tournament chips

[prodogey]

okay guys i want your opinons on how many chips i should use in a starting stack for tournaments and i want to see your chip sets so i know how many chips i need to buy

[JeromyinWV]

It depends on what kind of structure you want to do T100 or a T10,000. Go to homepokertourney.com or search on here and there are tons of ideas on starting stacks and blind structures. How many players are you going to have makes a big difference too!

[pug_in_chip]

Then you should check also Blind Valet - ..Blind Structure Calculator and poker tournament clock where you can make tournament structres "on-the-fly". And check here Site tools -> Poker Chip calculator.

The amount of chips depends heavily on the blind structre, how many players you have in the tournament and how many hours do you want your tournaments to last.

Give us some examples fo the things mentioned aboce, so we can deliver some more specific information. I am no good in that, since I usually make tournament structures for our STT's quickly. But there are very good fellow chiptalkers, which are very good in giving you the information you need.

[JD Roark]

Yeah, you need to decide on the chip denominations you want to use:
5-25-100-500-etc
or
25-100-500-1000-etc.
or
100-500-1000-5000-etc.

Then how deep you want the stacks to be at the start. For example, if you use denominations of 5-25-100-500-etc and starting blinds of 5-10 and you want to start with 200BB stacks, then you would be playing a T2000.

Probably the minimum you would want to for this would be:
10 x 5 chips
6 x 25 chips
8 x 100 chips
2 x 500 chips

Then the question is, how many players do you want to be able to handle. If you always play with the same 5 guys it will be a much smaller set then if you want to support 4 full tables.

The last step would be to think about color-ups (when you elimate the smaller denominations), so you will need some more of the bigger denomination chips to accommadate that.

Blind Valet can help with these choices, in the "Chips" section you can select your desired chip denominations and set your starting stack and then click on "Chip Distribution" to get a stack breakdown and you can play around with more or less chips in the stack.

Hope this helps.

[beyondtilt]

i like
8 t25
8 t100
8 t500
5 t1000
1 or 2 t5000 depending on time and number of people
http://www.chiptalk.net/forum/attach...1&d=1295004327

[albie]

20 chips per player definitely isn't enough, 50 is maybe too many for a tournament starting stack.
WE play a T1500 & I use
T5 x 15
T25 x 17
T100 x 10
then give out T500s for re-buys and add-ons.

[Duckbutter48]

What I use at my house when I run my 2 table 20 man T10000 no rebuy or add on tourney is.

10--100's
8--500
6--1000's

This keeps it very simple. I use the structure off of HPT for their T10000 tourney it last 3-3.5 hours. with 20 minute blinds.(last 3 blinds are 15 and stay 15 if we go longer then usual)

When we run our 50-80 person monthly T20000 no add on/no rebuy tourney we use.

10-100s
10-500's
9-1000's
1-5000

We basically use the WSOP main event blind structure with a few changes.

1st chip up we dump the 100's

2nd we dump the 500's.

last chip up we do is when bubble breaks and all are in the money(usually its the final table). we give them a 10 minute break, bring out the 100k chips and make the stacks smaller to make it easier on folks to make big bets with less chips.

This lasts about 5-6 hours.

If I have learned anything from running tourneys about chips its that the higher amounts seem to work better mentally for folks. Most of the guy play cash games and when we used to use non-demon(faux clay goodness) we started at 5-10 sb/bb. For whatever reason folks would bet higher then usual cause 5/10 just seems like a lesser amount, even though it was the same number of chips as the T20000 tourney is its still messed with them and the early blinds had too high of raises. We then decided to buy denom chips and raise values on the chips and the early blinds just seemed to play out better.

Mathmatically it was exactly the same but mentally folks like starting with 20k instead of 2k(I think it was 2k it was a few years ago)in chips so the earlier blind levels just played out better. Folks like raising the 100/200 blinds to 600/800 more then the 5/10 blinds to 30/40 even though realistically there's no difference. I guess everyone watched the WSOP and wanted to play with higher denoms.--go figure.

Its also nice to have a matching cash/tourney set and back then we didnt need a higher chip then $25 in the cash game. So the .25c $1 $5 $25 chips were for folks busting out and playing cash...the $100 and up were all for tourney and nothing could be mixed that way.

When ordering tourney/cash chips for 80(we did it for 100 JIC tourney got bigger) folks we really had to have our math correct...even with cheaper chips it was pricey.

[BPTDirector]

Originally Posted by beyondtilt

i like
8 t25
8 t100
8 t500
5 t1000
1 or 2 t5000 depending on time and number of people
http://www.chiptalk.net/forum/attach...1&d=1295004327

I use this structure a lot also and it always works out fine. 8 quarters and 8 hundos are plenty to keep from making change all the time. The biggest mistake I see when people purchase chips is that they get too many of the smaller denoms, and not enough 1k's....

BPT

[jdunford]

For a one or two table T10,000 tournament, I prefer starting stacks of
12 x T25
12 x T100
7 x T500
5 x T1000

But if it's going to be 3-5 tables, I go with
8 x T25
8 x T100
6 x T500
6 x T1000

That way you don't have HUGE stacks to deal with when tables combine. But I do find that less aggressive players have to make change almost every orbit with the latter starting stacks. Even 12-12-7-5 requires making change at times (e.g. during 150/300 blind level, etc).

[Krafticus]

I started using a breakdown like this for a 10k tournament
12 x T25
12 x T100
3 x T500
7 xT1000

Not many 500's, but after a few knock outs and such, they pile up. I usually have a min of 3 tables running. Last game had 33 runners and at the final table, one person had 75% of them in his stack.

Plus, people are more intimidated by the 1000 than the 500.

Mark