Guides · Setting up
Chip denominations are the most common thing a new home game gets wrong, and the mistake is nearly always the same: too many colours, and a smallest chip worth so little that nobody uses it.
The ratio that actually matters
Forget the specific numbers for a moment. What determines whether a chip set works is the relationship between the smallest chip and a starting stack. The useful target is roughly 1:40 — your smallest denomination should be about one fortieth of what each player starts with.
Go much finer than that and the small chips pile up unused, because no bet is ever small enough to need them. Go much coarser and you cannot make a meaningful raise early on without committing a large fraction of your stack.
For a $20 buy-in, that puts the smallest chip at around 50 cents. For a ₩50,000 buy-in, around ₩1,000. For a $100 buy-in, around $2.50, which you would round to $1 or $5 depending on how deep you want the early play to feel.
Three denominations is usually right
Four is defensible for a long tournament-style game. Five is showing off. Most home games run better on three, because every extra colour is another thing to count at 2am when the settlement is already contentious.
A workable three-chip spread for a $20 buy-in:
| Colour | Value | Per stack | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| White | $0.50 | 10 | $5.00 |
| Red | $1.00 | 10 | $10.00 |
| Green | $5.00 | 1 | $5.00 |
Twenty-one chips, $20 exactly, and a stack that is physically easy to check — if the tall column looks about ten high and there is one green, it is probably right.
Make the stack countable at a glance
This is the part people skip. A starting stack should be verifiable without counting individual chips, because you will need to do it repeatedly — on every rebuy, and again at cash-out.
Give each denomination a count that is a round number, ideally the same one. Ten whites and ten reds is instantly checkable. Seven whites and thirteen reds is not, and the difference costs you real minutes across an evening.
Colours to avoid
- Blue and green together under warm indoor light, which is most home games. They are the pair most often confused, and they are usually adjacent in value, which is exactly when a mistake is expensive.
- Two shades of the same colour. Light blue and dark blue read as one denomination across a table.
- Anything matching your table felt. A green chip on green felt is a chip that will be missed at cash-out, and a missed chip is a count that does not reconcile.
The conventional casino ordering — white, red, green, black, purple — exists because those five are distinguishable under bad light at speed. There is no prize for originality here.
Do you have enough chips?
A rough check: you want about 50 to 60 chips per player in the set overall, which allows for rebuys without needing to break the bank mid-game. A 300-chip set comfortably handles five or six players with rebuys, and gets tight at eight.
If you are short, raise the denominations rather than reducing the starting stack. A shallow stack changes how the game plays; a coarser chip only changes how it looks.
Write the values down
Put the denominations on a piece of paper next to the tray, in the colours themselves if you can. It sounds unnecessary until someone who arrived late asks what a green is worth mid-hand, and gets a different answer from two people.
Whatever you settle on, the values only matter at the end if they were the same values all night. Agree them before the first hand, along with the rebuy rules.