How Many Chips do you need for your Home Game?

When I was first starting to host home games, I had 2 sets of chips. That worked well for the time being, and I could probably get along well with them now, but I believe when starting a home game, the chips you buy are very important.

There are two different types of chip sets, cash sets for cash games, and tournament sets for you guessed it, tournaments. If you plan on having cash and tournaments at your home game it’s a good idea to get one of each set. If you use the same set for both, people might try to cash tournament chips for real money and that’s a security risk.

Cash sets are based on the stakes of a given game. For example, in a 25-cent/50-cent Hold’em cash game, the lowest chip denominations that you would need would be 25-cent chips, and you would only want a few $20 or $25 chips because the game will be relatively small. For a table of around 8 players, the minimum would be 200 25-cent chips, a.k.a. quarters, 300 $1 chips, 100 $5 chips, and 20 $25 chips. That’s a total of $1350, which most games of that size shouldn’t exceed, and if it does, you could get more of the $25 chips. Generally, you would only want 4 different denominations of chips because more than that is unnecessary and confusing. The stakes can be adjusted, for example, if you’re playing $1/$2 no limit hold’em, then you could use $1, $5, $25, and $100 chips. This is all assuming the buy-in is around 100 big blinds.

Tournament chips are dependent on how many people are buying in. If they span multiple tables, you will need more chips. For example, if you host a 25-person tournament, with a 7,500-chip starting stack, each person should get 12 $25 chips, 12, $100 chips, 4 $500 chips, and 4 $1,000 chips. That would mean that there should be 300 $25 chips, 300 $100 chips, 100 $500 chips, 100 $1,000 chips, and 25 or so $5,000 chips for coloring up.