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Tourney What chip transition is better, T500-T1000 or T500-T2500? (1 Viewer)

tigon

tigon

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I'm thinking about designing some inlays for a tournament set, but I don't even know what denominations I want on my chips let alone a design.

What do you like better for the next highest chip after the t500? I just think a chip worth double is kind of weird, but don't know if it actually works better for typical structures. Making it t2500 forces the next higher chips to be even higher.

I don't see myself running 3+ tables but it'd be nice for that to be a possibility in the future.

My breakdown of chips that I have are:

200+ t25
160 t100
160/240 t500
160/240 t1k/2k/2.5k
80 t5k/10k
80 t25k/50k
20 t100k/250k
 
There's a tendency to have 1,000, 5,000, 25,000, 100,000 to mimic the 1, 5, 25, 100 standard. (Multiples of 5, 5, 4.)

To get there, though, you need to do something between 100 and 1,000. 500 hundred is the usual go-to, and people just deal with the oddly small break between 500 and 1,000. (multiple of 2).

But some people use 1, 5, 20, 100. (multiples 5, 4, 5) - you don't have to mimic the common ones.

Alternatives just do away with the 1,000 5,000, 25,000, 100,000 entirely... As BG notes, 500, 2,000 10,000, 50,000, 200,000 works (multiples of 4, 5, 5, 4).
Another: 500, 2,500, 10,000, 50,000, 200,000 (multiples.5, 4, 5, 4). I like this approach, because the 2,500s make it easier to build multiples of five, like a bet of 45,000.

Or, if you stick with the typical 500, 1,000, 5,000.... then you can use fewer chips on the 500 and the 1,000 than on other denoms; since they're in a similar zone, they have a lot of overlap in usage, and you don't need as many of each.
 
$1 - $5 - $25 - $100 - $500 - $1,000 - $5,000 - $25,000 is the most logical progression for a casino because it's more logical to have a $1,000 chip than a $2,000 or $2,500 chip. It's easier to count with (a barrel being $20,000 and a rack being $100,000 in stead of $40,000/$200,000 or $50,000/$250,000 respectively).

For tournaments this progression has been applied as well, since it was already the norm for cash chips.

There is however nothing that says this cannot be changed or improved upon. For Tournaments I agree that going with T500 - T2,000 - T10,000 makes more sense, though some people still prefer sticking with the casino standards. I wouldn't go with T2,500 chips because they won't fit the standard 2,000/4,000, 3,000/6,000, 4,000/8,000, 6,000/12,000, 8,000/16,000 blinds. You would need to keep the T500 chips in play for far too long. (Then again, you're gonna run into trouble with the 15,000/30,000 blinds with the T2,000 chips, so either way you'd need to play around with the blinds if you get that high).
 
For me I'm happy using T1000's and T5000 as my work-horse denoms. Followed by T25000 usually appearing only in two table tourneys or more. To start any tourney I will also have T100 and T500 as well but will chip-up and phase out ASAP. I despise T25's and have never had them in any set. Completely useless chips.
 
This will depend entirely upon your blind structure. When the blinds get larger you may find having 1000s is more efficient...especially with antes.

Most people play smaller tournaments where this will not be an issue.
 
If you use a 2500 chip, you can actually repeat your opening structure, and get a lot of consistency

For example, if your chips are:

25 / 100 / 500 / 2500 / 10,000 / 50,000 / 250,000 / 1,000,000 / 5,000,000 / 25,000,000

Multiples:

(1) / 4 / 5 / 5 / 4 / 5 / 5 / 4 / 5 / 5

The exact structure you use with 25 / 100 / 500
Can be repeated with 2,500 / 10,000 / 50,000
And repeated with 250,000 / 1,000,000 / 5,000,000

Again, its 4/5/5 multiples all the way, repeating. 2500 is no more awkward than 25.

You can even do this with a single set used for cash or tourney, denoms:
.25 / 1.00 / 5.00 / 25 / 100 / 500 / 2500 / 10,000 / 50,000 / 250,000
 
Also, you can consider doing a high-value tourney set instead, and side-step the whole question.

I just bought a small 10-player Turbo set built from existing (standard) denoms of the Nine Dragons chips, intended for this opening stack:

5/4/1 of T1,000/T5,000/T25,000 - total T50,000.
Total bank: 500,000 - also makes a nice 1/2 million heads-up set.

But then I added a couple 500. Ten-player opening stacks are now:
1/5/4/1 of T500/T1,000/T5,000/T25,000 - total T50,500.

Why?

Because if the smallest chip is T1,000, opening blinds are 1,000/2,000, and the starting stacks are only 25 big blinds. Even for a Turbo, that's a short stack.

