The store I work in sells a very nice poker set that has very basic, plastic chips in red, white and blue. Now I know very little about the current poker craze, and the last time I played we used pretzels and M&M’s instead of chips, so I don’t give a lot of importance to these things. Several customers have asked if we carry clay chips, so I assume that’s the hot thing these days, but I always get the image of clay pigeons and think of them as very breakable!
So the other day a woman contemplating buying our nice, wooden-boxed set asks me how many grams the chips are. Forgetting for a moment that I am a retail lackey eager to make a sale, I say I don’t know and then ask, “Is that really important?”
The withering stare I got was enough of an answer.
So I googled, and discovered that people seem to care about this. We have a cart at the mall “Casino Island” that sells these fancy-schmancy chips in aluminum suitcases, so I could go ask them, but I think they are biased.
So will someone please explain why the weight of the chips is so darned important? I mean, our box of plastic ones weighs a ton…if they were clay I wouldn’t be able to lift it, I fear.
Well, clay chips “feel” better than plastic ones, and allow you to do neato tricks like shuffling two stacks of chips together with one hand while waiting for the deal. Plus, unlike M&Ms, you don’t have people eating the antes, which throws off the betting.
With clay chips, the weight is (as far as I know) a measure of the quality of the chip. Heavier ones are higher quality and less likely to break.
Of course, if the chips are plastic, the weight doesn’t mean jack, but your customer probably didn’t know that.
I bought very nice plastic (okay, they call them ‘clay composite’) chips, and I have to admit that the weight makes all the difference. The heavier the chip, the more “real” it feels. They’re easier to stack and count, easier to throw into the pot, and much easier to handle in general.
About two years ago, I bought 500 chips, and now I found that isnt’ enough. I have to go buy some more now. But you can find them anywhere online, for relatively cheap. I pay $0.25 per chip, but I tell you, these chips will last for years.
Shoot me an e-mail if you want me to send you a link to where I buy mine from.
Tripler
I’m a poker and craps player. That’s why I needed so darn many.
Otto’s link, while good at describing the chip differences, makes me wonder something. The author(s), like Tripler seem to say that weight is all the difference. But the article goes on the say that metal-under-plastic chips are somehow inferior. So now its not weight? Or are they just being elitist?
We play with clay chips at home. Old clay chips, probably from the '50’s. The thing about clay chips, besides the weight, is the sound. They have a low, solid sound. These were custom chips, with the original owner’s initials in the middle of each chip. It’s just nicer.
My family has always been a card-playing family. The kids (now in their 40’s) played with the plastic chips as kids while the adults were playing in another room with the good cards and the good chips. And the good snacks, come to think of it.
Personally I couldn’t care less what the chips are made out of. Chip tricks don’t impress me. The sound they make as they splash into the pot doesn’t impress me. All that I care about when it comes to poker chips is getting them and exchanging them for cash at the end of the game.
I much prefer clay chips, for lots of reasons. For one thing, they are much more stable when stacked. Ever accidentally knock over a stack of plastic chips? It’s much easier to do, and when you do they can scatter and roll all over the place. Clay chips, when knocked over tend to just go ‘thump’ and stay where they are.
Second is the feel. A pile of heavy chips just feels a lot better than handling those lightweight plastic chips with the serrated edges. I’m one of those guys who fidgets - at work I’ve always got a pen spinning on my hand, or I’m squeezing a skoosh ball or something. I like playing with the chips while I’m playing cards. Soothing.
But maybe most important is the noise level. Put eight people around a table, given them all piles of plastic chips, and all night long you’re going to listen to high-pitched ‘ting ting ting’ sounds. People splashing the pot make a racket. Even just stacking chips after winning a pot is loud. Clay chips are very quiet, and the nosie they make is lower pitched and much more pleasant.
Clay all the way. I spend a couple of hundred bucks for clay chips ten years ago, and I still have them and use them, they look like new, and they make every game we play with them more pleasant.
I just bought (and gave it to my wife to give to me for Christmas) a clay composite poker chip assortment in an aluminum case for $60 at Costco. It contains:
150 white chips
150 red chips
100 blue chips
50 green chips
50 black chips
2 decks of cards (bicycle decks)
5 red craps style dice
I’m pretty sure thats the correct counts of chips…if not, I will post again to clarify. Really, really nice. It’s one of those “I gotta haves”. I tried to give a link to Costco, but it’s not on their online shopping site.
The only two things I know about the current poker craze are:
(1) The game is always always always no-limit Texas hold-'em. Always. You are never allowed to play draw poker, or 5 card stud, or anything that doesn’t involve flops, turns, and rivers. And:
(2) The poker chips they use on TV have insanely high values ($1000, $5000, $10,000, etc.), and there is no standard as to what the various colors mean. Every Poker show uses different chips with different values. There are apparently no universal standards for chip values above $500. So, knowing that white = $1 and red = $5 won’t help you one bit.
Which is more dramatic, a $1000 dollar pot with 100 chips in it or a $1,000,000 pot with 100 chips in it? Of course it’s meaningless in a tournament situation but TV is about the drama.
(The chips also represent the buy-ins of the players. $10,000 buy-in gets you $10,000 in chips, multiplied by say 300 players and you’re playing for three million dollars in chips! Except you’re not, you’re playing for whatever the prize pool is.)
AFAIK the various poker shows use the chips of the home casino. Borgata uses Borgata chips, Bicycle Club uses Bicycle Club chips and so on.
I’m not typically guilty of falling for "Bigger is Better,’ but I am when it comes to poker chips. I have the 13.5 gram clays and they just feel great. I love the weight and love the sound.
I took a closer look at the plactic chips in the set we sell, and they aren’t the real cheap plastic chips with serrated edges…they are heavier and better looking. But I can’t open a sleeve up and go weigh one on Godiva’s scale, so the weight remains a mystery. But as soon as some bratty kid rips a sleeve open…
One operational reason (as opposed to esthetics) for clay (or clay imitation) solid chips is that they are easier to count, as a stack of X chips is always the same height. So make a stack of ten, then you can count ten chips by making a stack that size. A stack of the cheap plastic ridged-edged chips varies too much to be able to count by height easily.
Plus the heavier ‘clay’ chips just feel nicer in the hand. Like drinking wine out of a nice glass versus a cheap plastic cup.
It seems like a lot of the problems cited with plastic chips are due to the serrated edges. Wonder why they don’t just ditch those? You’d still have the lack of weight but at least they’d stack better.
