Chips, blinds, and betting

[JJT]

In the bar game that I play we buy 40 chips for $10, or 50 chips for $20. I guess this is considered a turbo game the way the blinds raise. By the forth level they are 8/16. Anyway, starting out with 4 (or 5) stacks of 10, as the game progresses, I re-arrange my chips by the that level to stacks of 16, but other people leave their chips in stacks of ten. So, someone will raise on the 4th level to 20 chips and I'm thinking, wait a minute, that's just 4 chips over the blind. I tried pointing that out but no one saw it, so a 20 chip raise, because they can push out 2 stacks of 10, will get people to fold, or agonize deciding to call.

Am I missing something? Or are they missing the practice of raising 2.5-3+ times the big blind?

[CrazyEyez]

They're missing the fact that with that structure you should be pushing all-in on almost every hand. But yeah, it's wrong to raise to 20 when the BB is 16. In fact it's not legal. Raises must be a minimum of a) the size of the big blind or b) the size of the previous raise, whichever is larger.

[metsfan88]

why do they rip you off with $20 for 50 chips when you get 40 for $10. Why not 80 for $20.

[basementproject]

As Crazy said above, the minimum raise needs to be at least 2xBB.

This sounds like a really strangely structured game... You guys drinkin while you play, by any chance?

[sapol]

Bar games are usually about the drinking so if you want to keep raising to 20 go ahead and do it (I suggest moving in about every hand)

[JJT]

To CrazyEyez: I distinctly remember a player "raising" post-flop to 20 chips when the blinds were 16 and that's where I tried to point out to one person, who'd folded against it, that it was only 4 more chips, but they didn't make the connection. I mean, we don't have a 5/10 level, so to some of the people a "big" raise is 30 chips when blinds are 8/16. I've given up pointing things like this out as I'll get an "I'll play my chips the way I want" reply. Okay.

To metsfan88: I'm sorry, I should have qualified the chip buy. On most days it's $10 for 40 chips. On Thursdays only (I don't know why) it's $20 for 50 chips. (Maybe one day I'll play Sunday where the buy-in is $25 dollars; don't know how many chips that buys.)

To basementproject and sapol: Yeah, there's a lot of drinking going on. (Not by me tho; not a big drinker). They haven't been playing at this bar for very long; less that a year, but I don't know how they came up with the structure.