Adding the 500 makes the opening blinds 500/1000, and means stacks are 50 big blinds. Much better. Because it's a Turbo with 5-minute levels, we won't need the 500s for long... we may not even get around the table before the blinds go up.

For a short-handed tourney of 5 people, I can do stacks of T100,000 from 2/9/8/2, and can open with 100 bb or 50 bb stacks.

You might even consider doing this for your tourney set:

500 / 1,000 / 5,000 / 25,000 / 100,000 / 500,000 / 2,500,000

Why?

The 500 / 1000 up front lets you scale the early blinds nicely.
The bulk of the tourney has a steady progression.

At the very top end, you might want a T1,000,000 chip, instead. It's a nice number, And you won't need to keep increasing the blinds any more... you'll just need to let them play out a bunch of hands. You're already at about six levels of chips (seven chips, but the first and last increments are only double, not multiples of four or five.)

And starting at 500 keeps the hundos and $25 checks in your cash sets. :)
 
I really like the idea of a 25-100-500-2000/2500-10000 progression for tournaments - SOOO much better to my mind than the 500-1000 jump. Although I would agree that using a T2000 makes a little more sense intuitively than a T2500, my eventual custom tourney set is probably going to use T2500s - they just make set breakdowns and starting stacks so much cleaner (and also you don't need as many T500s.)

Under this scenario the T500 may never be completely phased out, which is fine IMO as it is the workhorse denom for the whole tourney. And if you aren't capable of putting together 3 T2500s and 1 T500 to make 8000, well then I don't know what to tell ya. That's still the same amount of chips as 1 5k and 3 1ks.
 
My preference is to use the traditional T1K. I've seen players struggling to bet with multiple T500 chips. My head hurts just thinking about giving those same players T2K or T2500 chips.
 
I can see people getting weirded out by 2k chips, but not 2500... I'm wondering if it's because of how I pronounce it it my head?

If I think of "two thousand five hundred" chips, I don't want to deal with them.
If I think of "twenty-five hundred" chips, I feel it's as easy as deal with "twenty fives."

I can put together three quarters and a nickel to make 80 cents without a second thought.
 
I think you have a good range of ideas already posted. When I design a set I like to have the most flexibility for the widest ranges of choices in breakdown, blinds, starting stacks etc... My custom set had a 250, 2500, 10k, 50k, 250k, 1m, 5m, 10m, along with the traditional, so I could create different starting stacks. Having said that, I prefer the traditional breakdown 500, 1k, 5k, 25k, 100k 500k
 
abby99 said:
My preference is to use the traditional T1K. I've seen players struggling to bet with multiple T500 chips. My head hurts just thinking about giving those same players T2K or T2500 chips.
Click to expand...
I think this is a valid point. I have a set that uses T2000 but it's the highest denom of the set, so generally people don't need to bet using large amounts of them.
 
I prefer 25-100-500-1K-5K-25K because it more closely mimics what is common in casinos. Most of our chips are designed in one way or another after casino chips.

Similarly, for cash games, $20 makes more sense than $25 because it follow the currency. However, $20 chips are rarely seen in common casino games, so they confuse players, and $25 chips seem to work better.

So, as in many things, the method that "makes the most sense" fails to the one that "works the best."

L
 
T$1000 or T$2000 all the way

4000-8000 6000-12000 8000-16000 10000-20000

Good luck with your T$2500 chip
 
Thanks everyone. It seems like the 2500 chip could be pretty inefficient and lead to overreliance on the 500 chips during periods with ~1k antes.
 
I made my custom set with T2500 chips, and I'd never do it again. I'd go with T2000 for one simple reason: most players take forever to do the mental math required to figure out how to bet or call, say, 19,000 using T2500 chips. T2500 chips slow the game down tremendously.
 
tigon said:
It seems like the 2500 chip could be pretty inefficient and lead to overreliance on the 500 chips during periods with ~1k antes.
Click to expand...

I'm not going to keep beating the drum for any particular chip, but I do want you to be aware of the flaw in your logic -

Every value chip will have an inefficient zone when the blinds are just below it, and you'll rely on a lower denomination. You just need to pick your blind levels based on the chips you chose, whatever they were.

If you use $25 chips, don't play 20/40, 30/60, 40/80.
If you use $20 chips, don't play 15/30, 25/50, 35/70.
In either case, playing 5/10 will require a lot of smaller chips.

If you really like the idea of a 1000 chip and a 1000-based blind level, consider one of these chip spreads, too:

10 / 50 / 250 / 1,000 / 5,000 / 25,000
multiples: (1) / 5 / 5 / 4 / 5 / 5

10 / 50 / 200 / 1,000 / 5,000 / 20,000
multiples: (1) / 5 / 4 / 5 / 5 / 4

I really like the first one, with the 250 chip. These both avoid the 2 multiple from the standard progression:

25 / 100 / 500 / 1,000 / 5,000 / 25,000
multiples: (1) / 4 / 5 / 2 / 5 / 5

It may be weird to have a set with two-hundreds or two-fifites instead of hundos, but if this set is exclusively for tournaments, it's not like those will play in cash, anyway.

