[ericmalone]

Hello everyone, I have been using this breakdown for a couple weeks now and I like it for a couple reasons and I dislike it for a couple reasons.

1st, it is easy for re-buys. $10 (or $1000) in chips, even number easy to remember.

2nd, it is easy to pre-sort and comes out to 50 chips per person, all of which fit nicely into the case.

3rd, it has an easy-to-remember chip breakdown 20, 15, 10, 5 (or 10,10,10,6)

20x $5 chips
15x $10 chips
10x $25 chips
5x $5 chips

What I don't like with this breakdown is how quickly the $5 chips become obsolete. Basically after three rounds they aren't needed anymore

I try not to let tournaments go over 3 hours.

The system we were using gave each player $435 in chips (I didn't come up w/or advocate this one)

Please let me know your thoughts, much appreciated.

[jmc]

For tournaments, I think you really want to give your players the smallest number of low denom chips possible because they will always be obsolete in a few blind levels -- you'll just make more work for yourself later. Personally, I wouldn't give out more than 10x $5 chips.

Also, if you have $5 and $25 chips, I don't think you need $10 chips on the table.

Do you guys like playing with huge #'s of chips or something?

10x T5 (50)
10x T25 (250)
7x T100 (700)
= T1000

If you prefer larger stacks
15x T5
13x T25
6x T1000

I've always struggled with T1000 structures that utilize T5 chips -- usually the blinds have to increase to 25/50 pretty quickly, and then nobody wants to use T5 chips anymore. You can experiment with introducing antes with the T5 chips, or try skipping around the 25/50 level (i.e. use a 20/40 and 30/60 levels).

[tomb1]

Originally Posted by ericmalone

What I don't like with this breakdown is how quickly the $5 chips become obsolete. Basically after three rounds they aren't needed anymore.

Don't feel bad about that, most everyone goes through that phase. You see so many chipsets on eBay with huge numbers of the smallest denomination. It's much better to buy fewer of the smallest chip and more in the middle/higher, so you get more "bank" for your buck.

Now that you've gotten past the beginner phase, I like what jmc said -- you really don't need more than 10 x $5 chips to start (or fewer). If you like having $10 chips, then you definitely could get by with only 5 x $5s. You don't really need $10s, but what the heck....

How about something like 5/10/15/5 ($5/$10/$25/$100) for your $1,000? This is a decent-sized stack of 35 chips. Or 5/10/19/4 (38 chips) or 5/15/17/4 (41).