Poker Zombie
Royal Flush
My chipsets are usually a little over the top. 300 T25s for 18 players? Yes please. 16 per player means never having to make change. 1000 piece sets are my standard as they give a lot of room for my game to expand.
Yet, I still remember the early days when my budget couldn't reach that far. So, in order to stay in touch with "younger me" I decided to make a budget-friendly tournament set, with only 600 chips.
To make it work, I had to look very closely at set construction.
Here's the breakdown:
Blinds are also a very important part of how many chips you need, and blind structures are frequently overlooked in most discussions about budget set building. The idea here is to make sure the blinds don't increase to the point where all your chips are coming off the table. How do you do this while making the blinds appear reasonable? Antes. And though I hate antes, and have railed against the Big Blind Ante, it was the logical choice for this set, as an Ante jacks up the "M", ending the tournament before you need to color up too many chips.
For 18 players, the starting stacks of T250,000 are:
T500 x8
T1000 x6
T5000 x8
T25,000 x4
T100,000 x1
This is what I went with, with 16 minute levels, 12 minute breaks, and a 7pm-midnight timeframe.
The result:
There was a lot of change making, but it worked. It was a lot of fun, and the night ran pretty well, but there was the one gripe - too much change making. The group killed 3 bottles of vodka and then some, so that probably didn't help the simple math of making change.
In retrospect, the BBA was a partial cause of the change needs, as the Ante needs to be exact each hand. I was more focused on a structure that would pass the @BGinGA test for quality than I was in the number of chips needed each hand. 4000-8000-8000 ante fits the structure progression very well, but requires 6x T1000s for the Big Blind to post, or you need to make change. Then, right after paying the BB, your next hand is going to cost you 4 more T1000s. That is more than the average stack holds. An ugly jump to 5000-10,000-10,000 would solve that issue - but it would be ugly.
I could also solve the issue with a few more racks...
Yet, I still remember the early days when my budget couldn't reach that far. So, in order to stay in touch with "younger me" I decided to make a budget-friendly tournament set, with only 600 chips.
To make it work, I had to look very closely at set construction.
- Start the set at T500s. This would minimize the number of chips that I bought that spent much of the tournament sitting in racks after the first color-up. You need few T500s, because people rarely (or should rarely) use more than a single T500 chip in any bet.
- The top-end of the set also uses few chips. Their main purpose is to make the top-end deeper as you color up the smaller denoms, otherwise, most of them waste their day in a case.
Here's the breakdown:
| Chip Value | Amount | Value |
| 500 | 150 | 75,000 |
| 1000 | 125 | 125,000 |
| 5000 | 150 | 750,000 |
| 25,000 | 125 | 3,125,000 |
| 100,000 | 50 | 5,000,000 |
| Totals | 600 | 9,075,000 |
Blinds are also a very important part of how many chips you need, and blind structures are frequently overlooked in most discussions about budget set building. The idea here is to make sure the blinds don't increase to the point where all your chips are coming off the table. How do you do this while making the blinds appear reasonable? Antes. And though I hate antes, and have railed against the Big Blind Ante, it was the logical choice for this set, as an Ante jacks up the "M", ending the tournament before you need to color up too many chips.
For 18 players, the starting stacks of T250,000 are:
T500 x8
T1000 x6
T5000 x8
T25,000 x4
T100,000 x1
This is what I went with, with 16 minute levels, 12 minute breaks, and a 7pm-midnight timeframe.
The result:
There was a lot of change making, but it worked. It was a lot of fun, and the night ran pretty well, but there was the one gripe - too much change making. The group killed 3 bottles of vodka and then some, so that probably didn't help the simple math of making change.
In retrospect, the BBA was a partial cause of the change needs, as the Ante needs to be exact each hand. I was more focused on a structure that would pass the @BGinGA test for quality than I was in the number of chips needed each hand. 4000-8000-8000 ante fits the structure progression very well, but requires 6x T1000s for the Big Blind to post, or you need to make change. Then, right after paying the BB, your next hand is going to cost you 4 more T1000s. That is more than the average stack holds. An ugly jump to 5000-10,000-10,000 would solve that issue - but it would be ugly.
I could also solve the issue with a few more racks...
Last edited:
