Chip set, few questions

I'm looking into assembling a nice set of chips for myself and had a few questions:

1) What colors should I stick with? I'm thinking Green ($25), Black ($100), Purple / Pink ($500), and Yellow ($1000). I feel obligated to get more colors (red, white, & possibly gray), but not sure if it's worth it.

2) How many of each? I know Danny suggested a few different scenarios (tourney set-up vs cash), so I was thinking of getting a 1000 chip set and dedicating 500 to each.

3) Size, weight, & material? About everything I'm finding in my price range are 39mm, 11.5g & composite resin w/ metal insert which I'm assuming is . I see others in the 9g weight, and other materials (plastic-hell no, solid clay-too expensive)

Last question,
Here is the set-up I'm thinking about, what do you think (names are links to the ebay items)?

Copag cards

Monaco chips or 5-spot dual color chips

Black case

For cards I woudl suggest Kems. For a chip case I would suggest something more like this. More pofessional, has chips racks, and this is more like something you might actually find them using to transport chips in a casino. I believe they are called "chip carriers" as opposed to a "chip case." They come in many sizes, jsut google "chip carrier." I also know for a fact that rocky mountain gaming has some chip carriers in stock and will build you a custom chip set to go with it. very nice.

http://www.pokerchiplounge.com/products/products_view/601_1.html

I like this site.

Also I am trying to think of a good number of chips for a 1000 chip set to do both tourney and cash setups. Right now I am thinking 300 white, 100 red, 100 blue (or other odd color, these will be used as antes for cash games with antes or $500 tourney chip in tourneys), 200 green, 250 black, 50 yellow.

Here is my reasoning - I personally don't see me having a home game with more than $800 on the table not to mention ante chips add up and if I have to the $25 green chips could be used as a last resort. I was also considering maybe purchasing an extra rack or two of white (100 chips) extra as this will be the most comonly used chip.

Most tourneys can be run with a simple base amount of chips for our smaller denominations and built up using larger chips and not making things too complicated. That formula is 8 T25 chips, 8 T100 and 1 T500 chip for our starting stack of T1500 (T= Tournament chips). To make the stacks larger we simply add T500 and T1000 chips to get where we need to be so add 2 T500 chips per stack for a T2500 starting stack or 3 T500 and 3 T1000 chips to get to a T5000 starting stack and so on. Pretty simple eh? To make things simpler I try to not introduce a T1000 chip unless absoloutly nessecary, try to minimize the amounts of colors on the table wherever possible! Trust me on this one!

So here there are enough chips to run a 2 table tourney pretty niceley and at the same time have side action cash games going at the same time. We dont need quite as many yellow as when the blinds get that high there is always an option to bring back a previous color as a higher denomination and we have a few extra black to help color up green. Also remember that you do not have to use these colors for these exact amounts and purposes but a take it from someone who has played a lot of poker as well as dealt a ton of poker, keep the chips simple, the same, all across the board and as few colors as possible out at once and you can spend more time playing and less time arguing about what color is what.

Also I moved this thread to a more appropriate section

The next time I buy chips...(who knows when that will be) I will settle for nothing less than Chipco chips. These are used by Golden Gates and the Gilpin.....Ameristar uses Paulson chips which are more expensive....but I prefer the feel and sound of chipco myself.

They are not cheap though....it costs basically $1 per chip unless you are odering eleventy bazillion of them...

http://www.homepokerchips.com/order.htm

I think having a nice set of 300-500 chips would be a much better idea than getting two mediocre sets of 500.....I have a decent set of chips that are much better than your run of the mill metal insert chips...but not as nice as chipcos...I think I paid about $180 for them and have about 320 chips or so......I basically bought enough to do a 10 person $50 buy-in cash game with some left for rey-buys....I got deniminations of $.25/$1/$5/$25 (there really is no need for .50/50 chips in my opinion, do you see 50 chips at the WSOP? nope)

we were playing mostly small cash games (.25/.50 NL mostly) at the time...so these worked perfect....just this past Saturday I used them in an 8-handed >50/1.00NL game where people generally bought in for $50-$60....with rebuys we acutally got 6 of the $25 chips in play...

my point to all of this is just set it up with demoninations that you would use for your most common cash game stakes.....then you can alway set up your tournament around it.

for me I can do $50 in chips = 5000 tourney chips...

I also totally agree on the T50 or $50 dollar chip Ian and I have said this before. I actually ran my table with the poker tour minus the red T50 chips for nearly a year before the tour decided to drop them. They are pointless. As far as chips I am actally considering ordering that set I posted a link to. They look nice enough for me

Thanks for the help on this guys. I wanted to keep things simple as far as denominations go, especially for tourneys. It's always a pain in the ass when you're constantly trying to figure out what each of the chip values are.

I was going to get one style or the other, and try to get adequate chip amounts to support a small (2-3 table) tourney and possibly a side cash game. Unfortunately the budget is limiting me to about $.10 to $.20 per chip for a set of 1000. I'd love to get a quality set of Paulsons (or similar) someday, but I think even an above average set would get me by for quite sometime.

What's the difference between Copag and Kems? The copags we played with at Jeffs are 1000x better than any deck I've played with before and would be more than adequate for any game I would host. The only thing I've seen about the Kems is that the Copags advertise that they are as good as Kems.

BTW, what size cards: Bridge or Poker? I keep thinking you said poker was typically played with Bridge (the smaller size).

The only reason I posted the links I did, is because the seller on Ebay would sell me the complete set-up, upgraded to the Copag cards, black case and custom chip counts for $200 delivered. Didn't think that was a bad offer, but wanted to double check before I pulled the trigger. It will be a couple of weeks before I can do anything, but I wanted some input on what I should be looking for beforehand.

I also need to swing by Rocky Mountain Gaming before I buy just to see what they have in stock.

Before you go buy chips, please PM me. We have 6 or 7 sets and if you're will to drive a little south, you can get them much cheaper than anywhere else. I think they're all 11.5g, but definately worth checking out if you're looking for something to use "now" while you save up for a nice set. I think 4/5 sets are standard sets/colors, one is a Budwiser set and one is a WPT set.

Keith the cards at Jeffs house were Kems. I have never like Copags. Just get a setup of standard Kem decks from rocky mountain gaming and you will be fine. They supply the casinos, with Kems, I use Kems, Jeff had Kems... I really don't know why people like Copags so much. There is nothing horrible about them but to me, after using Kems for years, they feel light and flimsy compared to Kems. They are what you would call a "poker sized" deck and Kems are a "bridge sized" deck so they are wider as well. Even though they are a "poker size" deck i have never actually seen Copags in a casino poker room anywhere.

PoWdA wrote:
http://www.pokerchiplounge.com/products/products_view/601_1.html

I like this site.

Checking out that site, I found these. Not bad.

http://www.pokerchiplounge.com/products/products_view/596_1.html

dexman1349 wrote:

PoWdA wrote:
http://www.pokerchiplounge.com/products/products_view/601_1.html

I like this site.

Checking out that site, I found these. Not bad.

http://www.pokerchiplounge.com/products/products_view/596_1.html

Yeah those were the first ones I looked out on the site until I found that other set... I have been thinking a lot about it and I think if anything I would get the nicer ones and some flimsier cheaper chips for tourneys considering you might need more for tourneys and I personally would be much less likely to host a tournament if ever. I would really enjoy having a nice set for both but I think a nice cash game chip set is more important to me.