Brief History of The Poker Chip
The poker chip might not be quite as old and venerable as the game of poker itself, which could be about a century older, but this form of monetary token still goes back a fair distance in time. As far as anyone can ascertain, these chips had their origins in the United States, somewhere around the end of the 19th century. Before then, players used items like coins or gold nuggets to gamble with, until gradually those items were replaced with uniform poker chips.
However, it wasn’t simply a matter of every player or gambling establishment changing to a uniform type of poker chips right away. Even though chips eventually became the recognized medium of exchange in poker games, they came in literally hundreds of designs and very different materials. Some might have been made of bone or ivory, for example. A player’s custom poker chips could have been as diverse and unique as the player they belonged to. Yet with nothing being uniform, players could sneak their own chips into a game and end up wealthier at the end than their play might have warranted.
But as always, with an eye to security and the prevention of fraud, casinos turned the diversity of the poker chip to their advantage. Each casino custom created its own clay poker chip with its own specially patented formula for the clay and ceramic mixture, adding all sorts of markers in the design that would identify each chip as belonging to that specific casino. This prevented one casino’s chips from being cashed in another establishment, and made the games within their own casino more standardized and honest.
In more recent years, though, plastic has been introduced as a poker chip material, especially for the less expensive sets used in home games. Plastic chips all tend to be lightweight and pretty much of the same design, while casino poker chips have retained their higher quality. In just over a century, the development of poker chips has brought them from those earliest, random forms on river boats to the highly customized chips in casinos and the more casual sets used in people’s homes.
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December 11th, 2009 at 9:17 pm
[...] gracechen wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptThe poker chip might not be quite as old and venerable as the game of poker itself, which could be about a century older, but this form of monetary token still. [...]
December 11th, 2009 at 10:10 pm
[...] Amanda wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptA player’s custom poker chips could have been as diverse and unique as the player they belonged to. Yet with nothing being uniform, players could sneak their own chips into a game and end up wealthier at the end than their play might … [...]