I've addressed this issue before, but so the OP understands the issue, I'll put this out there again.
The issue with one set of chips for both uses is chip migration. Chip migration occurs when a tournament chip migrates to a cash game and there is no money in the cash kitty to cover that chip. That’s bad for the host, the banker, and/or the last people to cash out since the money in the kitty disappeared when others cashed out.
Tournament chips use fantasy values. The chips do not maintain their value throughout a tournament. Cash chips are using chips instead of cash. Those chips maintain their value throughout a game.
In a tournament, you might pay $20 and get 100,000 in chips. There is no correlation between the buy-in and the amount in chips. In a cash set, there is a direct correlation.
Suppose your players are trustworthy and would never deliberately migrate chips. That doesn’t fix the problem. Here’s what I saw happen where a cash game followed a tournament game, using the same set of chips.
Table gets bumped early in tournament (using 25/50/100/500/1000/5000/10,000 chips), and player raking large pot has chips all over the floor. Others help pick up chips.
Later, the cash game started at that table. Values of chips were the same except in pennies instead of points. Once again, player sitting in close to the same position has some chips dumped on floor. He picks them up (I wasn’t in it so don’t know if others helped). At the end of the night, there is $10 more in chips than there is in cash.
It isn’t hard to imagine what happened. The tournament player never noticed one of the 1000 chips on the floor, and neither did anyone else. When chips were dumped in the cash game, that 1000 chip got picked up without the player ever realizing he had picked up an extra $10 chip.
This involves no cheating, no deliberate chip migration, and no nefarious acts, but the pot is still $10 short. It’s an honest mistake, but who pays? Some players had already cashed out and gone home. Maybe one of them has $10 they didn’t actually earn. But how can you ask them to pay for something that wasn’t even discovered until after they left? And what if that had been a $50 or $100 chip? It’s the same problem, the consequences are just bigger.
It’s not hard to imagine T25 (T = tournament) as the lowest tournament chip, but being used for $25 in a cash game. That T25 is of little real value, providing just a small fraction of the starting chip stack (1-5%). When it is colored up, it has no more value in a tournament. So it moves to the cash game as the $25 chip. Similar scenario as above, but now the pot is $25 short. Some people will even do something like this. Make $ value different that T value. The T25 becomes the $100 chip. Now the pot is $100 short.
Now, suppose you are the banker, responsible for taking in cash and issuing the chips, and you are the one who has to pay for this. Really in a cash game, this is what SHOULD happen. But who in their right mind would be willing to be the banker with those rules that require the banker to pay for bank mistakes and accidental chip migration is a possibility because the chips are the same? No one in their right mind would do that if they understood the problem!
Or, what if there is such a banker, and he realizes that this has happened, he suddenly decides to go home and leave the banking to someone else. Even if you take away the first banker’s deliberate act, suppose he just goes home without noticing? I bet when that happens rarely are all chips turned in so the mistake is caught before changing bankers. The banker with no control winds up paying. For a lot of players, a cash set that only goes to $20 or $25 and a tournament set that starts at T25 or T100 works just fine. But you don’t have the same chips being used for both cash and tournaments.
That’s why I refuse to play cash games with tournament chips. If you are playing for money, buy two sets of chips. Before you have disaster strike, get a separate cash set and only use it for cash games. One disaster can cost you a lot more than the money lost that night. Your game might become known as a dishonest game and cost you players. Some would refuse to ever come back, and they might tell others.
The only way the same set of chips could be used would be if you did something like this. Cash chips are $.05/$.25/$1/$5/$20 or $25. Tournament chips are 25 (if not being used in cash game) - 100 - 500 - 1000 - 5000 - 25,000 - 100,000.
That makes sense, but it is actually two different chip sets! They just have the same mold and labels/inlays.
