Chip sets

Chip sets in Poker Club HQ represent the physical chips you use in your tournaments. Telling the app what chips you own keeps the generated blind structure in step with them.

Why chips matter

When a tournament has a chip set, the blind structure generator uses it to:

• Snap every blind and ante to a multiple of your smallest chip value, so you never get a blind you can’t actually make change for
• Suggest a sensible initial big blind

It also warns you if your starting stack is outside the usual 80–600× your smallest chip.

Without chips defined, the generator falls back to generic values that may not match your physical set.

Adding chips to a tournament

In the tournament Settings screen, tap the chips area to open the Chips screen. Tap + in the top right to open the Add chips sheet, which lists — with a preview of each — in this order:

1. Chip sets belonging to your other tournaments
2. The built-in chip sets
3. Individual chip designs

Tapping a tournament or chip set copies in every chip you don’t already have. Tapping a single design adds one chip using it and opens that chip’s settings so you can set its value and colors.

Built-in chip sets

The app ships five chip sets covering common value ranges. They aren’t named — the app labels each one by its values:

• 1, 5, 10, 25, 100
• 5, 10, 25, 100, 500
• 10, 25, 100, 500, 1K
• 25, 100, 500, 1K, 5K
• 100, 500, 1K, 5K, 25K, 100K

Each one uses conventional poker chip colors — white, red, blue, green, black, purple, yellow, orange, brown, and grey — assigned by value.

Editing chips

Tap any chip in the chip set to open its settings:

• value — The denomination of the chip (0 to 1,000,000)
• count — How many of this chip you physically own (0 to 1,000,000). Leave it at zero and the app assumes you have plenty.
• Colors — Tap the color swatches to customize the base color, spot color, and value text color using a full color picker. The value text color only appears once the chip has a value above zero.

Suggested chip stack

Once your chips have values, the tournament Settings screen shows a Chip stack row under Starting chips, with the suggested stack right there — each chip, how many of them, and the value they add up to. Tap it for the full breakdown.

The suggestion is built from three things:

1. Your chip values — the stack always adds up to the starting chips exactly
2. The starting chips — the target value of each player’s stack
3. The expected players — how many stacks have to come out of your case

For example, with 25, 100, 500, and 1,000 chips and a 5,000 starting stack, the app suggests 8 × 25, 8 × 100, 4 × 500, and 2 × 1,000 — 22 chips that add up to 5,000, weighted toward the small and middle denominations so players can post the early blinds and make change.

Your Antes setting shifts the mix. Standard antes are the demanding case — every player posts one every hand, in a denomination the blinds alone may have outgrown — so the app puts more small chips in each stack when they’re on: the same tournament becomes 12 × 25, 12 × 100, 3 × 500, and 2 × 1,000. Big blind antes match the blinds’ own granularity and need nothing extra.

Chips that don’t belong in a starting stack are left out and called out below the suggestion: denominations so small they’d only slow the game down, and denominations worth so much of the stack that they can’t be broken down. If your smallest chips are needed to post the first level’s small blind, they stay in regardless.

If the starting chips can’t be made from your chips at all — say 5,010 from 25s, 100s, and 500s — the app says so and offers a one-tap button to change the starting chips to the closest value that works.

Do you have enough chips?

Fill in the count of each chip and the suggestion gets sharper. The app then also shows Left in the bank — what’s left of each denomination after every player has been dealt a stack — and how many more stacks the bank covers.

Rebuys and addons are part of this. The expected rebuys and addons are converted to whole stacks and held back before the per-player stack is chosen, so a scarce denomination gets spread thinner rather than running out mid-tournament. If there aren’t enough chips for the rebuys, or not even enough to deal every player in, the app warns you and shows how many chips you’re short.

Custom chip images

If you’re signed into an account, you can upload photos of your actual chips. Tap the camera button in the chip settings to select an image from your device. The image is cropped to a circle to match the chip shape.

A custom image replaces the chip’s drawn design, so the color swatches disappear — the value and count settings stay.

Chip stack display

Chips appear in several places throughout the app:

• Tournament settings — A thumbnail showing the current chip set
• Chip set screen — Full-size chips sorted by value, each showing its count
• Timer screen — A stacked chip display along the edge, toggled from the timer’s customize menu under Show/hide chips, or wherever you place a Chips widget
• Add chips sheet — Preview stacks when browsing available chip sets

Stacked chips overlap slightly and are always ordered by value. When the strip is taller than it is wide the chips stack vertically; when it’s wider than tall they run horizontally.

Chips leave the timer as the blinds pass them

The timer’s chip strip shows the chips still in play, not every chip you own. Once no blind, ante, or bring-in from the current level onward needs a denomination, it drops off the strip — so late in a tournament the screen isn’t advertising chips that left the table hours ago.

A chip doesn’t leave the moment the blinds outgrow it, though. It leaves at a color-up point, so the strip keeps whatever your last one left there and narrows at the next. That keeps it in step with the Color up! widget: the banner names the denominations to take away, and by the following level they’re gone from the strip too. Before your first color-up point nothing has been suggested yet, so the app keeps one denomination past what the blinds need, in case it’s still in front of your players. And if every chip becomes unnecessary, the strip hides itself.

Choosing where you color up

Color up chips, under Blind structure in the tournament’s settings, has three settings.

At breaks is the default and suits most games: breaks are when chips actually come off the table, so that’s where the banner appears and where the strip narrows.

At any level suits a game that colors up whenever it needs to, without waiting for a scheduled break. Every level becomes a color-up point, so the banner names a denomination at the level it actually retires, then clears itself at the next one. Small sit-and-gos often run this way. If your tournament has no breaks at all, it already works like this, since there’s no break to wait for.

Never is for clubs where nothing ever comes off the table and every denomination stays in play from the first hand to the last. The strip shows your whole set for the entire game, and the Color up! widget never appears.

This setting only changes what the timer shows you. Your chip set and your blind structure are untouched whichever you pick.

Like everything else under Blind structure, it applies to levels as they’re built. It won’t rewrite levels you already have, so to change those, use the Color up switch on an individual level (or the button below it that sets every level at once).

Deleting chips

To remove a single chip, tap it and use Delete chip at the bottom of its settings. To remove every chip from a set, tap the Clear all chips icon in the app bar of the Chips screen. It asks for confirmation first.