Deciding The Number Of Poker Chips You Need
April 17, 2008
You can purchase as many chips as you want. Often you will begin at 300 chips, but as many as 1000 can be bought. You will need to assess how many you require.
The answer depends on how many people you generally have over for poker night and what kind of people you generally have over. For example, five tight-passive rocks will need less poker chips than five loose-aggressive maniacs. The maniacs are going to bet more chips more aggressively.
It can be assumed that 300 chips will service 3-4 players, but this is not really so. This number of chips will only be good enough to replace damaged or worn chips. This is because for a good poker game you do not really want to play with such a small group of people.
In reality 500 poker chips is a bare minimum. If your games regularly have 9 or more people, I’d invest in a set of 1000 to 1500 poker chips. This doesn’t necessarily mean that every chip will always be in play, but it does give you leeway when a couple people want to buy in big. In addition, your chips will last a lot longer if 100% of them aren’t in play every week.
It is important to ensure that you have plenty of low denomination chips. In fact only 30%-40% of your chips should represent higher numbers. This is because most bets are on low and medium chips. For example a set of 1000 chips should not have 200 of each denomination. Rather it should lean more heavily on the lower range chips. You would think that this is a matter of common sense but this factor is often ignored.
To sum it up the amount of chips needed will be determined by the number of people playing and their attitude, aggressive or cautious. You should have chips that allow players to bet as high as they want and because of this you will need more low denomination chips. A good way to estimate how many chips to get is to get 500 and then add 100 to 150 for every player after 5.
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