Brief History of The Poker Chip
The poker chip has an old and interesting history, almost as interesting as the game itself. It wasn’t an original component of poker, but as the game became very popular and began to spread, the chips were created more out of necessity than anything else, sometime around the 1870s or 1880s. What prompted the introduction of the original clay chips was the need to standardize the way players placed bets and calculated their winnings. There was too much uncertainty when they were able to use random valuables like coins or gold flakes.
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.
Casinos soon took the new chips of clay to another level, custom designing them so that any specific set of chips could only belong to one casino. Before long, each establishment developed its own particular mix of clay and ceramic materials for the chips, and began adding other identifying patterns on the finished product. Casino poker chips became as individualized and specialized as the separate casinos themselves. For about fifty years, straddling the 19th and 20th centuries, the casino-specific poker chip made from these patented formulas held sway.
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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