Dime-half-single alternative micro breakdown idea. (1 Viewer)

[JustinInMN]

EDIT 10/2: See Post #16 for my first experiment with this:
https://www.pokerchipforum.com/thre...native-micro-breakdown-idea.39237/post-886997

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Okay, so I have seen occasional mention in breakdown threads about doing a dime-half-dollar progression instead of nickel-quarter-dollar. (I'm pretty sure I've even mused on this at least once here.) The thought kind of came back in September when I played in a base T100 tournament during the Canterbury Fall Poker classic, and I was reminded of this in a recent base T100 breakdown/structure thread.

I really don't know how I feel about this either way so I thought I'd pitch what I've thought up so far just to see where PCF takes this.

Nickel-quarter-single

Pros:
*More commonly understood
*Supports NL blinds of .05-.05, .05-.10

Cons:
Requires more .25 chips as workhorse

Dime-half-single

Pros:
*Requires fewer fracs, one rack of each supports .10-.10, .10-.20 and .50-.50
*Requires fewer second value chips (.50) because of the existence of the single. (Think T500-T1000)

Cons:
No clear workhorse in .10-.10 or .10-.20 (Single seems too big, but do people really want to bet stacks of halves?)

Also, would people really like a progression of half-to-two when the single is so easily understood?

So I guess what I want to know is what are your thoughts on whether or not dime-half-single is really a viable alternative? Has anyone by chance actually tried it?

With dime-half-single I would probably be figuring 0.10 * 10, 0.50 * 6, x * 1 for staring stacks in .10-.10 or .10-.20, and then for more normal stakes, just playing .50-.50 or .50-1.

With nickel-quarter-dollar would be 0.05 * 10, 0.25 * 22 and 1 * x in .05-.10, .10-.25.

I guess I am looking at dime-half-single as a possible alternative for downward flexibility instead of just a base 0.25 set and using fewer fracs overall than having to get nickels and then two racks of quarters. But is the weirdness worth the change?

I know this isn't the most coherent thing I have ever written here, and that's the main reason I'm asking. Do I have something here, or is it just too bizarre?

 

[Beakertwang]

I was actually just considering the possibility of putting together a small .10/.50/2.00 set for micro stakes, with 5's as rebuys. Finding hotstamped THC dimes might prove to be difficult, however.

Some of the $2 chips that have shown up lately have created feelings.

 

[andy699669]

With that 10p-50p-$1 the powerhouse is in the $1s.

 

[JustinInMN]

With that 10p-50p-$1 the powerhouse is in the $1s.

This is the crux of what I was wondering. You have done this? It's not too big a jump if playing .10-.10 or .10-,20?

 

[BGinGA]

I'd load up on the dimes, dump the 50c chips, and jump straight to $1s for your 10c/20c game.

Well, actually, I'd go standard 5c/25c/$1 (and play either 5c/10c or 10c/25c), which also leaves room for 1c penny-poker on family nights (by adding a 1c chip) and upwards expansion (by adding $5s), making it a super-flexible set.....but that's not what you're asking.....

Dimes are pretty useless chips, generally speaking. So are 50c chips. Both have a place in very specific scenarios, but they really limit overall flexibility.

 

[honkydevil]

With my CPS chips w/nickels I started my noob friends playing .05/.10 and then they wanted to double the blinds to .10/.20 which was great but after a couple games I said we play .10/.25 to reduce the piles of nickels in the blinds going in. After another game or 2 I said just bet in .25 increments which requires even less nickels in your set.

Not sure if this helps anything but that’s how I dealt with using nickels.

 

[honkydevil]

I said we play .10/.25 to reduce the piles of nickels in the blinds going in.

After that I bought a Paulson set and said we play .25/.25 to continue reducing the nickels lol.

 

[Lemonzest]

I flip flopped a long time and we did play 10/20 cents for a while. After much convincing by PCF I finally switched to 25c/25c and I am never using dimes again. Quarters are just so much more functional.

25c/$1/$5 works great and they are all standard denoms which helps for buying/selling and trying to build sets.

 

[allforcharity]

Get two sets of non-denominational chips.

Use one when you need quarters.
Use both when you need dimes/half-dollars.

If someone screams "Security!", you are losing at most 25 cents if a non-denom chip worth 0.25 suddently shows up at a future game worth 0.50; not worth crying over.

 

[Darson]

A while ago I was toying with the idea of a 10c/50c/snapper/$10 set but the availability of 10c chips put me off.

 

[JustinInMN]

Get two sets of non-denominational chips.

Use one when you need quarters.
Use both when you need dimes/half-dollars.

If someone screams "Security!", you are losing at most 25 cents if a non-denom chip worth 0.25 suddently shows up at a future game worth 0.50; not worth crying over.

I do appreciate this would work, but it's more of a style point for me. If I am going to get customs with denominations, I am going to denominations on all chips.

(And FWIW, I feel like I am among the more likely to yell "security" .)

 

[JustinInMN]

And this was my first plan.

Maybe I should've given this at the outset, I am considering a breakdown to cover a crazy range from .05-.10 to 1-2, with extra singles built in to play limit. I was really only trying to focus on the fractional part of the breakdown at the start. I'm in this for customs so availability isn't really an issue.

So I was on something like this.

0.05 * 100
0.25 * 200
1 * 750
5 * 300
20 * 100
100 * 50

1500 chips.

So then I figure that makes good subsets for the following NL games.

