Larold
Pair
(Photos at end)
The story of my first custom set.
I have a lot of friends who love poker almost as much as I do. With the pandemic lifting, there's a big up-tick in home tournament interest. I've always longed to have a custom set I loved, and now I'm at a point in life where I've got the income to support a new, gigantic set. I host big home tourneys at my place and at friends'.
Initial Requirements - Design
I started by ordering mold sample sets and color palette sample sets from CPC. However, my interest in CPC soon waned upon discovery of a few things:
- Even the base price of the true clay (or whatever they called the type of chip I was most interested in) from CPC was a little hefty
- They honestly didn't feel that much different from the cheap super diamonds I have (sorry if that offends!)
- They didn't have the feel / texture that I had in my head
- Most importantly, I knew I wanted a 618 edge stripe design. And that blasted the price into the stratosphere - to unacceptable levels.
Interesting, CPC charges for a lot of extra things. If you want the face aligned to the edge stripe, that costs extra. And if you want the front face aligned to the back face, that costs extra. (At least, for the chips I was looking at.) I just couldn't stomach the price for the set size I needed (more on that soon).
Don't get me wrong - CPC had amazing quality sample chips. They just didn't match what I was after in my head.
In the meantime, Tom from these forums sold me a sample set of Tinas that arrived quickly. Different colors, stripe patterns, designs, etc.
This. This was everything I had in my head that I wanted in chips: The vividness, breadth of color palette, and texture / weight / sound / feel. Everything matched what I was after.
Graphic Design and Color Scheme
I am legally blind, and live / die by color. I want a huge number of color options and flexibility in my set. I also host tournaments of upwards of 40 people, so I needed flexibility at that scale. I inquired about graphic design help on these forums, and Matt Rossetti was the first to respond.
I can't say enough good things about his work. On the first mock-up, he nailed 98% of what I had in my head, and surpassed my expectations with excellent ideas I hadn't thought of. We accidentally had too much / dark black for the main word in the logo, so Matt helped tweak the design after Tina sent photos of the first samples.
Set Size
This is where it gets ridiculous. I had Matt design me 14 different color schemes. I knew I wanted white, blue, red, green, black, purple, yellow, orange, pink, and grey. But once I had those ten, I knew I wanted some more for fun. I opted for teal and violet, and asked Matt to design two color schemes. (He opted for forest green and brown). After working through my breakdown, I ended up at 4,200 chips. (!!)
After the 2nd draft of the design, Tina sent back photos of the samples that just looked awesome. We were ready to rock.
Production and Shipping
Between giving Tina the green light and her shipping the chips, I'd say it was about 5-6 days. I opted for air shipping as it was only about 30% more expensive than boat shipping. And the chips went from her shop in China to my doorstep in Illinois... in only 61 hours.
The packing was a beautiful job - she knows her stuff. Out of the 4,200 chips, I could only find ONE that had a visible ding. It was a nick scraped out of a blue chip with the white base material visible. No chips were cracked. She sent me 2-5 extras of each color. I had 168 cellophane-wrapped stacks of 25 to unpeel - god my hands got dry and cut. But it was worth it.
The Cost
She quoted me 28 cents base price for the chip. Matt provided such prompt, consistent, and excellent work that I tipped him 10%. Graphic design cost maybe came out to 2-3 cents per chip. Rush shipping was about 8-9 cents per chip, and send-money-to-China PayPal fee was about 1 cent per chip.
Total cost of the project - about 41 cents per chip.
Why You Came Here
Funny thing. I did not specifically aim for 4,200 chips. Instead, for each color, I thought about how many I wanted. Via a last minute bump (200 orange -> 300), I ended at 4,200. Now, I say funny thing because of... math. I got to thinking - if you take stacks of 20, you end up with 210 stacks of chips. 210 rang a faint bell... and after a few seconds, I remembered that 210 is the sum of the first 20 positive integers: 1 + 2 + 3 + ...+ 20. So I committed to artwork of a perfect 20-row triangle using all the chips.
Here's the graphic novel.
Tina's wonderful and thoughtful packing job:
The construction begins...
More construction...
And more...
And let's just skip to the grand finale...
And after lots of snapping pictures, I needed to get them into their home so that my wife knew long-term storage would not be... onerous. Big thanks to Justin
for selling me these absolutely-wonderful racks. I will never use any other racks...
That's 92+ lbs. of awesomeness.
Now, perhaps the most important pic (for me). Matt's stunning graphic design work - a close-up of the purple: (Sorry for the blur.)
Matt even let me match the musical staff's color (on the black and white chips) to the edge stripes! ...
Notice the stunning work Matt did to keep the black chip looking black, but with an even darker black for the name. The flash from the phone made it look more grey than it actually is.
So... a sincere thanks to Matt for the design help, Justin for the racks, Tom for confirming that Tinas would get me everything I was looking for, and all of you for being patient with my questions over the last three months.
Here's to ridiculous-ness. Cheers!
