RowdyRawhide
Full House
Sound advice here. I wouldn't worry about having the small blind and big blind the same at these levels. If the table is limping along I've rarely seen the small blind fold anyway. Maybe a little more often at 4-8 but in my experience there's typically less limping preflop in these games as wellVery well put, my mental custom set has ballooned from 1000 to 1800.
That said, although I personally prefer the limit game, I don't think it's a very popular format in home games. I am trying to host a limit game through our "Minneapolis Rounders" poker group on Meetup.com in two weeks, have one player signed up out of hundreds of members in the group. If I set up .25-.50 NL, I can get 6-8 players without sweating a ton.
If you really have a group interested in a limit game @RowdyRawhide and @v1pe are giving you the right advice. Load up on "workhorse" chips (at your stakes quarters are the choice, don't bother with .50 chips) and get a few high value store chips. If I were you I would go for a set of 600: 500 quarters, 75 fives, 25 twenty-fives (just for bulk), for a bank of 1125.
If you are playing .50/1 then this accommodates 45 buy ins of 25, and 20 buy ins before you would even tap the twenty-fives.
If you are playing .25/.50 then your typical buy in would probably be 10-15 and you would have 33-50 buy-ins before tapping the twenty-fives.
I think this would accommodate both stakes well. With regards to the issue of the small blind in a .25/.50 limit game the 50% rule isn't set in stone. (So don't worry about finding 0.125 chips ;P) There is nothing against the rules about making both blinds the same, and that's what I would do if you don't want to mess with anything smaller than quarters as you said. The only real difference with this change is it would get the small blind involved in more hands than otherwise. (They've already essentially "limped", but will also have better pot odds when facing a raise.) I don't consider that significant, and at least the change would be in the direction of increasing action, which is better.
The only real alternative would be to get some nickels and use a .10 or .15 small blind, but in my opinion I don't think that's really worth dedicating any portion of your somewhat tight set for this specific purpose. I'm already pushing you to 600 as it is.
But the main point is focus on "workhorse chips" whether building a no-limit set or a limit set. But in a limit set you can really take the idea further because you really only need two denominations and you only need to make change to break value chips instead of during pots (if you used singles in this case). If you were to decide to do 1000, I would say 8 racks of quarters, 1.5 racks of fives, 0.5 racks of twenty-fives for just in case.
As for depth of bank there could be an argument made for skipping the 25s all together and just going straight to 100s any way. 1 ×$100 = 1 barrel of $5s. Perhaps you could have 10 or 20 custom plaques made from @ABC Gifts and Awards. Then you could only have chips for the quarter and 5s
