home game. I was never short of course, but when we started trying to keep score, we saw plenty of inaccuracies. It was often difficult to get an honest total from eight or ten people.

We and bought a set of chips about eight months ago. Accuracy of scorekeeping improved dramatically but, since I host most of the games, I'm the banker, and it turned out to be a bit more work than I expected.

The first thing I did was, instead of sorting the chips in the case by color, I sorted them into stacks of $10.00. If someone bought in for $10, they got one row from the case.

When we did our first no-limit hold 'em tournament, I put the $10 worth of chips into ten Ziploc bags, each with a number on it so people could pull their chips and draw their seat at the same time. We ended up using the bags for several weeks afterward. It made things even easier. Someone handed me a ten, and I tossed them a bag of chips.

We've since spent a few bucks and graduated to the clear plastic chip boxes instead of Ziploc bags, but it still works the same. Ten bucks gets you one box. I stack the chips up and count them a day or so before the game so I know everything's all even. When a player cashes out, the chips go back into his/her original box. Since we're keeping score now, an added benefit is that, even if you can't depend on an accurate chip count from drunk players (or worse, a drunk banker) at the end of the night, all the chips are in boxes for you to review the next day.

Of course, the fact that we all trust each other helps.