I’m hosting a friendly poker game tomorrow for some guys from work. It seems like the group understands cards well enough (although we’ll be going over the rules quite a bit beforehand) and I am looking forward to a good time. In trying to get ready for tomorrow, I got the table and chairs ready, cards and chips on the table. I was gonna split up the chips into seven piles and realized my god-awful math ability would prevent me from getting it right. So I turn to the SDMB.
$25 buy-in, giving each player $250 in chips. 500 chips: 250 white, 125 red, 125 blue. What values do I assign to the different colors, and how many of each do the seven guys get?
golly do i feel like an idiot asking this question, but i’d feel even dumber doin it tomorrow.:smack:
It’s not set in stone, however, by convention, the white chips are the lowest value, usually $1, the red chips are next highest, often $5 or $10, and the blue chips are the highest, sometimes, $25 or $50. You’ll want to adjust the values of the chips to suit the game and the players’ pocketbooks, of course
How does a $25 buy-in morph into $250 in chips? Sounds like Reaganomics to me.
Let’s say you want each player to start with $25 worth of chips and keep, say, $75 in chips in reserve so a losing player can buy more chips.
Total currency: 7 x $25 + $75 = $250
The following chip values could work, and they’re easy to remember:
White = 25¢ 250 white chips = $62.50
Red = 50¢ 125 red chips = $62.50
Blue = $1 125 blue chips = $125.00
========
$250.00
Make seven piles for the players with these quantities:
10 blue chips ($10)
15 red chips ($7.50)
30 white chips ($7.50)
Total: $25
And toss the rest of the chips in the reserve pile, or “bank”. The leftovers will consist of:
55 blue chips ($55)
20 red chips ($10)
40 white chips ($10)
Total: $75
If/when the game starts getting more serious, the players will probably want to buy the blue chips, or trade in their whites for blues. If you really want to impress them, by the way, buy three decks at the dollar store (with different backing colours or patterns) and when the game starts, make sure they all see the packs are unopened and gauranteed unmarked. It’ll make you look like the Cincinatti Kid.
And by the way, poker games in which “one-eyed jacks are wild, two are wild, and sevens are wild” are mega-uncool.
I’m not answering the question asked because I think it might help you to try a different method. Unless you are playing a tournament, I would keep it simple and make a dollar a dollar.
Everyone pays cash for a certain number of chips. Some ones would be nice for change later.
Put the cash in a bank, something like a hat.
When a player leaves with chips remaining, count up the value of his chips and pay him from the bank.
If a player runs out of chips during the game, he can buy chips from the lucky guy who has the biggest stack at the table: “Here’s five bucks. Give me five bucks in chips.”
To continue with keeping things simple, I would make whites .25, blues .50, and use a .25-.50 betting structure. The minimum bet (not counting checking) you can make is .25; the maximum bet you can make is .50. The maximum bet you can make on the last round per hand (after the seventh card in seven card stud) is $1.00. Assuming you don’t want to buy another box of chips, you could start everyone out with $15.
$8 in white chips (quarters) = 32 white chips per person x 7 people = 224 white chips needed.
$7 in blue chips (fifty cents) = 14 blue chips per person x 7 people = 98 blue chips needed.