Official order thread for The Egyptian Chips

[guller]

Do you think this will be a decent set for a 10 player tourney and the occasional 4-6 player cash game?

This is what I have ordered so far:

50 - .25
100 - $1
150 - $5
150 - $25
100 - $100
50 - $500
25 - $1000
10 - $5000

[CaptLego]

[ QUOTE ]
Do you think this will be a decent set for a 10 player tourney and the occasional 4-6 player cash game?

This is what I have ordered so far:

50 - .25
100 - $1
150 - $5
150 - $25
100 - $100
50 - $500
25 - $1000
10 - $5000

[/ QUOTE ]

It probably depends on what stakes you play for in your cash games. For low stakes, I'd think that fewer $5 and more $1 or even .25 chips would work better.

[CaptLego]

[ QUOTE ]
Do you think this will be a decent set for a 10 player tourney and the occasional 4-6 player cash game?

This is what I have ordered so far:

50 - .25
100 - $1
150 - $5
150 - $25
100 - $100
50 - $500
25 - $1000
10 - $5000

[/ QUOTE ]

To elaborate a bit more...
I think you've got a nice flexible distribution. With this distribution, you can support most any game as long as you don't have many players or don't want to give many chips to each player. That's the tradeoff, though --- you can't support many players or give many chips to each player for any particular game.
This set has 8 colors. For any specific game with 10 or fewer players, you won't use more than 3 or four colors.

Put another way, for any specific game, you'll be using less than 1/2 of your set -- and within any range of 3 colors, you'll want more of the lower denoms than the higher ones. So you'll be starting each player with 15 to 30 chips, no matter what game you play.

If you want to use those octagons and plaques in your tourneys, then you probably don't have any use for the $5 chips -- or even the $25 chips for that matter, depending on how small you want the blinds to start (i.e. how long you want the game to last). If you do use the $5 and $25 chips for tourney chips, then you'll have no use for the octagons and plaques, and will lose some of the charm of this set.

Similarly, if you're playing low-stakes cash (<$50 buyin) than you won't need many $5 or $25 chips.

So to me, your set seems optimized for cash games with a $200 to $1000+ buyin, where you'd use those red and green chips. (If you're playing for those stakes, then you should probably ignore ANY advice coming from me.) Otherwise, it seems that you'd need to play those red and green chips as something other than face value to get much use from them. (And 1/2 of your set is red and green chips.)

Bottom line: If your cash game buyin is typically less than $100, then you should reduce the number of $5 and $25 chips drastically (maybe to 25 each), and get more of the .25 and $1 chips for the cash games, and maybe more of the $100 chips for tourneys.

[guller]

I don't think there is any reducing any numbers now, only adding (which I'm open to).

Cash games would typically be 50-100 buy in's, and would happen very rarely. I think I would rather play cash games but everyone else is too into tourney style. I got .25 chips and $1 chips really to just complete the set, but if they get use, even better.

The reason I went for so many 5 and 25 chips was to accomodate smaller blind structures. Say starting at 5,10 to 10,20 to 25,50 etc. Hopefully coloring up the small chips when no longer needed for the blinds will allow me to use the upper end chips. Then maybe color up to use some of the plaques for the final table.

This is all so difficult to decide without the chips in front of me. I will probably end up adding more after they arrive, too bad I already went for the 500 chip mahogany case instead of the 750, oh well. Thanks for the advice.

Gull

[TenPercenter]

[ QUOTE ]
I don't think there is any reducing any numbers now, only adding (which I'm open to).

Cash games would typically be 50-100 buy in's, and would happen very rarely. I think I would rather play cash games but everyone else is too into tourney style. I got .25 chips and $1 chips really to just complete the set, but if they get use, even better.

The reason I went for so many 5 and 25 chips was to accomodate smaller blind structures. Say starting at 5,10 to 10,20 to 25,50 etc. Hopefully coloring up the small chips when no longer needed for the blinds will allow me to use the upper end chips. Then maybe color up to use some of the plaques for the final table.

This is all so difficult to decide without the chips in front of me. I will probably end up adding more after they arrive, too bad I already went for the 500 chip mahogany case instead of the 750, oh well. Thanks for the advice.

