How many chips each? 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. An important aspect is how long you want the tournament to last - the more chips each player starts with, the longer the game.
As the blinds rise, it is often helpful to trade the small value chips for those with higher value or you'll end up with a lot of "small change" in front of you.
For instance, you begin with blinds of 500/1,000. Every player therefore needs some chips worth 500. When blinds reach 5,000/10,000, these chips will simply become annoying and should be exchanged for a 1,000 chip, or ones of even higher value.
