Types of Poker Chips
The poker chips that you find in a home or private game among your family or friends are very different from the ones you would find in a casino in Atlantic City or Las Vegas. Among the various different types of chips, the ones used in home settings are mass produced, plastic versions. They were introduced as imitations of the original clay poker chip varieties that were developed for use in casinos from the 1880s to the 1930s.
The clay chip sets that have been traditionally used, and which are still used in some places even now, weren’t made entirely of clay except at the very beginning. It was soon discovered that the clay-only chips broke too easily, so the makers began creating them from composites, of which the most common one now is a clay-ceramic mix. It’s very unlikely that you’ll find this type of chip in a home set, however; as these would most usually be casino poker chips.
An interesting development more recently has been another type of composite poker chips; this time made with cores of metal called “slugs,” and then covered with an injection-molded plastic. These have a similar look and feel, not to mention weight, to chips found in a casino. With the right stamping of pattern, color and monetary denomination, one of these chips is almost indistinguishable from a more traditional casino chip. There are even some chips made almost completely of metal, which can be anodized to be certain colors, that is, coated with a protective colored film by chemical or electronic means. But these are not yet common. Where they are used, however, is in a casino setting rather than in a home game, because they tend to be expensive.
The two most common poker chips, though, of all the existing types, are the cheaper plastic ones used at home and the most widely used professional versions used in casinos. Those look a lot like the original clay composite types, but are now usually made with of hard, injection-molded resin. Both these and the clay composites, though, will frequently be made from secret formulas specific to an individual casino, and will have added security features like markings that show up in ultraviolet light or radio frequency ID tags. Only poker chips casino versions are the real thing.
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