[UW85]

For along time we used to do a "Chip Race" -- such as in the situation you describe where there are two 50's you need to get rid of and they add up to ONE 100, then you simply flip a card over to each and the higher card wins the chip. It also can work with mulitple people. Such as if you had 5 people each with 50's -- that's two 100's + a 50. In that case the way I did it was to play for THREE 100's. All 5 would get a card but only the top three would get the 100 chip. If there is a tie, such as two aces, we always followed suits ( spades, heart, diamonds, clubs) -- an ace of hearts beats an ace of clubs.

Having said all that, looking at the big picture and knowing we almost always start with very deep stacks of chips (tons on chip value), I decided just to give each player a straight across exchange instead of doing chip races (they get time consuming). The amount of extra I'm giving them in the "big picture" of all the chips in play is so small, it's insignificant. This wouldn't be true in a cash game though. So, in the case of tournament play, if I had three people with a 50 chip, now I just give them all a 100 -- again, just due to time & ease. Hope that all makes sense.

Edit: Can't spell suit and compost's advice on the order of suits -- guess I had it wrong.