Gull

[/ QUOTE ]

I think you've chosen very well. It my experience, the two middle denoms are always used more than the others, by a "double" margin. When I made the first group buy, the majority of the members bought twice as many $25's and $100's as the other chips. Now that the set has grown to eight denoms, that needs to be feathered out a little, and you did what I did by only getting a few $1000's and $5000's. You might need to top-off the $100 chips if you find that you need them.

You're set very well to play tourneys WITHOUT using the .25 and $1 chips. Then the guys that get knocked out can use those for a side cash game, which usually happens in my tourneys. I might suggest topping off the .25 chips a bit more later if you find that people are having to make change too often for other players in those cash games.

Ten

BTW: Here's a little spreadsheet I created to help determine chip counts for tourneys. Simple but effective: TenPercenter-ChipCount.xls

[guller]

I'm not sure of a song to introduce them.

But for now "The Waiting" by Tom Petty is pretty appropriate.

[CaptLego]

[ QUOTE ]


Now that the set has grown to eight denoms, that needs to be feathered out a little, and you did what I did by only getting a few $1000's and $5000's.

BTW: Here's a little spreadsheet I created to help determine chip counts for tourneys. Simple but effective: TenPercenter-ChipCount.xls

[/ QUOTE ]

I don't think that "feathered out a little" is the optimum solution. The problem is that the chip demonimations progress geometrically, not linearly. Since this is an egyptian set, think about a pyramid. If you want to add one more brick to the top of a pyramid, how many must be added to the base and to each successive layer?

Take the values in your spreadsheet, for example:
You start 10 players with T1000, consisting of 10 red, 6 green, 3 black and one gold. 20 chips/person, 200 chips total, 4 colors, T10,000 total on the table. That's fine, and you know it works well.

The only problem is that this game has no use whatsoever for the orange and purple chips. I can't imagine of a game that would see red and purple chips at the same table.

For example, how would you get the orange and purple chips into this game?

Color ups? You've only got 200 total chips on the table, so there's not much need to color up in the first place. But if you did color up, 10 orange or a mere 2 purple chips would replace all 200 chips on the table. To get two purple chips into this game, you'd be replacing all the other chips on the table, and your small blind would have to be $5000. Even heads-up, two chips aren't very many to distribute to two people, and the game will be over before the small blind hits $5000. So color-ups won't get the chips into play on this table.

Start with more people? This can work -- if you started with 5 or 10 times the number of people, then by the time you reach the final table, the players will on average have 5 to 10 times the T1000 starting chips, and a color-up starts to make sense. But then you'd need 1000 red chips and 500 green chips at the start of the tournament.

Start each player with more $?? Suppose you started each player with T10,000. You could give them an orange and a purple to start with. But if the red $5 chips are to be of any use, you'd need to start the blinds at 5 or 10. So each player would be starting with 1000 BB, which would make the game run pretty long. 1000BB is too big for a buy-in. You could start the blinds higher -- like 25/50, but then you don't need any red chips at all.

Rebuys? This seems like the quickest way to get big chips in play. After the first few rebuys, you can just hand out a chip with the denom equal to the buyin. The rebuy guy can go to the person that took all their chips from them and have him make change. But you still have no use for chips higher than the rebuy value, until you've hit 50 or so rebuys and want to color up. This game will be running pretty long, as well, but not as bad as the 1000BB scenario.

[TakenItEasy]

I've been working on integrating the new chips into beginning stacks for my tournaments. These stacks will incorporate all of the denominations but each denomination can be replaced by 2 of the next higher denomination chips. This allows you to start at the appropriate beginning blind levels. You will probably want to start out at something higher than .25/.50 unless you want a prety long tournament, so, for example, if you want to start at $25/$50 you only need to replace all red white and blue chips by 2 greens. You can also color up chips when the blinds reach that level. That is every 3 levels for a standard blind schedule. I've found that these color up levels make good break times. With enough players they can encorporate the octagons and plaques as well.

Starting Player Stack
colors value qty/ply total/plyr
blue 0.25 8 $2
white $1 8 $8
red $5 8 $40
green $25 6 $150
black $100 8 $800
gold $500 8 $4,000
oct $1,000 0 $0
placque $5,000 0 $0
Starting Stack: $5,000

TakenItEasy

[PinataUT]

Right this is the reason that I got 5 of every chip up to 100. 80 100s. 40 500s. x 1000s and 6 plaques. That way can start people off with some T that makes sense T1500(0) and party blinds I guess.