.05-.05 (.05/.25/1): 100/200/300
.05-.10 (.05/.25/1): 100/200/300
.25-.25 (.25/1/5): 100/400/100
.25-.50 (.25/1/5): 100/300/200
.50-1 (.25/1/5/20): 100/150/300/50
1-2 (1/5/20/100): 150/300/100/50
LIMIT (.25/1/20): 100/700/100

Then I got in this tournament (where I became 10th place Canterbury Park world champion of crazy pineapple, btw), which used BB ante so it was base T100 instead of T25 and I received a 15/5/6 (T100/500/1000) breakdown of chips for T10000, and that clicked with me as a credible 0.10-0.10 breakdown, 15/5/6 (0.10/0.50/1). The more I thought about it, I realized doing dime-half-single could save me a rack of fracs, that I could re purpose into singles.

0.10 * 100
0.50 * 100
1 * 850
5 * 300
20 * 100
100 * 50

1500 chips, that covers the following subsets

.10-.10 (.10/.50/1): 100/50/450
.10-.20 (.10/.50/1): 100/50/450
.50-.50 (.50/1/5): 100/300/200
.50-1 (.50/1/5/20): 50/150/300/100
1-2 (1/5/20/100): 150/300/100/50
LIMIT (.50/1/20): 50/850/100

So at least in theory, I like the breakdowns better in the latter list. The .50 chip seems much better for .50-1 and limit games, and at least a wash substituting .50-.50 for .25-.50.

But I find the 5c/25c/1 breakdown more intuitive as pretty much everyone in the thread has said so for, but at least on e-paper, it appears the 10c/50c/1 breakdown is possibly more efficient if playing the micros isn't too weird. In other words it seems I can essentially make the 1 the "workhorse" for all stakes with a 50c BB or lower.

So it appears maybe @andy699669 has done this. I guess I am mostly wondering if making 1 the workhorse in these micro games is too big a jump in anyone's experience or what micro players might think of that breakdown compared to using nickels and quarters?

This must be how 1000 chip sets become 1500 and how that becomes 2000 .

The best answer might be to find some dice chips somewhere and run an experiment.

 

[Marius L]

Just wanted to chime in on the .10-.20 structure.

Here in Norway the most common stakes played in pokerclubs are 10-20 nok (a bit higher than $1-$2)

These games (at least the ones I have played in) use 10 - 100 - 500 - 1000 chips. No 50 chip. The combo of 10s and 100s works well. I will say that the games play pretty big, and the common preflop open is usually in the range of 100 - 120. Seems some people don't bother throwing in 60 or 70 in tens.

I still think the combo of 10s and 100s would work well if people opened more in the range of 3-5x bb.

Heres a random stack pic from a while back
Blue tens and gray hundos

 

[Ischie]

Looked at the Paulson microstakes set a bit closer and the 10cent chip appears to be the most used by far. Blinds of 0.10 and 0.20 is great imho.
Here is a video with some opinions by @Hobbyphilic.

 

[Eloe2000]

We have a long-standing weekly .10/.20 NLHE game that started as $20 buys/rebuys that we moved to $40 buys but never changed the blinds for some reason. We are finally looking at changing the blinds to .20/.40 but it’s such an odd structure. Conicedentally we are moving the game to my house and am looking to get a new set and I’m completely baffled at how to tackle it stack wise. There is definitely no appetite to go to $50 buys so I am debating either a .1,.5,1,5 set or a .1,.25,1,5 set (set we had historically used) myself to accommodate a .20/.40 blind structure.

 

[JustinInMN]

So I ran an experiment in my micro stakes game this week.

Usually this is a 10 buy-in dealers' choice game, 5-6 handed family game with .05-.10 blinds on button games, .05 ante in stud with a .10 force, and .25/.50 for limit games.
The set for this is 75 * 0.05, 225 * 0.25, 200 * 1. (not a lot of ones get in play.)

This week we changed a bit, still 10 buy-in, but .10-.10 blinds for button games, .30 dealer ante in stud, and .20/.40 limit.
I had the following breakdown 0.10 * 100, 0.50 * 40, 160 * 1.

I re-purposed some of the 8V china clays to make dimes with cheap labels. (If I put pictures here, it would hardly be pr0n.)

The feedback on the switch to dime-half was indifferent to positive. It ran pretty smoothly, it didn't really impact the game a lot. The positive feedback was that dimes and halves are just more significant, even though I didn't really change the overall stakes of the game.

The only real downside was it was far fewer chips in play. We got only 75 in play after a few hours, which works out to 195 chips. In the old breakdown that would have been 315.

Related to that, the limit games for sure felt tight with only 100 dimes to work with in a 2-/4- chip structure instead of having 200 quarters in a 1-/2- chip structure. This could probably be mitigated by going for 200 dimes, but that feels like too many blind chips.

That said, if it was 200 dimes in the set, the 75 instead represents 335 chips so it solves both issues .

But my first experiment indicates, this is a credible breakdown.

 

[Lovejoyz]

This is far more important to some people than others. One of the groups that I play with don’t care ‘how many’ chips are in play. The other group wants mounds of chips, mounds and mounds of chips, and will still play tight in our .05-.05 game
With that said, I’d rather have too many blind chips than even the slightest question or ‘is there enough, probably?’

 

[karsus]

I know this is heresy as it reduces the need for more chips

Instead of getting nickel or dime chips, what I did was build a set based on $0.25 fracs, $1s, $5s, $25s, and a barrel of $100s. That allows me to run a $0.25 games up to $1/$2 games. If we want to run a dime game, what we do is run the chips at 10% of face value. For instance $1 chips become my dimes, $5 chip is 50 cents, and so on. It allows you to run a wide variety of stakes without needing multiple different sets.