When you're playing poker online, it's all numbers, and you don't
have to worry about what color chips are worth what amounts. You
don't even have to worry about having enough chips, or where to get
the chips. But if you're hosting a home game for the first time,
you're going to need to know some things about poker chips,
especially colors and values.
How Many Poker Chips Do I Need?
You can never have too many poker chips, that's for sure. But the
minimum you can usually get away with when hosting a small
home game is 500 chips of varying colors. One caveat too; don't buy
those rinky-dink plastic poker chips. They're cheap and
insignificant, and you want your bets and raises to feel
significant. So buy the clay poker chips, the heavier the better, at
least 11 grams per chip or more.
What Are the Poker Chips Worth?
They're actually worth anything you want them to be worth. But I
can give you some standard colors and values in the chart below;
it's not a bad idea at all to stick with these standards, since at
some point in your poker career you'll play somewhere with someone
who has definite ideas about what the different color poker chips
are worth. This is for a standard poker chip set:
| Color |
Value |
Number of Chips |
| White |
$1 |
150 |
| Red |
$5 |
150 |
| Green |
$25 |
100 |
| Black |
$100 |
100 |
There are some other things you want to know
about buying a poker chip set. For one thing, you don't want to
buy chips with pre-printed denominations on them. If your group
decides to change the stakes, you'll want the chips to be blank
so that you can just announce it. If the denominations are
preprinted on the chips and you change the stakes, you and your
guests will very possibly wind up confused about what the poker
chips are worth.
This page was last updated on January 5, 2006.
