How to Color Up in a Poker Tournament?
This year I've spent 3 or 4 nights a week in a series of poker tournaments ran by the U.S. Military Club system in Japan. Since most of the people are Club managers, few really have experience with poker tournaments. They gave a great try and for many of our service members it was a good poker learning experience. The players were cooperative, and we got through it real well, but one of the things I noticed was that many had problems grasping how you should color up the lower denomination chips as the blinds progressed. For those of you with any experience in live tournaments this will seem rather simplistic, but if your regular home game uses a tournament structure, this might do you some good. There are basically three ways to approach the problem.1. Ignore it. Simply color up all those chips that equal the higher denomination chip, and leave any partial in the game. They remain there and are removed when a player accumulates the correct amount, and the change is usually bet when an all-in occurs. If there are only a few players remaining this works pretty well but if there are five or more left, you can encounter problems making change.
2. Replace is probably the easiest way to do it. Have the players put their chips in stacks equal to the higher denomination chip and round each player's total up. So any incomplete stacks get one chip of the higher denomination. This method is fair, and doesn't really put that many extra chips into play, but most sophisticated players will modify their play to insure that they have only one chip of the smaller denomination.
3. Race is the method most commonly used in professionally run tournaments, and although it is hard to explain. Once, you have seen it done properly you will have no problem doing it. Like ‘replace' is fair but it puts fewer chips in play. More importantly players will not modify their play to take advantage of the color up. The total of partial stacks is rounded up to determine how many of the higher denomination chips will be available to the race. Each player is given one card for each chip (if a player has 3 odds chips, he is given 3 cards face up, at the same time, before giving cards to the next player with odd chips). The player with highest card gets the first chip. If there are additional chips they are given to the other player with the highest card etc. until the all of the chips are gone. No player should get two of the chips. If two players have the same high card, this is one of the few places when the ranking of the suits is used to determine the higher card. The suit ranking used is the same as Bridge: Spades, Hearts, Diamonds and finally Clubs. The Ace of Spades beats the Ace of Hearts, etc. Example Race
Well for you guys that know how, this isn't much, but if you end up with a bunch of low denomination chips in your home game, maybe this will help you do a good color up and make the final stages of your home poker tournament go better.
GL
jb
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