Poker Chips and Poker Chipsets – A Brief History

Poker chips have been used in one form or another for hundreds of years for betting, cards and games of various different types. Originally poker chips would not have been like the poker chipsets that you see in stores today but would have been more likely to be chunks or gold, silver, metal or some other kind of rock which could be seemed to have some value. These very basic poker chips would have allowed the development of the card games of the day such as poker and blackjack so that each player could have a common currency to play with. As you can imagine before the standardization of poker chips there were many disagreements about the real value of some of the tokens that were being used to bet with. This lead to many poker chip related disagreements (some more than just vocal disagreements) during play and almost certainly contributed to the “wild” image that poker acquired in the saloons and bars of the time (made even worse by the fact that many players carried pistols and other firearms).

So poker players needed a way to standardise betting within their games. Still a far cry from the clean, packaged and well presented poker chip sets of today what they produced was a massive step in the right direction. Most poker chips at the time were either metal poker chips or clay poker chips, as both were materials that could be molded into different shapes and also branded with the values of the poker chips in order for the betting and game structure to become more complex. Other common poker chip materials were ivory, bone, wood and gold. These newly developed poker chips and poker chipsets meant that a tournament style structure would be possible – whereby the poker chips on the table did not directly relate to cash, but actually represented a pre-determined buy in amount, with poker players having to leave the table when they no longer had enough chips to play with.

It is not really until the 1800’s, though, that you really begin to see anything that is similar to the poker chips that we see in hundreds of stores around the world today. They were usually very simple and were usually blue, red, green, white or yellow in colour. It became more and more common for poker chipsets to contain chips made out of clay. Clay poker chips were the most easily manufactured in large quantities at acceptable prices, and were the most customisable in terms of design and graphics. Due to this clay poker chips have since become the standard in pretty much every single casino today. These days most “clay poker chips” are not actually 100% clay but have certain other materials added to them in order to make them more durable and better lasting. The name for this composition is sometimes referred to as “true clay” (not to be confused with clay composite poker chips which are actually a mixture of plastic and a small amount of clay). These look and feel absolutely great and are now the standard in almost all vegas casinos.

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