How To Pick The Right Poker Chip Set

Besides the poker tables and playing cards the next most important element of the game is the poker chips themselves. If you've ever gone looking for a poker chip set, you no doubt saw tons of different poker chip sets for sale at online poker shops. Like almost everything else today, the choices are almost endless, and still growing. Then of course, if you really want to go first class, you can customize your chip set with your own chosen images, text and values.

So how do you pick out the right set of chips for YOU? A poker chip set that gives you the denomination assortment and quantity you need, and also pleases the senses both in look and feel?

I've found a good place to start is to decide, based upon your regular game, whether or not you want pre-printed denominations or not, just different colors. You value these only by color. They can still have a custom image, they just don't have pre-determined value so that any color can be any amount, depending upon the particular game and stakes you're playing for. These types of chips are especially good if you play tournaments, and you will require fewer chips for a tournament than if you get poker chips with pre-printed values. A tournament, due to its structure and increase in size for the remaining chip stacks, require a much wider variation in chip values than your average cash game. In a tournament a player may start out with 5000 chips, but end up at the final table with 325,800 poker chips. Unless you want a literal mountain of $25 and $100 chips, you're going to need some $5,000, maybe even $10,000 chips.

These same color-only valued chips work well for cash games too, although to avoid possible confusion ("for the fourth time Earl.... Greens are $25", you repeat again), denominated chips sure have a place at cash games, maybe even an advantage over the non-denominated color-only style poker chips. Since you probably play approximately the same cash stakes most of the time, you don't need as many chips, nor as many different values. Plus, the ease of everyone seeing the value on the chip has a tendency to shut Earl up. It's a simple process to add up as many buy-ins as you might have times the maximum buy in with only two or maybe three denominations and you're good to go. Calculating the number of each value/color chip and poker chip quantity total needed for a tournament can be a bit more of a challenge, as anyone who's ever done it knows. That's why they make Tournament Timer/Calculators/Displays is to make it easy to plan out and keep on time with your Poker Tournament.

Once you decide on whether you want chips with denominations or without denominations, and how many of each, then it's just a matter of picking the look, weight and feel that suits your personal taste. If you want to customize your poker chip set, that's even cooler.

Ron Sherrod, Owner of PokerUpShop, an online Poker Store offering a great selection of Poker Chips and Sets, and an inexpensive way to customize your own poker chips with great quality label/inlays for about 12 cents per chip. PokerUpShop also offers free US shipping on all orders over $49 which will save you money on your poker supplies. Visit us at