That's pretty sweet for a tourney starting at 100/200. I'm sure it works well, and yeah, nice easy setups and storage when you get a 20-chip stack. For those starting at 25/50, 4500 is a nice 20-stack as well.

I think I'll either make it a $8 + $2 or a $11 + $4 or something to keep the buy-ins even; either way I'll have lots of change ready.

I like this setup also, just a stack of 20 chips is easy to work with.

This looks good to me, and I appreciate that you took the time to hand-jam the chart out. I'm at school in New York and home is in Illinois so I can't play with my dice chips, but I see that your chip layout will work to chip up with + rebuys and addons.

Here's the final order (chips come in packages of 25):

T25 x125
T100 x 125
T500 x 100
T1000 x 100
T5000 x 75

+ 3 cut cards and a nice set of 4 pip 4 color modianos (I've splurged on deck buying lately hehe).

Thanks for everyone's help! I'll be running my first tourney with them two weeks from yesterday, I'll post then with pictures!

This does work fine. And it would free up some more chips in higher denoms. But I don't think higher denom chips are needed.

Another newb question:

When coloring up, do you round up, or have the player keep the remainder? i.e. if I have 2x T25 and the T25's are all getting removed, do I round myself up to 1xT100?

You could do either, but I always round up. I want to get all of the small chips off the table.

The value is not much by that point. One 25 gets you 100 when the blinds are 400/800, for example. 75 free chips. Big deal.

There are also methods for racing for odd chips between players, but I think it is a waste of time, for the same reason.

There are two ways of getting the small chips off the table - round up or race. When you race, everybody puts their T25s out and gets one card per chip. Then you color up the T25s to T100s and award them to the highest cards (max one per player) until they're gone. This is more complicated but keeps the total amount in play unchanged.

Rounding is easier. Like you said, color everybody up to T100 and just round up any extras. The downside is that this (slightly) increases the amount of chips in play.

My experience is that most casual tourney players would much rather round than race. I tried racing with my weekly tourney group, and there were a couple of players who never understood it and utterly hated it. There was grumbling and bitching every week, until finally we shifted to rounding. Everybody likes that, because their stack never goes down but sometimes will go up.

Yeah, I think rounding up is much easier. The only concern is that some might get butthurt if they don't round up, i.e. they've got no extra change in the chips being removed. The counter to that is the fact that the amount a player gets in rounding is utterly negligible compared to the blinds.

It all evens out over time, and I think players will realize this. Some weeks they'll get T100 for a single T25, other weeks they'll stay the same.

When I tried racing, I thought players would understand this, but I was wrong:

"Dude, you've got 10,000 chips, and you're worried about losing 25 in a race? It's less than a small blind!"

"You're taking chips out of my stack that could make a difference!"

You might be right. It depends on the game. For a 7-handed turbo, where you're unlikely to get past the 300/600 level, then I wouldn't use anything higher than 500.

If your game will get to a blind level of 1000/2000 long before the tourney ends, you'll find that a starting stack with 5x500 has put WAY too many 500 chips out there. The problem is the "reset" at 1k. Ideally, the next chip would be 2500, but alas.

Here is another consideration for your chips if you haven't purchased already: http://www.discountcasinogear.com/Ne...p-Se-p/246.htm

It looks like if you buy a set, it comes to less than $0.19/chip (taking into account the case). Maybe something like this: http://www.discountcasinogear.com/65...Set-p/1180.htm