pokah chips!

[Raging Turtle]

I am looking to aquire a good play set of casino quality chips this christmas, and I've got a few questions for those who know a bit more than I do:

How many chips do you need to support a good 6-8 people playing?  What about 12?
Whats a decent price/size ratio?  In every damn store in the mall, I see these 'expert poker sets' that are selling X number of clay chips (and cards and blind buttons, ooo) for 40-50 bucks.  Are these a good deal, or a ripoff like I suspect? 
Does the weight make any noticeable different if its 11.5 or 12.0 or 10.5?  Seems like it'd be close enough to not be an issue. 

Thanks in advance. 

[Margalis]

Do you want actual casino quality chips, or "close enough."

Real casinos use pressed clay chips. 99% of the "casino quality" chips you can find are "clay composite" chips. The tend to be a bit bigger and heavier than casino chips. Probably 25% wider on the diameter. "Clay compsite" chips are plenty good though. There isn't really any reason to try to find actual casino chips unless you are really anal. (And willing to pay more)

Prices look like they have come down a lot. I got a set of 500 chips for about $100 bucks, it looks like you can get the same on ebay now for 50.

500 chips is enough for 8 people. 12 is probably doable although you will have to do a fair amount of exchanging. By that I mean start people with high-value chips and frequently break them as needed.

One thing to keep in mind is don't get chips with numbers or prices on them. Just get different colors and you can decide how much they are worth on a per-game basis.

Most standard "clay composite" poker chips are 11.5 grams. I doubt it really matters.

[Lanei]

I bought my dad 1,000 11.5 gram clay composite chips for father's day, pretty much just two of the sets of 500 (150 white, 150 red, 100 blue, 50 green, 50 black, with a dealer button, 2 decks of cards and 5 dice per case)  I paid about $90 from someone's Amazon.com affiliate store.  I'd imagine prices are lower now than half the year ago when I got them.

[Raging Turtle]

Thanks guys, thats pretty much exactly the information I was looking for. 

[taleril]

On a related note, does anyone use those foldable, felt tabletop things?  I've got one that I use to convert the dining room table into a poker table, but the felt is getting a bit ratty.  Does anyone know of a good brand of poker tabletop?  Unfortunately, I don't have the space to dedicate to a full-time poker table.

taleril

[WayAbvPar]

In my experience, it is better to have too many chips than too few. I would go with at least 1000. If you really wanna cough up some dough, you can get them customized- colors, denominations, logos, etc. I will eventually get it done, just so I can play with all the fruity colors that I like.

[UD_Delt]

Our home game usually has anywhere from 8-15 people in it. We use 2 sets of 300. Both sets have white and red as the base but we then also have black, green, and blue chips. We usually start with $200 in chips (10x $1white, 8x $5red, 10x $10blue, 2x$25green.) That leaves tons of chips leftover.

There's definately a balance you want to achieve between people needing to break larger chips vs. people counting out multiple stacks of 10+ chips. If you are playing tournament style with escalating blinds you'll always have that asshole counting out 25 $1 chips to post the small blind once you start hitting those higher blinds. That's the point where we usually give up, take a 5 minute break and color everything up anyway. So, it's not always good to start with too many small value chips since it just makes that process more painful.