The blue-chip Nazis

Final post today, I promise.

I usually play either $1-2 or $1-3 blinds no-limit hold'em, and in nearly every casino that means using $1 chips and $5 chips. (There are a few exceptions, such as Caesars, Red Rock, and Excalibur, which also use $2 chips, and Wynn with their notoriously confusing $3 chips. I dislike both arrangements. They're completely unnecessary and inefficient departures from the norm.)

I like keeping roughly 10 (between 5 and 15, anyway) $1 chips (which are usually blue, though sometimes white or gray or something else) in my stack. This allows me to tip cocktail waitresses and floormen as needed. More importantly, it allows me to make a bet of any size I want without having to verbally announce the amount. If I have no $1 chips and want to put in a bet of, say, $8, I would have to throw in two red chips ($5 each) while saying "make it eight." I want to keep silent during a hand as much as possible, and having a supply of $1 chips helps make this possible. If I have a big stack of blue because of winning a pot that contained lots of them, I use them to pay my blinds and make small calls. Then when my blues have been whittled down to about ten, I use red chips for those purposes so that I get a bit of change, and thus keep my blue stack between 5 and 15.

The dealers have a little problem, as chips from the table gradually get squirrelled away in the drop box: Because the rake on these games is usually between $1 and $4, they run out of the $1 periodically and have to call for a refill from the cashier. This process slows down the game. As a result, some dealers are highly protective of their tray full of blues.

One Hilton dealer is almost funny in how consistently she will decline to let players get change for their red chips when they request it. Once I saw her tell a player she couldn't make change because she was almost out of blues. Then, a few minutes later, after she had gotten her tray restocked with blues, the same player asked again, and this time she said, "I can't, because I just got a fill." The absurdity of her logic made me laugh out loud, though I'm pretty sure she had no clue what I found so funny.

I'm inspired to write about this today because during this afternoon's session at the Palms, I was faced with two consecutive dealers who openly resented my blue-chip practice. With both of them, I had about 5 blues, yet tried to pay a blind with a $5 chip. Each one of them looked at my stack and said, "You still have some ones there. You can use those" (or words to that effect). It was obvious that they were trying to minimize the number of blue chips they gave out in change. They were like mother birds defending the eggs in their nest from predators.

But here's the crazy thing: The way I do this makes no difference whatsoever in the overall flow of the $1 chips from the cashier to the dealer's tray to the table to the drop box. The net rate of loss is exactly the same no matter how many blue chips any player keeps in front of him, as long as each player is more or less consistent over time. If I keep approximately 10 at all times, the dealer will have to get a fill exactly as often as if I started out with 50 of them and kept that number all the time, or started with zero and tried to keep as few of them as possible at all times (as I've seen some players do). It's the net flow that determines how often the dealer will have to stop the game for a fill, not the number of blue chips sitting on the table.

Of course, if I and/or other players for some reason really liked hoarding blue chips, and continuously put in red ones in order to get blue ones in change, that would quickly deplete the dealer's tray. But even then, after a while the whole system would simply reach a new point of equilibrium. From that point on, the rate of loss from the dealer's tray would be precisely the same as it usually is. The only way to change the overall dynamic would be if there were no red chips in play, and thus no need ever to make any change. But with the size of pots in these games, that's obviously impractical; the dealer would lose far more time counting chips in large bets than is currently lost with getting occasional fills.

So I'll continue my peculiar (but not irrational) little habit of defending a stack of about 10 blue chips. Fortunately, the vast majority of dealers either understand what I'm doing, or don't notice, or don't care one way or the other; they just make change from a $5 chip when I need it, without comment. And I'll continue to chuckle at and be baffled by the occasional dealer who acts like a blue-chip miser, unwilling to part with any unless absolutely necessary. It's dumb, but it's also pretty harmless, and it's usually over in 30 minutes, when the next one sits down, and I can go back to my usual pattern.

Addendum, 7/30/07: I liked the phrase from the first comment to this post so much that I stole it to make a new title.