[TenPercenter]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]


Now that the set has grown to eight denoms, that needs to be feathered out a little, and you did what I did by only getting a few $1000's and $5000's.

BTW: Here's a little spreadsheet I created to help determine chip counts for tourneys. Simple but effective: TenPercenter-ChipCount.xls

[/ QUOTE ]

I don't think that "feathered out a little" is the optimum solution. The problem is that the chip demonimations progress geometrically, not linearly. Since this is an egyptian set, think about a pyramid. If you want to add one more brick to the top of a pyramid, how many must be added to the base and to each successive layer?

Take the values in your spreadsheet, for example:
You start 10 players with T1000, consisting of 10 red, 6 green, 3 black and one gold. 20 chips/person, 200 chips total, 4 colors, T10,000 total on the table. That's fine, and you know it works well.

The only problem is that this game has no use whatsoever for the orange and purple chips. I can't imagine of a game that would see red and purple chips at the same table.

For example, how would you get the orange and purple chips into this game?

Color ups? You've only got 200 total chips on the table, so there's not much need to color up in the first place. But if you did color up, 10 orange or a mere 2 purple chips would replace all 200 chips on the table. To get two purple chips into this game, you'd be replacing all the other chips on the table, and your small blind would have to be $5000. Even heads-up, two chips aren't very many to distribute to two people, and the game will be over before the small blind hits $5000. So color-ups won't get the chips into play on this table.

Start with more people? This can work -- if you started with 5 or 10 times the number of people, then by the time you reach the final table, the players will on average have 5 to 10 times the T1000 starting chips, and a color-up starts to make sense. But then you'd need 1000 red chips and 500 green chips at the start of the tournament.

Start each player with more $?? Suppose you started each player with T10,000. You could give them an orange and a purple to start with. But if the red $5 chips are to be of any use, you'd need to start the blinds at 5 or 10. So each player would be starting with 1000 BB, which would make the game run pretty long. 1000BB is too big for a buy-in. You could start the blinds higher -- like 25/50, but then you don't need any red chips at all.

Rebuys? This seems like the quickest way to get big chips in play. After the first few rebuys, you can just hand out a chip with the denom equal to the buyin. The rebuy guy can go to the person that took all their chips from them and have him make change. But you still have no use for chips higher than the rebuy value, until you've hit 50 or so rebuys and want to color up. This game will be running pretty long, as well, but not as bad as the 1000BB scenario.

[/ QUOTE ]

Wow, no way I'm attempting to counter all those points. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img] We're not arguing, just discussing though right?

In that spreadsheet I posted, I changed my default buyins from 50 to 10, because that guy wanted a 3-4 man cash game, and I allowed for rebuys, and bumped it to 10. In MY tourney's, we have about 50 buyins, with rebuys included. 25 to 35 people. So we can easily get to the $1000 chips (when they arrive) and theoretically even the $5000 chips. Plus, like you said, we can do T$10,000 tourneys just for fun, and leave out the $5 chips for use in the cash games. But I like the idea of saving the $5000 plaques for ONLY the final table, maybe even the final 2-3 players. The orange $1000's I'd like to get into play at the second color-up, when we eliminate $25's.

If it weren't for my particular Egyptian set, I'd never suggest that ANYONE needs eight denoms. However, many many people have two seperate sets for the precise reason that they can have side games going at a tourney. This, in essesnce, means you have 8-10 denoms anyway, counting the two different chip sets with 4-5 denoms each. With mine, you can accomodate both at the same time in one night.

With denoms stretching from .25 to $5000, there's NOTHING you can't accomplish. Like tonight, I had family over and we had a cash game going where $1 gets you $1000 in chips. We used the $25 through $500 chips. No one was confused, including my 14yo neice or my MOM, who is not always clear on poker stuff. The $1=$1000 didnt faze her a bit. She even understood (and laughed) that a $850 bet meant she was really betting 8.5¢. Recently a buddy and I did $10 gets you $100, and we used the $5 through $100 chips, where a $10 blind was really a dime.

With the .25 chips in play, you can use the .25 through $25 at face value (quarter ante, friends cash games) or at 10% value (nickel BB, family cash games). There are countless ways to use them all.

Ten