Definition of chip race
Chip racing is the act of removing small denomination chips in a tournament as the blinds increase. This phenomenon only occurs in tournaments. There is no such thing as a chip race in a cash game. Let's imagine the following situation. You start a tournament with 1500 chips. The blinds are now 25/50. After several hours of play, the blinds are 500/1000. Chips that have a small denomination will no longer be needed. A break in the tournament is usually taken to go to all the remaining players and clean out their stack of denominations that they no longer need. If you are just an online poker player, this is something you have never seen before. Chip races can occur at many times in a tournament.
How the chip race works
When it comes time to exchange denominations, the chips alone are rounded up. For example, if a player has only one 500 chip in his mat and we get to the stage where we remove the 500 chips and replace them with 1000 chips, even though he doesn't have two 500 chips to make 1000, he is not eliminated, but he will be given the smallest chip in the next denomination, which is a 10,000 chip.
