BUYING POKER CHIPS
All you need to know before buying your poker chips
Nowadays, several types of poker chips are available on the market. Prices can vary greatly according to the quality of the chips. Depending on the type of games where the chips will be used, you might want to go for better quality chips if you want your game to be more professional like, or for less expensive one if you only intend to run a friendly home game once in a while.
Types of Poker Chips
Plastic Poker Chips
These are the chips that you can find in supermarkets and discount stores. The quality is obviously not the best, but they are fine for occasional home games. The chips are lightweight, generally 5 to 9 grams. Plastic poker chips are often replicas of popular the "Clay" chips, and they often come with the low range poker sets and suitcases.
Ceramic Poker Chips
These chips are made of ceramic which increases the weight and provide a better tactile experience. Very resistant, these ceramic chips generally weigh between 9 and 11.5 grams.
The most commonly used are:
- Suited: The four card suites are printed around the chip.
- Dice: Each side of a dice is printed around the chip.
- Diamond: Diamonds are printed around the chip.
Clay Poker Chips
Less slippery and a bit heavier than the composite, they weight 9 to 13g. The clay chips improve the feel and sound better. These chips are used by professionals, in casino, poker rooms and poker tv shows.
There are two forms of Clay Chips: Injected and Molded.
Injected Clay Chips
Their feel and sound are excellent. They are also washable (such as Clay Composite) and very solid. Their prices start at about £50 for 300 chips.
Molded Clay Chips
Made of pure molded clay, the touch and sound are exceptional. However, they are less solid than the injected clay chips, and not washable. They are made for special occasions. The famous Paulson chips are from this kind.
Design Poker Chips
Clay and Composite chips are generally available in types of design: single color, two colors and three colors. If the single color can seem a little dull, the three colors may be a little bit too much and make it less "class". The two color chips are by far the more popular. In most cases, no value is printed on the chips, so you can create your own color code.
How many chips should you buy?
Most of the time, you will find two basic options when it comes to buy chips: 300 chips or 500 chips, although sets of 1,000 are also available.
There other sized sets (200, 400, 650, ...) and chips can also be bought by unit. Depending on the size of your games, you will need more or less chips:
- 300 chips are fine up to 5 players.
- 500 chips up to 8 players.
- 750 for 10 players.
You shouldn't have any single table game with more ten players!
The minimum chips for each players should not be less then 30.
Ideally, you will have 50 to 75 chips per players, so everyone can enjoy a bit of gamble
ALL SORTS OF CHIPS ARE AVAILABLE AT OUR POKERSHOP. SIMPLY CLICK TO CHECK IT OUT NOW!