The story of my first custom set.
I have a lot of friends who love poker almost as much as I do. With the pandemic lifting, there's a big up-tick in home tournament interest. I've always longed to have a custom set I loved, and now I'm at a point in life where I've got the income to support a new, gigantic set. I host big home tourneys at my place and at friends'.
Initial Requirements - Design
I started by ordering mold sample sets and color palette sample sets from CPC. However, my interest in CPC soon waned upon discovery of a few things:
- Even the base price of the true clay (or whatever they called the type of chip I was most interested in) from CPC was a little hefty
- They honestly didn't feel that much different from the cheap super diamonds I have (sorry if that offends!)
- They didn't have the feel / texture that I had in my head
- Most importantly, I knew I wanted a 618 edge stripe design. And that blasted the price into the stratosphere - to unacceptable levels.
Interesting, CPC charges for a lot of extra things. If you want the face aligned to the edge stripe, that costs extra. And if you want the front face aligned to the back face, that costs extra. (At least, for the chips I was looking at.) I just couldn't stomach the price for the set size I needed (more on that soon).
Don't get me wrong - CPC had amazing quality sample chips. They just didn't match what I was after in my head.
In the meantime, Tom from these forums sold me a sample set of Tinas that arrived quickly. Different colors, stripe patterns, designs, etc.
This. This was everything I had in my head that I wanted in chips: The vividness, breadth of color palette, and texture / weight / sound / feel. Everything matched what I was after.
Graphic Design and Color Scheme
I am legally blind, and live / die by color. I want a huge number of color options and flexibility in my set. I also host tournaments of upwards of 40 people, so I needed flexibility at that scale. I inquired about graphic design help on these forums, and Matt Rossetti was the first to respond.
I can't say enough good things about his work. On the first mock-up, he nailed 98% of what I had in my head, and surpassed my expectations with excellent ideas I hadn't thought of. We accidentally had too much / dark black for the main word in the logo, so Matt helped tweak the design after Tina sent photos of the first samples.
Set Size
This is where it gets ridiculous. I had Matt design me 14 different color schemes. I knew I wanted white, blue, red, green, black, purple, yellow, orange, pink, and grey. But once I had those ten, I knew I wanted some more for fun. I opted for teal and violet, and asked Matt to design two color schemes. (He opted for forest green and brown). After working through my breakdown, I ended up at 4,200 chips. (!!)
After the 2nd draft of the design, Tina sent back photos of the samples that just looked awesome. We were ready to rock.
Production and Shipping
Between giving Tina the green light and her shipping the chips, I'd say it was about 5-6 days. I opted for air shipping as it was only about 30% more expensive than boat shipping. And the chips went from her shop in China to my doorstep in Illinois... in only 61 hours.
The packing was a beautiful job - she knows her stuff. Out of the 4,200 chips, I could only find ONE that had a visible ding. It was a nick scraped out of a blue chip with the white base material visible. No chips were cracked. She sent me 2-5 extras of each color. I had 168 cellophane-wrapped stacks of 25 to unpeel - god my hands got dry and cut. But it was worth it.
The Cost
She quoted me 28 cents base price for the chip. Matt provided such prompt, consistent, and excellent work that I tipped him 10%. Graphic design cost maybe came out to 2-3 cents per chip. Rush shipping was about 8-9 cents per chip, and send-money-to-China PayPal fee was about 1 cent per chip.
Total cost of the project - about 41 cents per chip.
Why You Came Here
Funny thing. I did not specifically aim for 4,200 chips. Instead, for each color, I thought about how many I wanted. Via a last minute bump (200 orange -> 300), I ended at 4,200. Now, I say funny thing because of... math. I got to thinking - if you take stacks of 20, you end up with 210 stacks of chips. 210 rang a faint bell... and after a few seconds, I remembered that 210 is the sum of the first 20 positive integers: 1 + 2 + 3 + ...+ 20. So I committed to artwork of a perfect 20-row triangle using all the chips.
Here's the graphic novel.
Tina's wonderful and thoughtful packing job:
The construction begins...
More construction...
And more...
And let's just skip to the grand finale...
And after lots of snapping pictures, I needed to get them into their home so that my wife knew long-term storage would not be... onerous. Big thanks to Justin
for selling me these absolutely-wonderful racks. I will never use any other racks...
That's 92+ lbs. of awesomeness.
Now, perhaps the most important pic (for me). Matt's stunning graphic design work - a close-up of the purple: (Sorry for the blur.)
Matt even let me match the musical staff's color (on the black and white chips) to the edge stripes! ...
Notice the stunning work Matt did to keep the black chip looking black, but with an even darker black for the name. The flash from the phone made it look more grey than it actually is.
So... a sincere thanks to Matt for the design help, Justin for the racks, Tom for confirming that Tinas would get me everything I was looking for, and all of you for being patient with my questions over the last three months.
Here's to ridiculous-ness. Cheers!
Last edited:
that is an insane amount of chips. 