And if anyone claims the math is hard, I'd remind them that you're simply breaking the 1,000 denom into quarters, nickels, and pennies:
1000 / 250 / 50 / 10
1.00 / .25 / .05 / .01

We've all been doing that math since we were children.
 
Just start with T1 (or T.25, T.05 or T.01) as your lowest tournament denomination, and all of your worries disappear. :cool:

You'll never need/use a chip larger than T500: T.01, T.05, T.25, T1, T5, T25, T100, T500
 
BGinGA said:
Just start with T1 (or T.25, T.05 or T.01) as your lowest tournament denomination, and all of your worries disappear. :cool:

You'll never need/use a chip larger than T500: T.01, T.05, T.25, T1, T5, T25, T100, T500
Click to expand...

You read my mind.

The biggest lol of this thread and similar ones is the insistence planning these "high-denom" tournaments. What's the allure of playing T100,000 or higher tournaments? How will they play any different than any other tournament? So much teeth gnashing and hand wringing which can be eliminated by just playing T100.
 
Agreed. I think a lot of people don't want their well-played cash denoms matching a tournament denom... but if you have separate chip sets for cash and tourney, it's really moot.

There are a lot of people, however, for whom the higher-denom chips are just more fun, somehow. And they are usually the types you want to entertain. :)
 
Just because this thread is hardly getting any replies or input and nobody seems to care either way anyway, I thought I'd put together a couple of blinds structures starting with T25 chips, and incorporating T2,000 / T2,500 chips to prove that both can work fine.

T25/T100/T500/T2,000/T10,000

50/100
75/150
100/200
150/300
- Remove 25 -
200/400
300/600
400/800
600/1,200
800/1,600
- Remove 100 -
1,000/2,000
1,500/3,000
2,000/4,000
3,000/6,000
- Remove 500 -
4,000/8,000
6,000/12,000
8,000/16,000
10,000/20,000
16,000/30,000
- Remove 2,000 -
20,000/40,000
30,000/60,000


T25/T100/T500/T2,500/T10,000

50/100
75/150
100/200
150/300
- Remove 25 -
200/400
300/600
400/800
600/1,200
800/1,600
- Remove 100 -
1,000/2,000
1,500/3,000
2,000/4,000
3,000/6,000
- Remove 500 -
5,000/10,000
7,500/15,000
10,000/20,000
15,000/30,000
- Remove 2,500 -
20,000/40,000
30,000/60,000
 
I care (or, I want to voice my opinion). I have no doubt that effective blinds structures can be constructed around T2K/T2.5K chips. My objection stems from watching players handling T500 chips. Imagine a player making a 9,000 bet by putting 9 stacks of two chips each. Most (not all) players would catch on quickly, but I'm concerned about the effect that the other players will have on the game. My tournament chip sets all have 500/1K chips at that inflection point. I believe in using denominations that are familiar to the players and am not interested in retraining anybody. Just sayin' . . .
 
abby99 said:
I care (or, I want to voice my opinion). I have no doubt that effective blinds structures can be constructed around T2K/T2.5K chips. My objection stems from watching players handling T500 chips. Imagine a player making a 9,000 bet by putting 9 stacks of two chips each. Most (not all) players would catch on quickly, but I'm concerned about the effect that the other players will have on the game. My tournament chip sets all have 500/1K chips at that inflection point. I believe in using denominations that are familiar to the players and am not interested in retraining anybody. Just sayin' . . .
Click to expand...

^^^Exactly. This isn't about what would work for me, or what math I can do. It's about what works in real life. Inevitably, some players fumble with their chips or count chips awkwardly. However if you throw in denominations that are unfamiliar, you multiply the problem. The only real downside to T500 and T1000 chips in the same set is that you need a few more chips to make things work. That might be a problem if this were www.efficientpoker.com.....
 
I understand and agree with the counting difficulty, but I also find it funny that people who can't count a few chips can also play a complex game like poker.

They remind me of the cashiers at fast food places (and most retail stores) that can't make simple change without having the register tell them.
 
Sal Bandini said:
They remind me of the cashiers at fast food places (and most retail stores) that can't make simple change without having the register tell them.
Click to expand...

You must referring to the guy who will give me $0.85 in change as two quarters, three dimes, and a nickel. He's probably thinking 25 - 50 - 60 - 70 - 80 - 85. I suppose I should be grateful for not getting eight dimes. ;)
 

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