The Banality of Checks Mix

During my last two poker sessions, I have run across three examples of an annoying type of player, a sub-species of the internet d-bag who is seemingly incapable of betting with all red chips.  These aren't odd ducks like Paul Magriel "double quack-quack"-ing as a mental tic.  They aren't pulling a  Lance Funston, famed for playing the buffoon with great success at the 2005 U.S. Poker Championship, "seeing your three purple, and raising two orange, two purple, and two green":



Nope, these are kids who deliberate and put out a precise bet—$21, $42, $67—each and every time they bet or raise.  Often, the red and white chips (blue chips in Vegas) are intermingled, making it tougher to quickly determine the bet size.

Now this quirk is rather harmless, but it does make me a bit grumpy.  Once a pot gets above $15-$20, there is no good reason not to round bets to a $5 increment.  Betting with a mix of red and white chips unnecessarily slows the game down as the dealer has to make change, and usually players have to ask and be told the size of the bet because of the mix of chips.  I could understand making the bet precise to within a $1 increment if it materially affected the game.  But do these players seriously think that a player will call or fold because a bet is $42 instead of $40 or $45?  If so, they clearly haven't played much live $1/$2 NLHE.  Come to think of it, maybe it is an internet player quirk, where players are habituated to more precisely sizing bets to the penny.  Stupid interwebs.

There is one—and only one—perfectly valid reason to bet with mixed chips postflop—to make a bet palindromic (e.g., $151, or $232).  Palindromic bets are extremely strong wagers which greatly increase your odds of winning a hand.  A "perfect palindromic wager" is one which exhausts your entire supply of white chips, and is a nearly unbeatable play.  But otherwise, mixed chip bets are an incredibly stupid and pointless maneuver that should be shunned.  Please, stop the checks mix madness.