They Don't Know Chip

At recent tournaments, a lot of my devoted readers have demanded to know why I haven't been writing Card Player columns lately (thanks to both of you). The answer is that I'm lazy and I have been very busy. No one disputes the former, but they demand to know how a poker player can be too busy. I am working on a poker book (as is everyone these days). I am playing live games and online. I am a partner in some bars on Avenue A in New York City: Nice Guy Eddie's, Doc Holiday's, The Library, Julep's, and the new Vasmay Lounge. Eating, drinking, playing pool, and girl watching can be very time-consuming. Lastly, I have been bitten by the tournament bug and have started playing in lots of tournaments, and this keeps me on the road a lot. While I love tournaments, there are some infuriating things that happen in them, which is what drove me to write this column.

At approximately half the tournaments I've played in this year, the chips have been badly designed. There is one absolutely essential factor in chip design: It should be easy for a player to tell the difference between denominations. A player at one end of the table should be able to look at the stack of a player at the other end and know how much he has. When someone bets five chips, you should not have to strain to see the amount. What could be simpler or more basic? Why can't they do it right? My guess is that in many cases, chip colors are chosen by graphic artists, designers, or non-playing casino personnel. I won't name names, but, guys, get your act together.

Another frequent mistake tournament organizers make is changing the cash value of chips between tournaments. While all tournament chips have "no cash value" printed on them, they all have one. If you pay a $500 buy-in and get $1,000 in chips, the cash value is half of the face value. I was at a tournament where a low buy-in supersatellite gave $2,000 in chips for $100 cash. On that same day, in the main tournament, players got $2,000 in chips for $500 cash – and the same chips were used.

Any person with an IQ higher than room temperature would realize that chips should never be a problem online. Online games don't need chips. They just need a circle with an amount in large print in the center. (If they really wanted to get fancy, bigger bets would get a bigger, brighter circle.) Online poker sites seem to have grasped this fact to the extent that they don't show big piles of chips in front of each player. But they weren't capable of the imaginative leap of realizing that they didn't need stacks of chips for each bet and in the center for the pot. Nothing is worse than playing in a couple of no-limit hold'em games at once in which $1 chips are dark blue and $100 chips are black. It is almost impossible to distinguish bet sizes of $3, $102, $201, and $300. In all cases, three dark chips appear in the pot.

You might ask yourself, could anything be more stupid than using chips online? Absolutely, and they've found it. They add the noise of chips into the game sounds. What are they thinking? There is nothing I want less than more noise when I'm playing online and listening to music or watching a movie. The site designers would respond that you can turn the sound off, and that is true, but there is one sound I want. I want to hear a gentle beep when it is my turn to act and a few seconds have passed without my responding. And I want a louder noise when I have five seconds left. I hope this rant doesn't disappoint my public, and now it is time for me to head out for a beer.