How many chips does each player start with?
As a rule of thumb the starting amount of poker chips per player should be 40-80 chips. Starting with this many chips gives each player enough of each of the starting chip colors.

Poker Tournament Starting Chips Blinds

Total number of physical poker chips to start with: 21 X 20 = 420 poker chips At some point during the tournament the “25” chips will be useless since the blinds will be in even “100’s”. At that point you can “color up” the “25” chips. So, you will need more “100”. For a typical 10-player tournament with each player starting with $1000 in chips (this will be the default tournament in other sections of this article), a set of 500 poker chips should be plenty. You will also want at least four colors.

1. At the beginning of a tournament, every player should have at least 50 big blinds. With fewer chips, the blinds quickly become too high to play reasonable poker. Naturally, you can start off with more chips: you could do this with approximately 100 big blinds.
2. The first big blind should be 1/50 of the starting chip amount. (or the starting chip amount should be 50 times the starting big blind). So if everyone starts with 1000 in chips the first big blind should be 10/20. Blind period is the time each blind lasts: Typical tournament blind periods are.

However, I have played in many tournaments were everyone starts with 20 chips and this works. The one problem with having just 20 chips is that you don’t get enough of the smallest denomination chips and at some point everyone has to ask another player for change with a larger denomination chip.
My personal opinion (for whatever it is worth) is starting with about 40-50 chips. This give everyone a stack of the smallest denomination and a stack of the next denomination and then the rest of the chips are made up of what is needed to get to the dollar amount that everyone starts with.

Example: everyone starts with $5000 and the blinds start at $25/$50.

Poker Tournament Starting Chips Game

Everyone gets 45 chips; (20) $25 chips, (20) $100 chips and (5) $500 chips. In smaller tournaments, everyone could get 80 chips to start; (40) $25 chips and (40) $100 chips.