In televised games, wouldn’t it be simpler to do away with physical chips or wads of bills and just keep track of amounts by computer? The size of the pot and each player’s “stack” would then be easy to display - no need for the occasional time-consuming count.
Is this ever done?
Nope. There are lot of reasons why:
The number of chips a player has is an important thing to know. If the stacks were tracked by computer, you would have to have a large display that showed the chip count for each player, visible to all players. And, it would have to be right in front of each player, becuase it would be a ‘tell’ to look over at the stack display all the time.
Players like having chips in front of them. It’s the visceral, tactile representation of the money you are playing for.
How would players bet? By typing the amount into a keyboard? I suppose you could do that, sort of like playing online poker. Then you’d have to have some sort of display in the middle of the table that shows the current pot size. It sounds like it would get pretty complex.
Estimating pot sizes and calculating pot odds and all that are part of the skill of poker. Why take that away?
Poker is a traditional game, and poker chips are part of the tradition. I wouldn’t want to see it changed for that reason alone.
You need chips so you can fidget with them!
Plus, many (most?) pros have a lot of knowledge and experience invested in tells involving the way people handle their chips and bet with them. It’d be a bit of shame to render it all worthless overnight.
These tables exist, and are spreading. There’s a lot of resistance to them for the reasons **Sam **mentions, but there’s a decent chance they’ll become more common.
I wouldn’t bet (ha) on it. The only place I’ve seen them was at Turning Stone casino in NY. They had three installed with much fanfare (I think Greg Raymer was there to promote them). They were almost never used, and the casino finally replaced them with regular tables.
The places where they do work out are places that don’t offer live poker.
The Excalibur in Las Vegas has an all-electronic poker room, as does the newest casino in the area here in Michigan (Four Winds). I have no doubt that they failed in the casino JeffB spoke of, because they gave the players a choice, and the players will almost always choose the non-electronic table. But more and more places are going to offer electronic-only.
These tables offer a lot of advantages to the casino: faster hands for more rake, winnings on a card which can easily be put back into another machine to spend more money, no dealer mistakes, easy sit-and-go tournaments with no more than casual supervision from the casino staff. A coworker’s wife works on these things for a living, and the backlog of orders is reportedly huge.
For the record, I don’t like the damn things.
Same thing happened with 4-color decks; they launched them simultaneously in a half-dozen casinos on the Strip with much fanfare, and quietly replaced them with 2-color decks after about a week.
ETA: I understand 4-color decks and electronic tables are both more popular in Europe, though.