Optimal cash game set for $5 to $50 buyins? (1 Viewer)

[elemeno]

Optimal meaning a comfortable amount of chips to play any stakes starting with 100BB at $5 to $50 buyins. I like handing out a barrel for the lowest denomination. My games don’t get too crazy, so with 8 players, we’re looking at 24 buyins maximum and very rarely.

I’m thinking:

200 nickels
200 quarters
200 dollars
200 fives
Total bank: $1260

$5 game, 5c/5c blinds
20 nickels
16 quarters

$10 game, 5c/10c blinds
20 nickels
20 quarters
4 dollars

$25 game, 25c/25c blinds
20 quarters
20 dollars

$50 game, 25c/50c blinds
20 quarters
20 dollars
5 fives

Any reason to deviate from this?

 

[TankingRowlet]

I only do a half barrel of the smallest chip as it is only played as blinds and change can be made quite easily between hands. Personally don't like having way too many small chips.

Believe there is a Google Doc lying around somewhere with very optimized chip count breakdown, which looked like this for 25c/50c
120x 0.25c
200x $1
160x $5
20x $20/25

Add 100 0.05c and looks like you'll be good.

 

[QuietMaple]

I have similar needs as you and I agree that it's nice to give everyone a barrel of the small chips. I do the same, so I think 200 nickels and quarters is about right. You're breakdown seems perfectly reasonable to me.

If you wanted to trim down a bit you would be fine with 160 nickels and 160 quarters instead, but some prefer the look of a full rack of 100 on the shelf If you wanted 700 chips instead of 800, you could go with this:

 

[bruh]

To answer your question, the reason to deviate from this is preference. Some people hate a lot of chips on the table, others like it. To me, 'minimum' number of chips sounds cool and all and you definitely save money, but moar chips is not only visually more appealing and fun, but I also find that proportionality between the denominations helps in quickly assessing how much a player has in his stack.

My preference is (per player):

• 10 to 15 of the lowest denom chips
• 40 to 100 of the workhorse chips (4x or 5x the value of the lowest denom)
• A third and possibly a fourth denomination, of which the number in play should be in proportion to the amount of workhorse chips
• Add-ons / rebuys using only the highest denoms

Examples of chips per player for relatively deep and splashy games:

$.25/.50 cash game (NLH)
$.25 x12
$1 x47
$5 x10
$25 x2

That's $150 (300 BB). Think of it as 50 dollars in each of the three higher denominations, then make change with three $1 chips and you get you blinds chips.
Or for moar chips, use $1 x75 and $5 x15, with no $25 chips.

Another example using even moar chips

$1/3 cash game (NLH)
$1 x10
$5 x98
$25 x20

It's very intuitive seeing the rack of $5 and the one barrel of $25. And now you see why some people buy seven racks of workhorse chips.
That's $1000 (333.3 BB). If you think that's too much, you can always adjust and play 2/5 or 5/10

You could say that for tournament chip stacks it would be a different story, I disagree. Keep the lowest denoms with a reasonable minimum number of chips (they'll just be colored up) and use the same proportionality reasoning as above for the higher denoms. For example, for a 8-10 player STT T500 base tournament with a deep stack (300k), I'd use.

T500 x10
T1000 x10
T5000 x27
T25000 x6

Of course you could be much more efficient by using

T500 x10
T1000 x10
T5000 x7
T25000 x10

If hosting a tournament with a larger player base and more tables, consider the T5000 as a low denomination and keep the total number in play to a minimum before it gets colored up, introduce a T100k chip, possibly even 500k or 1M chips and use the same principle.