Poker Tournament - Determine Initial Chip Count using Excel Solver

Have you ever tried to pull off a poker tournament and struggled to determine the best way to distribute the initial chips to the players?  Well, here is an overkill solution to help you decide how many poker chips to start with.  It is an Excel spreadsheet that uses the Microsoft Excel Solver add-in.  Make sure you enable the Solver add-in for this to work.

You can download this template from the Microsoft Office Template Gallery.

The colors are used as guides to help you with the spreadsheet.  I chose not to protect the cells so you could view and modify the formulas.

Blue = Modify values to meet your needs
Yellow = Targets that Solver will modify
Orange = Value Solver is trying to minimize

The first thing you should configure is the number of players, chip colors, per chip value and available chip counts.

Then, set the chip distribution ratios.  This is used to make sure you have more chips of a certain denomination that others.  For example, if you want to have more lower denomination chips than higher denomination chips, set the lower denomination ratio higher than the lower value chips.  If you do not want to use this feature, set them all to 1.

Finally, set the target chip count.  If you specify $1000, solver will try to come up with a distribution as close to $1,000 for each player as possible.  If you want to use as many available chips as possible, set the target chip count >= Max value per player.

To use solver, click the Data tab in the ribbon bar and choose Solver.

The Solver Parameters dialog will appear.  Click the Solve button to see the solution.

Game on!