[bolgenmod]

Sometime I just want to kill them, but last night kind of took the cake. And the problem I have has as much to do with psychology as the number of chips I might have or need.

I have three beautiful sets (well, 2 and half until my samurai rebuy): 1000 Pharaohs, 700 Engdahls, and 650 (after rebuy) Samurais. But at the home game, we play with crappy suited chips (like dice chips, but with the suits instead of dice around the rim). ONCE (months ago) I brought my Pharaohs to the game, and everyone was indifferent to hostile. The basic problem was that the colors are different from those they were used to. (I have non-denoms.) So everyone was confused. I decided that they were not worthy, and that was that.

Yesterday, after a mostly horrible week and a VERY depressing day of grading absolutely terrible exams (how anyone can NOT tell the difference between Midsummer Night's Dream and the Merchant of Venice is beyond me!), I decided I was cranky as hell and was not going to take it anymore. They were going to play with my Pharaohs, or I was going to throw a fit.

We play .20/.40 limit hold'em, $10 buy in, .10/.20 blinds. Usually the starting stacks are:

40 x .10 -- $4.00 -- red
12 x .25 -- $3.00 -- blue
3 x $1 -- $3.00 -- black

Of course, this causes lots of strangeness: when the bet is .40, people often put in 2 blues and take back a red (we call this doing an Enrique, after a player who doesn't like the blues and thus always does this to try and get rid of them first). But when we first started playing, none of us had a clue as to what chip values should be. We really thought that this was the standard way of assigning chip values. Every other aspect of the game now follows standard rules, but we still use these stupid values.

Since I don't have any red or black Pharaohs (I thought they were ugly), I decided to try this: just blues for .10, greens for .20, with purples as $1 available for coloring up. I have enough of each of those colors to cover 8 people, and I thought the blues and greens were sufficiently different in color so there would be no confusion between them (one of our players is legally blind). And having only two denoms would make it easy for everyone to remember. And I know that those colors and values still don't follow casino standards, but no one but me does (or would care).

So the new values and starting stacks:

40 x .10 -- $4.00 -- blue
30 x .20 -- $6.00 -- green

Well, they gave in to my cranking -- I came in, slammed the case down on the side table and announced: "I spent hundreds of dollars on these gorgeous chips, and we ARE going to play with them!" -- perhaps to humor me, perhaps because I am the banker and thus giving them their damn chips in the first place. And many of them hated it. They were confused. The f*ing MATH PROFESSOR was getting confused because he couldn't figure out that on the turn 4 .20 greens was a RAISE, not a call (4 .10 blues was a call of the .40 turn bet). He didn't seem to have a problem when he first joined the game and someone put out 2 blues (worth .50) and took back one .10 red to call a .40 bet, but somehow the .10/.20 thing was too hard to understand!! A few people did say that they thought the chips were nice. But at least half of the players also said: "Next week we're going back to the old chips."

So what to do? I see basically three options:

1) Give up and play with the crappy chips with the strange values.

2) Persuade them to try it again: it was the first time, after all.

3) Try a different set of values with the Pharaohs. Either assign the chips what have become our standard values (.10, .25, 1.00), or come up with another system (.10 and .40?).

In terms of what I own, I have the following:

325 blues
240 greens (will be 300 again when Michael restocks: I sold 60 to a member who needed them)
275 purples
100 oranges

And I really don't want to buy a bunch of reds and blacks just to keep the colors the same, especially since I would need about 400 reds. And although I would love to move to a slightly larger game (.25/.50, let's say) and maybe use the Samurais, I doubt that's going to happen.

And I guess I have two final questions: are our chip values really too strange? Or is it just ME being a total pain in the a**? (They think that I take the whole thing WAAAY too seriously: last night when someone checked out of turn, the only other person in the hand checked to him, and the first guy then decided to bet. When I backed up the other player who suggested that this wasn't fair (the check out of turn should have been binding), they called me a Poker Nazi!) (BTW, we are all very good friends, colleagues, and even family -- we aren't just poker friends. Which may be why I want to kill them!)

The bottom line is that I have spent many, many dollars buying beautiful chips that just sit in their cases while we play with absolute crap. I'm not asking them to be chip fanatics, just to play with my gorgeous chips. Does anyone have any suggestions how I could persuade them? (And thank you for reading all this -- most of you know I do go on...)

