Although the first legal casino in Venice, Italy, ‘Il Ridotto’ opened its doors in 1626, the poker chip as we know it today originates from the 19th century. Players used coins, gold nuggets or chips made from ivory, bone, wood, paper or a clay composition before that time.

Clay chips versus ceramic chips

Clay chips were manufactured by many companies between 1880 and 1930 and even today you can still order them online. Around 1985 ceramic chips were becoming famous as it was possible to print a picture and text on the complete side of the chip. At that time this was not possible for clay chips as they could only hold a print on the inlay. Furthermore, it was a lot cheaper to produce ceramic chips. Today you can also find plastic chips which are the cheapest poker chips available. You can read more about the different types of poker chips in our poker chip reviews.

A standard poker chip weights between 8 and 10.5 gram. The most commonly used colors in poker home sets are: blue, white, red, green and black. Each casino has its own logo printed on their chips, to distinguish them from other casinos. As each chip represent a certain value it is important that in places like Las Vegas, Monte Carlo and Macau, where there are many casinos located near each other, the chips are clearly marked with the trademark of the casino where it belongs to. You obviously won’t have that problem when playing poker online.

Chips for poker tournaments

At poker tournaments the chips are usually simpler in design and cheaper to produce with only one color and a small diameter with a basic mark on the interior to distinguish denominations. Except for the chips used at the yearly major poker event ‘The World Series of Poker’ (WSOP). These chips are being especially produced for the occasion and are collectors’ items.

The Canadian Jonathan Duhamel, who is sponsored by PokerStars, one of the best poker sites for US players, won the WSOP 2010 Main Event. He started the final round with the last 9 players with 65,975,000 chips. Jonathan won the golden bracelet and $ 8,944,310 USD. There were 7319 players who participated in the Main Event of 2010.

Counterfeiting of chips

Have you ever wondered why you do not hear much about counterfeiting of chips? This is because it is a difficult and expensive process to produce chips. Furthermore, each casino has high levels of surveillance and the dealers are familiar with the color and design of their chip and would recognize a fake chip fairly easily. There is a story about a Canadian casino that suspected that fake chips were on the gaming floor. The staff immediately took all the chips from the tables and replaced them with new chips with different markings. This resulted in the arrest of the counterfeiters.

The poker chip as we know it today has come a long way and it is nice to find so many cool websites where you can order unique and customized chips for a fair price.