Have you ever played poker? If yes, you’re one of many that know the excitement of staking a giant fortress of chips right in front of you. It’s a way of showing all opponents that you are most certainly a force to be reckoned with, there is not betting feeling! Not sure how many have ever stopped to wonder how or where the chips originated from or even how it came about. For those who have, the history of poker chips never started with the game of poker.
Both home and casino poker is vastly different from how it used to be played. In the 19th century, poker chips did not exist, Gus Hansens and Phil Hellmuth brought several strange objects to the game; these included gold dust and tiny gold nuggets. But it needed to be, and this was when saloons started offering to standardise objects as substitutes. At first, it included clay, bones or pieces of ivory. The alternatives were easy to forge, and it left gambling houses to come up with unique chips. Forging of chips remained a hassle until the 1880s when companies started to create poker chips out of clay, which was the start of the change for how poker was played around the globe.
Poker Chips
Most accept that poker chips are still manufactured from clay, although in addition to clay composites, most chips also contain ceramic. In casinos, in Las Vegas, all ceramic tokens are the most popular. Even today many have thought of a plan on how to forge poker chips, at a glance casino tokens and poker chips look quite similar and easy to copy. How difficult could it be, both are circular disks with a pretty design and if you could find a way to copy them, well you ready to have a ball?
Those who tried to give it a go found out that casino chips are much more difficult to forge than the currency used by America. The owners of casinos are well aware of the forgery history of poker and casino chips. Which means that the casino industry is quite careful with their in-house currency and several security steps are taken to ensure chips can’t be forged. Specific identities on the chip make it extremely easy for the cashier to instantly identify a forged chip.
Every chip used by casinos have a specific texture, feel and weight, and if anyone gets to replicate that, there is still the microchips to deal with. Just about all casino embed microchips in their chips with serial numbers, and each is imprinted with a series of numbers. But, be sure that all the details of each chip are not known and probably that information will be kept secret for as long as possible.
Casino/Poker Chip Rules
Buying into a casino poker game means you are exchanging your cash for poker chips and the way the tokens work depends on the game-type. Buying into a tournament means you might receive around $1,500 in poker chips value, although the buy-in is only $60. You probably already know that the chips itself hold no value, their purpose is buying into the tournament game. It is here where it gets extra, and therefore our next article will continue to discuss the importance of poker chips and how they’re made.