(The good news is that I KILLED last night: I cashed out $32 for a $22 profit, actually a few dollars more than I made in my last trip to the casino! So I guess my crumby week had a decent ending!)

[noelsarchs]

I have a bit of difficulty understanding all this, but tell your buddies that you first are no longer going to use third world chips. Next, use your good chips with a $5 being a nickel and a $25 as a quarter. If they can't figure that out, there is no cure for them.

[Wylecoyo]

The complete geek solution (read: the way I do it) with non-denom chips is to have a card printed up with two columns - one with a picture of the chip itself and another with the value assigned. I have a few different combinations made up and laminated on a 3x5 index card to hand out to players so they can look down and figure things out for themselves when they get confused. It doesn't completely fix the problem, but it does help in some cases (there are just some people who will never be able to manage life without someone holding their hand).

[Dwight87]

you have so many pharaohs for 8 players, how about using every color as 10¢ and just reserve one of the colors as $1. 2 denoms should be simple enough for these guys, right?

[dad604]

I would say option 2. Having a $.10 and $.20 chips for a .20/.40 limit game is very logical. I am surprise that the MATH guy had so much trouble. Also try Wylecoyo's suggestion of having printing cards.

Another option is to make all the chips 10 cents. That way there will be no confusion. You have enough chips for 10 players at 100 chips per players for total of $10 each.

[99%evil]

Slow acting poison, 'nuff said.

[bolgenmod]

The smarter they are, the stupider! Seriously, we have about 5 PhD/College Professors among the regulars (and two people who are from France and Austria, only Masters degrees at the moment, but are at our college for a year to teach their native languages. Both are fluent in English, of course, but never played poker IN THEIR LIVES before. And they have no problem understanding!). Not that degrees = smartness (I count myself as a prime example!), but still, these are not otherwise stupid people. (And the Math Professor is the worst: has NO clue about odds, draws when he feels like it regardless of the odds.) That's why I think it is more about psychology, rather than them not being capable of understanding.

Thanks for the suggestion Wylecoyo -- when we've played tournaments (about once every 6 months or so), we have had similar charts. And interestingly, NO ONE has a problem then, even though we were playing with the usual chips, same colors, but different values. (No one except me, I should add -- last tournament (which was Halloween), I screwed up big time and raised 30 times the bb, not 3 a couple of times. I actually posted about that then because I felt like the biggest idiot in the world!) I guess I could try that.

As to noelsarchs suggestion -- my biggest chipset is the Pharaoh NCVs, so there's no problem in that. Should we really have a .25 chip playing .20/.40? It seems strange to me. Maybe all dimes is the best solution after all.

[gramma]

I say throw your cheap chips in the garbage. Now there gone. BREAK OUT THE NEW CHIPS BABY.!!!!!! Seriously it doesn't take brain surgeons to figure out the denoms as long as you post it some where. Unless your playing with children. LOL.

[SpaceMonkey]

Originally Posted by Wylecoyo

The complete geek solution (read: the way I do it) with non-denom chips is to have a card printed up with two columns - one with a picture of the chip itself and another with the value assigned. I have a few different combinations made up and laminated on a 3x5 index card to hand out to players so they can look down and figure things out for themselves when they get confused. It doesn't completely fix the problem, but it does help in some cases (there are just some people who will never be able to manage life without someone holding their hand).

I agree. Make up cards showing the denominations, and keep bringing them along with your chips for every game.

I'm not a big fan of people making their own change from the pot, so 10¢ and 20¢ chips make more sense. Keep using your chips for a couple months and they'll get used to it.

Having every color be worth 10¢ would work too, because a 2 chip/4 chip game with tons of chips is always better than a 1 chip/2 chip game. But I also don't really like multiple chips being used as the same denomination (though it may be the best solution in your case here).

The problem really comes down to the fact that most people don't like change. They had a system that they were used to, and that was that. No need to think about anything when betting. You have to convince them of valid reasons for the change that will improve the game. And aside from the fact that 25¢ chips have no good use in a 10/20 game, I'm not sure what else you can say unfortunately. (other than "you'll get used to this")

[ebae]

Bottom line... if you cram it down their throats enough times the bitching and moaning will go away and they will get used to it...