[jdunford]

I've seen several posts where people have said (in other threads) that "more chips = more action". They're usually referring to cash games (say, $0.50/$1 using $0.25 chips rather than $0.50 chips). I guess having huge stacks makes players think they're deeper stacked than they actually are, and then they might be a little looser... but with only 500 in chips, it might not be such an issue.

6-players... assuming your levels are 20 minutes, you'll probably get about 3 orbits per level, so starting at 5-10 (or 5-5), you'll want plenty of 5s so players don't need to make change regularly. I'd go with:

20 x T5
12 x T25
1 x T100

I find if you hand out one large-denom chip (a 500 in my T1500 tourneys), players tend to gamble away their lower denom chips, and then they tighten up when they have to break their big one (which basically is a card-cover until then). It gives them one last hope, worth 20% of the initial stack size, in this case.

If you have lots more 100s, you could easily bump this up to a T1000 tourney by adding 5 x 100 to each. You only need 36 of 'em if you keep the 25s in play (or, at most, 60 if you colour them up).